Ireland's hip-hop rebels: How three Belfast bros became Fox News villains

[marmar]

Ireland's hip-hop rebels: How three Belfast bros became Fox News villains
Belfast rap trio Kneecap made global headlines at Coachella — and right-wing enemies. It's a classic Irish story

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published May 11, 2025 9:00AM (EDT)


(Salon) It’s almost surprising that a hip-hop band from the perennially troubled, still-British province of Northern Ireland hasn’t emerged until now: It’s the right kind of place. Admittedly, “race,” in the 21st-century meaning of the word, is not a major consideration on the island of Ireland, despite some discomfort with recent immigration from Eastern Europe, Syria, North Africa and elsewhere. Belfast and Dublin still don’t possess the kind of high-friction cultural ferment found in London, Paris or Berlin, and Ireland’s best-known musical exports can clearly be classified along the spectrum that includes rock, pop, folk and punk: Van Morrison, U2, Sinéad O’Connor, the Pogues.

Indeed, if there’s a track that defines pop music in Northern Ireland before the rise of the Irish-language hip-hop trio Kneecap — now the focus of international controversy and incoherent Fox News attacks after their Coachella performance on April 18 — it would be the exquisite punk-pop single “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, released in 1978 during the worst years of the vicious low-intensity civil conflict known as the Troubles.

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In the uneasy and remarkably small-minded politics of Northern Ireland — which remains about evenly divided between Catholics who identify as Irish and Protestants who identify as British — the Irish language is still perceived as a political provocation. That's exactly why Kneecap’s two principal rappers, who go by the in-joke names Mo Chara and Móglai Bap, grew up in Irish-speaking families. But it was the band’s more overt political discourse that has gotten them in trouble — if you actually believe that making headlines around the world amounts to trouble for a deliberately confrontational rap act.

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That double standard is no doubt at work here, but so is the double standard among Kneecap’s critics on both sides of the Atlantic, dutifully playing their roles as finger-wagging scolds lamenting the moral collapse of Today’s Youth. Of course it’s offensive that Kneecap members apparently chanted “Up Hamas, up Hezbollah” at a concert last November, or that they suggested a year earlier that right-wing members of the British Parliament deserved to die. It’s supposed to be offensive. This band was equally shaped by “F**k tha Police”-era gangsta rap and early Beastie Boys; they named themselves for the IRA’s notoriously gruesome punishment tactic: a shotgun blast to the back of the knee. (As for their chant of “Maggie’s in a box” in tribute to Margaret Thatcher, a political leader none of them is old enough to remember — I’m sorry, that’s hilarious.) ...............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/05/11/kneecap-ireland-hip-hop-gaza-palestine/

[SalamanderSleeps]

1. Here is their mom.....figuratively.