Longer ago than I care to admit, I was a student at an American East Coast university. Students have a taste for alcohol, sugar and provocation, so for a while the tipple of choice for some of my noisiest American acquaintances from the debating society was the “Irish Car Bomb”: a shot of Baileys and whiskey, or similar, dropped into a glass of Guinness. To cement its appeal to students, the “Irish Car Bomb” always created excessive amounts of sticky washing-up for somebody else to clean.
The trend continued for sometime, until someone in the group made the mistake of inviting an Irish student to join them. (“You’ll love this…”) She was, quite understandably, horrified. For her, “Irish car bombs” were not a boozy joke. They were a deadly and daily risk growing up in a nation that had endured over 16,000 bombs placed across the streets between 1969 and 2003. She had met mothers bereaved by the Omagh bombing, the real-life “Irish car bomb” which sought to derail the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Yet for weeks, one of the Americans who had been on this night out grouched about the “uptight” visitor. After all, he vented, hadn’t the only targets of Irish paramilitaries been English invaders who deserved it? As an “Irish-American” – one great-grandmother, never visited, couldn’t pick out Dublin on a map – he thought an “Irish car bomb” was a fine way to celebrate his roots.
The “Irish car bomb” wasn’t just a drink. It was a very particular form of lazy provocation and identitarian signalling. And if a smart music producer had decided to turn it into a band, they would have come up with something that looked a lot like Kneecap, the hip-hop trio from Belfast which is now a social media phenomenon.
Kneecap hit the British headlines again this week after being forced to apologise – grudgingly – for inciting the murder of Tory MPs in a video from November 2023. They had already established themselves as international news last week, after an attention-grabbing set at the Coachella festival in California featured the words “F**k Israel Free Palestine” broadcast on a screen, accused the Israeli state of “genocide” and garnered a predictable backlash from the likes of Sharon Osbourne, who called for their visas to be withdrawn.
Yet ever since 2018, with the release of their first full album, 3CAG, Kneecap have been a significant presence in the social media landscape, particularly among young people with a hazy memory of the Troubles, a penchant for terms like “imperialism” and “colonialism”, and a taste for rebellion.
The group trade on the disapproval of its institutional elders. “Condemned by politicians, beloved by fans, kicked out of their own gigs and packing festival tents to overflow, Kneecap are a cultural phenomenon”, reads the band’s strapline on YouTube. You can expect Sharon Osbourne to feature prominently in their next marketing release.
If Kneecap are the “Irish car bomb” of bands, then like the cocktail they are fundamentally sophomoric. The band have bottled the type of edginess that hints at radical intention, but rarely have the courage of its convictions or the rigour for serious argument. In promoting this brand, they have been helped inordinately by the foolishness of Establishment figures reacting to the provocation, but failing to make the case to Kneecap’s fans as to where the problem truly lies.
A cult social media following has allowed Kneecap to flirt with violence while denying it when pressed. Take the Coachella debacle. There are many, myself included, who find it unhelpful to use the term “genocide” in relation to Israel’s operation in Gaza.
Nonetheless, this is clearly a claim that many people, across Ireland, the UK and the United States, do make on a regular basis, and falls easily within the bounds of legitimate free speech. Amnesty International makes the same claim regularly, while fundraising, despite having to rewrite its longstanding definition of “genocide” in order to retrofit Israel’s military actions into such a fashionable term. This is not a reason to revoke the visas of Amnesty workers. Similarly, declaring “F**k Israel” may be childish – imagine the same phrase with “India”, “Pakistan”, or “China” in the title, and realise that a nation of people is not the same as its government – but it is not incitement to violence.
This is the Kneecap playbook. They broadcast provocative, but legally acceptable messages on their biggest stages, then harvest a round of disapproval which will allow them to complain about being censored for innocent speech. Sharon Osbourne played into their hands this week, with her Trumpish call to punish what was essentially a speech act. The rest of the time, however, Kneecap are not so innocent.
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Read MoreTake the clip from a gig last November, in which one member of the band chanted “Up Hamas, Up Hezbollah”. There should be no real question that this constitutes support for proscribed terrorist groups. Most of us, however, weren’t supposed to catch this chant – or at least, those of us over the age of 30.
It was designed for the crowd of hardcore fans dedicated enough to trek to the Kentish Town Forum, and for those whose Instagram algorithms have been trained to keep serving them up hard-left-cum-hip-hop content. The concept of the “dog whistle” in politics used to refer to a signal only those who shared the speaker’s prejudices could detect. We need a new terminology to refer to the type of carefully curated social media content targeted only at those already falling down the rabbit hole of radicalisation.
It is too simplistic to suggest that Kneecap don’t know about the legacy of the Troubles: they hail from some of West Belfast’s most deprived areas, the latest expression of a longstanding subculture of urban republicanism. The name is another trap set for their critics: the band claims that “Kneecap” is a reference to a paramilitary punishment now mainly meted out to drug users. The band insists that their name aligns them with victims of kneecapping, not the perpetrators.
Which, no doubt, is why one of them likes to wear a balaclava.
Kneecap’s fans, among them Gerry Adams, might claim that all this demonstrates their mastery of subtle irony and allusion. Yet their view of the world is as simplistic as that of their densest critics. If they have abandoned the 70s tribalism of the Belfast ground war, it is only to replace it with the 2020s tribalism of social media brand loyalty, where anyone with an Instagram account can buy into the nebulous myth that England, Israel and America are interchangeable expressions of the same ancient order of capitalist-colonialism (and buy merch accordingly). Kneecap may condemn the practice from which it took its name, but they also invited Adams, alleged to have been the head of the IRA at a time when “kneecapping” was its trademark punishment for traitors (something he denies), to make a sympathetic cameo in Kneecap, a film about the band’s origin.
But just like students lining up to order an “Irish Car Bomb”, Kneecap’s jesters are going to have to decide whether terrorism is an edgy joke, or a legitimate political legacy worth defending. It can’t be both.
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