Anyone with enough sense can see how stupid the hue and cry over Kneecap is. But then, we live in a particularly myopic age, aggressively forgetful and wantonly incurious. One prone to performative pearl-clutching over simple talk of murder while real murder (indeed, genocide) takes place on a daily basis.
The prevailing narrative – pushed by politicos, pundits, and self-appointed cultural gatekeepers – is that Kneecap don’t know what they’re talking about. That the Belfast hip-hop trio are disrespectful, mean-spirited, and worst of all, uneducated. The latest chapter in this little saga opened with the group’s performance at Coachella, where, puncturing the glut of influencer photos and “blindsiding” organizers, they projected a few blunt statements on the back of the stage. “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. It is being enabled by the US government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes.” Then, "Fuck Israel. Free Palestine."
Enter Sharon Osbourne, who took to social media in the days following to say Kneecap support terrorism and called for the revocation of their US work visa. Now, London’s Metropolitan Police counterterrorism unit is digging up videos from 2023 in which MCs Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara apparently express support for Hamas and Hezbollah, and declare “the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your MP.” Cue a host of cancelled gigs and festival appearances, death threats sent to the band, and former butter salesman John Lydon saying that Kneecap need a bloody good kneecapping. Clever.
Each round of moral panic seems to take up more space, wastes more of our threadbare attention spans. The aim, unspoken but obvious, is that Kneecap are tamed, trained to be another set of players in an already insipid cultural landscape. We already have enough of those.
To be fair, Kneecap know how to use controversy to their advantage, and they are far from the only recording artists to do so. The spectacle was made to be gamed and those who can do it are rewarded in clout and cash. What makes Kneecap different is that they also manage to throw in a bit of savvy detournement, using their platform to subvert expectations of what an artist “should” be.
This is a group that has made very public hay of their court battle with the UK government over grant money, getting Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch’s hackles up in the process. In Melbourne, they were joined onstage by the missing decapitated head of a statue of King George V. As with the current calls to have their visas revoked, as with the ongoing counterterrorism investigations, every public dustup has led to more streams, more fans, more merch sold, and more people learning how to say “fuck the cops” in Irish Gaelic.
Kneecap’s published response to the outcry around their Coachella shows – "Statements aren't aggressive, murdering 20,000 children is though” – sums it up. For all the back-and-forth and performed outrage in our culture over the power of words, we are never more offended than when those words accurately describe the violence and cruelty of daily life.
So it is with Gaza. Eighteen months since the October 7th attacks, more than 50,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel from a combination of bombardment, starvation or disease. The world’s governments have done nothing, expecting us to carry on with life. Those who have refused have been cast as terrorists or smeared as antisemitic. Protesters have been brutalized, fired from their jobs. Students have been expelled, jailed, threatened with deportation. Business as usual must continue, even when that business includes mass murder.
The members of Kneecap have been quick to clarify that what is happening in Gaza is well beyond anything the North of Ireland has endured in living memory. Still, the parallels exist, and they don’t need to be invented by Irish rappers. Nobody recognizes colonial violence like the colonized. The comparison flies in the face of a liberal order that was supposed to bring peace in the form of compacts like the Good Friday Agreement and the Oslo Accords.
Now, this order is giving way to something altogether more brazen and nasty, more overt in its repression. Which is what ultimately makes the shrill denunciations around the group’s “Kill your MP” video ring hollow. A stupid thing to say from the stage? Probably. On balance it is no worse than what the Tories and Kier Starmer’s Labour government enable on a daily basis. Dead people don’t care whether they’re killed with a gun or a knife or a fountain pen. The end result is always the same.
Both Downing Street and the families of two slain MPs have rebuffed Kneecap’s apology for the statement, claiming it was disingenuous. But what, exactly, would a “genuine” apology look like in this case? What could possibly be good enough for a government that has proven itself just as dishonest? One imagines that no matter how much Kneecap prostrated themselves and tore at their breast, no matter how many times they try to make amends, there will always be goalposts to move, another penitence to demand. So why fucking bother?
Disbelief of Kneecap, suspicion of their motivations and stances, has grown with their profile. Speaking with Rory Carroll in the Guardian, journalist Malachi O’Doherty said that Kneecap “have worked diligently at presenting themselves as worthless layabouts. There’s a dishonesty at the heart of that.” Discussing the willingness of Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to collaborate with them, O’Doherty was similarly cynical: “Maybe what their success suggests is that hood culture and provie [Provisional IRA] culture are both now parodied rather than preserved with any integrity.”
If O’Doherty had spent any time as a layabout, he’d know it takes a surprising amount of work. Laziness is a right, but it never comes free. On a more serious note, there is something creepy in O’Doherty’s suggestion. By his logic, any story of poverty, any expression of indigency that makes into the mainstream, must by its nature be an act or a sham. It is a profoundly elitist worldview, assuming middle-class propriety as natural and good and honest, insinuating the poor are too stupid to speak for themselves. Only the privileged may make their way through the culture industry. Not those getting drunk on the dole.
Nothing in what is publicly known about Kneecap’s biography gives us reason to distrust their origins in the council flats of West Belfast. Their 2024 biopic was full of humorous embellishments, but the group’s members have come honest by them. And their lyrics are relatable to anyone who has spent any amount of time being poor: stories of boredom, scapegoating, harassment from cops, random sex, the anxieties of mental health and poverty, the thrills of petty vandalism and doing handfuls of drugs.
Kneecap joyously refuse to be moralistic about any of this. It is what it is, and though it’s maddeningly unjust and painful, it can also be lots of fun. Listening to their brash and bouncy lyrics about getting smashed and causing mayhem, I’m reminded of what Mattie Colquhoun writes in Postcapitalist Desire about Sleaford Mods’ gleeful/spiteful track “Jobseeker.”
Colquhoun writes: “Rather than raising consciousness through sympathy, depicting, through a fiction, the abject reality of the British welfare state, [Sleaford Mods’ vocalist Jason] Williamson instead raises consciousness through bloody-mindedness, bottling the shame of class subordination and weaponizing it.”
It’s fitting then that Sleaford Mods are among the hundred-plus artists who have signed on to an open letter supporting Kneecap, alongside Brian Eno, Thurston Moore, Massive Attack, Pulp, Mogwai, and many more.
“The question of agreeing with Kneecap’s political views is irrelevant,” reads the statement, “it is in the key interests of every artist that all creative expression be protected in a society that values culture, and that this interference campaign is condemned and ridiculed.” In other words, like it or not, music is a site of struggle. Always has been, always will be. Not just a struggle over artistic freedom, but over who gets to make art, and on whose terms. The difference now is that we have to admit it.
This is what establishment writers like O’Doherty, politicians like Badenoch, and TV gadflies like Osbourne do not grasp. All speak as if their wide hearings are proof enough that they’re telling the self-evident truth. As if respectability itself is a kind of justification. As if we haven’t already been shown the profound dangers in this kind of arrogance. Obviously they would like nothing more than for Kneecap to behave, but then they wouldn’t be Kneecap.
Alexander Billet writes about music and arts, cities, and radical memory. His first book, Shake the City: Experiments in Space and Time, Music and Crisis, was published in 2022 by 1968 Press. He blogs at alexanderbillet.com, and is active on BlueSky and Instagram. He lives in Los Angeles.