The faux-radicalism of Kneecap

The police shouldn’t waste their time investigating rappers.

The members of Kneecap must be delighted. As a rap group with anti-establishment pretensions – albeit one whose biopic was awarded a BAFTA earlier this year – what better publicity than being ‘assessed’ by the British police for their controversial comments? Specifically, footage has been circulating of a Kneecap gig from November 2023 in which one of the trio is apparently heard saying: ‘The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP’.

This is just the latest of a series of controversies. It began after a recent set at the Coachella music festival in California, when the group called on the mostly posh kids in the crowd to chant ‘Fuck Israel’. This was obviously deliberately aimed to provoke, given that hundreds of young people were massacred and raped at the Nova music festival in Israel on 7 October 2023. Since then, other footage has emerged of the band chanting ‘Up Hamas, up Hezbollah!’ and waving the latter’s flag.

Given that the culture wars have had the effect of demagnitising many a moral compass, it is worth restating a few basic facts. Hamas and Hezbollah are proscribed terrorist groups. The Hamas charter explicitly calls for the extermination of Jews, and the Hezbollah manifesto of 1985 demands the wholesale eradication of Israel. The 7th October pogrom was the most deadly antisemitic attack since the Holocaust. There is no getting around the fact that those who support Hamas and Hezbollah are cheerleaders for fascism.

But we have to keep in mind that Kneecap, like every other pop group, deals in theatrical displays. Their faux-radicalism brings to mind those gangster rappers who have been accused of ‘poverty tourism’ for feigning a past in the ghetto. The rapper Drake, for instance, is a former child TV star, which is why one critic bewailed that ‘Drake’s wannabe gangsta persona is cringe’. But this is to miss the point. It’s not deception; it’s just showbusiness.

Kneecap falls into this category. The group peddles in the lexicon and imagery of the Troubles, a conflict that they are far too young to have ever known. Their grandstanding is, for the most part, an attempt to be satirical and punkish. The name of the band refers to the form of punishment favoured by the Provisional IRA, and the paramilitary garb is mimicked in the tricolour balaclava worn by DJ Próvaí (a name that itself alludes to the Provos).

Yet their recent spate of statements on social media have been anything but satirical, and definitely not punkish. Rather, they have been desperately earnest. The anti-Israel stance is, after all, the expected position of every middle-class student in search of meaning. And the band has even sent their ‘heartfelt apologies’ to the families of murdered MPs David Amess and Jo Cox. It would seem that the financial ramifications of cancelled gigs have had the expected effect.

Here is an excerpt from the band’s latest statement:

‘Let us be unequivocal: we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah. We condemn all attacks on civilians, always. It is never okay. We know this more than anyone, given our nation’s history. We also reject any suggestion that we would seek to incite violence against any MP or individual. Ever. An extract of footage, deliberately taken out of all context, is now being exploited and weaponised, as if it were a call to action.’

All of which would probably be a lot more convincing had one member of the band not posted a photograph of himself online reading a copy of The Voice of Hezbollah by the antisemitic terrorist leader Hassan Nasrallah. This is a book that describes Israelis as ‘the descendants of apes and pigs’.

For that matter, the band appeared to have led their audience in a chant of ‘ooh, ahh, Hezbollah’ at a gig in London, a variation on the ‘ooh, aah, up the ’RA’ chant in support of the IRA. The only way this could be convincingly satirical is if their targets were the scores of mindless western activists who are happy to be herded into geopolitical territory they only vaguely comprehend.

It is, of course, completely understandable that many of those who actually lived through the Troubles – where balaclavas and burning vehicles were rather more potent than mere accessories for pop groups – would not be fans of Kneecap. It was doubtless a neat gimmick for the band to invite Gerry Adams to appear in their movie for a cameo, but there are many Northern Irish citizens who hold Adams responsible for the deaths of loved ones, and they are unlikely to see the funny side.

In a sense it’s a positive thing that the Troubles are considered such a distant memory that they can be safely romanticised by young musicians who have had no experience of them. Yet there is something in this radical posturing that smacks of nostalgia, a kind of yearning after victim status that has become so fashionable. It’s reminiscent of young gay people who claim to face ‘oppression’ when they’ve only ever known complete equal rights and the ruling class’s continual celebration of their ‘identities’.

Similarly, there has been a long tradition of Irish republicans claiming solidarity with Palestine, as though these conflicts were in any way connected. It’s the result of binary thinking; a blockheaded conviction that the world can be neatly divided into the two classes of Oppressor and Oppressed. I have on many occasions over the past few decades seen Palestinian flags and murals in the Bogside (a republican heartland of Derry) alongside the usual Irish tricolour and pro-IRA graffiti. They appear periodically every now and then and, whenever such insignia is raised, it isn’t long before the Israeli flag is seen flying in the Protestant areas of the city. This kind of tit-for-tat is common, but it isn’t serious political analysis.

For fans, Kneecap’s faux-radicalism is part of their appeal. But ultimately, it’s just a band. And surely by now it’s almost compulsory that popular musicians should have inane opinions about international politics. The crisis in the Middle East has long been oversimplified by numbskulls in need of a cause. Queers for Palestine, of course, represents the apotheosis of this folly, a group who would be the first to be executed in a Hamas-run state.

As for all the outrage, I will never be convinced that police should be investigating anyone for speech crimes. There is much to criticise in the comments made by the members of Kneecap, so why do the authorities need to be involved? Psychopaths who genuinely wish to cause harm to politicians are not going to wait for permission from novelty rappers. We should be worried about those who actually commit violence, not those who pose as criminals on the red carpet while they’re waiting for their BAFTA.

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