As talented trio Kneecap make waves with their smash hit feature film, Will Penn comments on the shifting sphere of identity politics in hip hop, and how Kneecap have changed the conversation for a whole generation.
The blending of fact and fiction is a tricky walk along a precipitous ridge. Down one side is the distortion of fact for self-aggrandisement and illusion. This is what punks and skaters in their scenes call posers, a serious accusation of simply not being real. Down the other is a bland and dime a dozen talking head style documentary robbing you of the satisfaction of any small truth that you might have gleaned for yourself. But what lies along that ridge is delicate and illusory.
The Beastie Boys were an early example in hip-hop who treaded this path with poise and deliberation. Drawing on anti-hero characters from 1980s wrestling, they created outlandish personas that helped to fashion their unique form of hip-hop and break into the mainstream. This punk spirit was evident. They played with their middle-classness in their early career and their manager, Russell Simmons, secured the trio an opening act spot for Madonna during the 1985 Virgin Tour. Their explicit lyrics and provocative stage antics shocked the young fans in the audience. “Every night, they’d go out there and make 95 percent of the crowd hate them,” Simmons recalled. “But they turned the remaining 5 percent into loyal fans.” As for Madonna, she remarked, “I thought they were so adorable.”
Pushing the Limits
The courtship of controversy is now a central part of hip-hop; think Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s WAP, or Kendrick Lamar’s recent character assassination of Drake. And, somewhere along this rich and storied tapestry, the baton fell into West Belfast and to Kneecap, comprised of Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, performing with a Roland 808 and a tricolour balaclava. The new movie, Kneecap, showcases their charisma by the bagful, along with the weed, the coke, and the ket to match. They deliver their lyrics in a withering machine-gun rattle of Irish and English. Their outrageousness and larger-than-life personae that more closely resembles performance art – so much so that they have a biopic seven years after their first single.
This performance art illuminates the dualism between persona and authenticity. None of the film feels like a “pose”, to use the punk term. Something that other Irish hip-hop groups have been criticised for in the past. In 2019, Dublin musicians Versatile were roundly condemned for their sexualisation of black women and appropriating the voice of a culture which was simply not theirs. It seemed that they appropriated hip-hop as a haven to posture as violent criminals when they were anything but. In truth, their lyrics went little further than shock value. In this regard, Kneecap’s tongue-in-cheek humour and auto-fictive mythologising are both a breath of fresh air and totally consistent with tradition in this storied and rich genre.
A Political Performance
Of course, the combination of outlandish character is not specific to hip-hop. Many have used music as a means to combine persona with authenticity – think Johnny Cash’s campaign for prison reform and Folsom Prison Blues, or Dolly Parton’s colourful and inclusive blend of country. However, few have used music and autofiction on screen. In Rolling Thunder Revue, Martin Scorsese and Bob Dylan delight in autofiction, interspersing concert footage with interviews and conspiracies of theft. Allen Ginsberg urges viewers pursue their own introspective journeys; a nineteen-year-old Sharon Stone joins the tour to help with the stage costumes, briefly flirting with Dylan, and proclaiming that one day she would be a famous movie star; a disgruntled Stefan Van Dorp claims to have directed the original footage of the tour for a movie he was making about the spirit of America in the ’70s. The catch? The latter two are different degrees of fictionalised; Sharon Stone would have been 17 and reportedly never crossed paths with Dylan; and Stefan Van Dorp is a totally fictional character, played by punk performer Martin Von Hasselberg. It’s certainly entertaining trying to guess what is fictional but, ultimately, it feels like auto-fiction for autofiction’s sake.
Kneecap utilise this fictionalising to invite the audience into their own world, an approach that has proven to be a vitally invigorating tool for hip-hop to reach new audiences. On M.A.A.D CITY (YAWK YAWK), Kendrick Lamar invites his audience to participate in the evaluation of his character.
If I told you
I killed a n****
When I was sixteen
Would you believe me?
It doesn’t feel as though it is a real admission of having killed someone. More, Lamar invites the audience to assess what they understand of him by his question to them – if they do or don’t believe it, he has already invited them to understand their own prejudices against him. It is an act that both seems to posture while inviting a much gentler assessment of him, his environment and what we presuppose of both. In much the same way, Mo Chara starts the film with what we know of Belfast through other films, news reports, images so endlessly seared into our brains.
The Power of Words
Unlike their other Irish contemporaries, Kneecap use hip-hop to its fullest act of resistance. Their eponymous film is driven by a strong mantra, reverberating and thudding throughout like a steady bass. “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet for Irish freedom”. Late in the film, they powerfully proclaim hip-hop the voice that allowed the Black people of America to bring voice to protest. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” jumped to my mind as both a party and a protest anthem. But I remember, after first hearing Kneecap, looking up sneachta, curious as to why it was so prevalent in their lyrics. The political message felt a little lost on me when I realised they were just rapping about cocaine.
But Kneecap are keen to stress that rapping in Irish is the protest. And providing distinctive and succinct social commentary is something they deliver as easily on screen as they do off it. For cancelling South by Southwest in Austin for its sponsorship by the American Military “in solidarity with the people of Palestine” (why a music festival has these links, I will never understand), Kneecap has amassed a devout Irish and global following. Their call to resist is still as important as ever – in late June the group obtained legal clearance to contest a British government decision to withhold £15,000 in funding from them because of their “political views”.
Tickling the Taboo
The film serves a reminder of the marginal position that the Irish language holds despite the passing of the Identity and Language Act of 2022. This marginalisation is Kneecap’s challenge. And while they are quick to reference the Troubles, they certainly are seeking any sympathy. They’re not interested in the struggles of previous generations – they spit their intergenerational trauma into the face of sceptical doctors in a tongue-in-cheek ploy for prescription drugs. They’re not interested in factionalism, turning it into dirty talk between Móglaí Bap and Georgia, the Protestant girl that he is sleeping with. And perhaps, most importantly, they’re not interested in intimidation – “Rangers are shite” is all that is thrown at members of the Orange Order before a stylish chase through Belfast’s urban sprawl. The DUP might insist that Kneecap squares its criticism solely as divisive sectarian rhetoric. In Kneecap, the band simultaneously understand what lingers from Belfast’s past, how Arlo must hand himself in, how Irish remains a marginal language still on the verge of extinction while also articulating a future that is as hopeful as it is humorous. What lingers is the complete authenticity of their humour and the way that they have made speaking Irish an act of rebellious coolness.
The true crowning glory of Kneecap is its dual mythologising of the band itself with the demystifying of modern Belfast through the limited lens of The Troubles. Here is a generation who do indeed want to move on. But I now think, maybe that is the point of the film: to bring the Irish language to the masses, out of rote learning for the leaving cert and into everyday use. It would so easy to posture and to pose, to adopt hip-hop to intimidate rather than dismantling power structures that marginalise the language. But in the end, Kneecap juggle the entertaining with the illuminating in equal measure – a true cinematic balancing act. Like The Beastie Boys in front of the preteen audiences of the 1980s, Kneecap place themselves and their authentic myths on full bare-chested display behind a tricolour balaclava.
Kneecap is available to stream online now.
Will Penn grew up in Luxembourg. Since moving to Dublin in 2018, his poems and essays have been featured in the Summer Hill Magazine, and the Gorko Gazette. Check out his Instagram page here, and follow him on Substack here.
2 Comments
Kneecap are terrible though and translating the lyrics into English shows them up as the modern day Geto Boys they are.
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