The controversy surrounding the Irish rap band has obscured deeper questions about power, conflict and resistance, but they won't go away, writes the Journal Of Music's Toner Quinn.
Kneecap have again cut through the noise and forced us to think hard about what is happening in the world. By screening the words 'F**k Israel, Free Palestine' at the end of their concert at Coachella on 18 April, they enraged many and also drew support. Yet no sooner was the world thinking about what Israel was doing that would cause three young Irish rappers to say such things than the conversation changed. In recent days, surfaced footage of concerts in which Kneecap used the Troubles phrase, ‘the only good Tory is a dead Tory’, and shouted support for Hamas and Hezbollah, has led to a different kind of outrage. The band have now withdrawn their comments and they regard the episode as a smear campaign to distract from Israel’s killing of over fifty thousand Palestinians. It has certainly done that. Our public conversation swings between outrage and accusation with little in the way of a deeper discussion about power, colonialism, the causes of resistance, and why human beings do appalling things to each other in the first place.
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Listen: Behind The Story asks: Where do Kneecap go from here?
The words on stage at Coachella from band member Mo Chara are worth quoting:
'The Irish not so long ago were persecuted by the Brits, but we were never bombed from the fucking skies with nowhere to go! The Palestinians have nowhere to go – it’s their fucking home and they’re bombing them from the sky. If you’re not calling it a genocide what the f**k are you calling it?'
What he said next has not been quoted as much:
'We have to use whatever wee platform we have to talk about this stuff. I don’t want to be lecturing people. Believe me I’d love to not have to get political but … nothing is changing. And don’t get it twisted, the American government could stop this tomorrow morning. So free the six counties of Ireland! Free Palestine! France out of Africa! Tiocfaidh ár lá!'
Deep down in Ireland we know where this comes from. The long Irish history of resistance has given us an instinct regarding conflict and colonisation. It is not simply an emotional reaction. It is part of a way of thinking that began in the 1790s with Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen when we sought a form of political thought that would allow us to find freedom and at the same time live peacefully with the settler. It took us another two hundred years before we achieved it, and given the shocking violence in Gaza, who could say but that it may, though we hope not, take Palestinians and Israelis an equally miserable length of time.
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Listen: Kneecap manager Daniel Lambert talks to RTÉ Drivetime
The important point is that this tradition of thinking about imperialism and colonisation – the late Desmond Fennell called it ‘Irish national thought’ – is now broad and rich, is not just about resistance, and has delivered a workable peace in Ireland because it addressed the causes of the conflict. In the interviews with Kneecap that I have seen, they are always pointing towards the roots of conflict, because we have learnt in Ireland that that is how you find peace and an end to war. It is no wonder they are frustrated that their overall message has been obscured by provocative statements they made on stage when playing to the gallery.
Artists are always showing the way forward – binding ideas together – before the rest of society gets there.
The courage and persistence of Irish artists in speaking out about Gaza has been remarkable: Kneecap, Lankum, Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin, Christy Moore, Damien Dempsey, Mary Coughlan, Fontaines D.C., The Mary Wallopers, Raymond Deane, Steve Wall, Lisa O’Neill and many more. They have woken up a generation of young Irish people, not only to the injustices of the Middle East but to those on their own doorstep. As the singer and activist Charlotte Church said on The Tommy Tiernan Show recently, the crisis in Palestine is ‘the biggest spiritual awakening of our time, the catalyst for this enormous world change’. This generation is also seeing the huge political forces working against a ceasefire in Gaza, and that is deeply demoralising. But our Irish musical activists persist, against the odds.
Watch: Kneecap manager responds to controversy and criticism, via RTÉ Prime Time
Is it too much to suggest that Ireland’s history offers even a fragment of hope? Last September, a video appeared online for a song titled Marching Round the Ladies by the County Down singer/songwriter Joshua Burnside. In the video, he sits singing and playing the guitar around a table in a pub with a group of musicians on fiddle, flute, banjo and mandolin. Everyone will recognise this image – the classic Irish pub session – but what is different is that all of the musicians in the video are wearing marching band uniforms – the kind Protestants wear on Orange marches in the North. There is a deep message at work here.
Burnside is from the Protestant tradition, but peacetime in the North has allowed a new generation to think clearly and look at the traditional divisions between the two communities, finding the things that bring them together: music, for one. He describes the song as a tribute to Orange marching bands, but of course it is a quintessentially Irish tribute.
There is something else going on in Burnside’s video: while the musicians play, a female artist sits at the table with her back to the camera. She is painting letters on the skin of a huge Lambeg drum (another essential part of an Orange march). Towards the end of the video, you realise she is painting a lyric from Burnside’s song:
Marching up the Shankill,
Marching up the Falls,
It doesn’t matter where you’re from
The Tories f**k us all.
At his concerts, everyone sings this line together with glee. Burnside based Marching Round the Ladies on a traditional Belfast street song, but that line is entirely his own.
Songs like this don’t come from nowhere. Artists are always showing the way forward – binding ideas together – before the rest of society gets there.
In August 2017, a group of Palestinian contemporary dancers visited Conamara and performed in the small Gaeltacht venue, Seanscoil Sailearna. Afterwards, one of the dancers spoke to the audience and a connection was made between the two communities: ‘Freedom of speech starts with a song, starts with a dance,’ he said. What he was saying was that art is the essential encouragement for people to begin to speak out about their situation. It starts with seeing that expression of freedom through creativity, and then the courage to speak a political truth follows.
The world can criticise Kneecap, but through their music, they have started something that won’t be silenced.
Toner Quinn is the Editor of The Journal Of Music - read more from the Journal Of Music here.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
