30 April 2025

The nastiness and cowardice of Kneecap

The language is coarse, their lack of conviction is cynical.

Mo Chara – “my friend” in Irish – is the stage name of one third of Kneecap, the bilingual hip-hop trio from West Belfast. I might suggest he hasn’t done enough to earn such a moniker. “Then all you c***s are getting one behind the ear,” he raps, rather un-amiably. “’Nois, cúpla ceist [now, a few questions], do ya want it in your chest?/Or your knees? Or your head?” they ask on their biggest track “H.O.O.D”. “Get the noose!” Mo Chara implores his bandmate on their hit 2024 song “Guilty Conscience”.

Who could have guessed the band behind such blood-soaked lyrics might be nasty? Who might suspect a group named after the republican paramilitary tactic of shooting allies and enemies through their kneecaps? The one whose members include DJ Próvai – a rhetorical play on a member of the provisional IRA – who wears an Irish tricolour balaclava on stage (you can buy an imitation on their website for £27).

If there was any doubt – the group’s first single was released in 2017, and they were the subjects of a celebrated eponymous feature film in 2024 – there is little now. On 27 April it was reported that two videos of the band are being assessed by counter-terrorism police: the first is of a November 2023 gig in which one of its members seems to yell: “The only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.” The second, from late 2024, appears to show a band member shouting: “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” while draped in a Hezbollah flag (the band recently closed their set at the California music festival Coachella with a sign reading “F*** ISRAEL, FREE PALESTINE). They chant “Maggie’s in a box”, in reference to the late Margaret Thatcher. Whatever you make of the politics, you have to pity the lack of decorum.

This has all earned Kneecap no uncertain trouble. Kemi Badenoch has said that the group should be prosecuted. Downing Street called the comments about murdering MPs “completely unacceptable”. Taoiseach Micheál Martin said the band urgently needed to clarify whether they were pro-Hamas. One Labour MP has called for their upcoming Glastonbury set to be cancelled.

Every punk has their price. And for the self-styled, anti-establishment republican renegades of Kneecap, the prospect of a cancelled Glastonbury appearance and the legal ramifications of supporting proscribed terrorist organisations seems to be theirs. Kneecap have apologised for the comments to the families of the murdered MPs David Amess and Jo Cox. In the same statement they said: “Let us be unequivocal: we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hezbollah” (which certainly makes their “Up Hamas! Up Hezbollah!” intervention confusing). The group complained its comments were taken out of context to derail the conversation from the “ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people”.

“Guilty conscience? No thanks!” Kneecap boasts on “Guilty Conscience”. Yet for all the radical posturing, casual reference to rebel IRA slogans, balaclava’d members, and rhetorical violence, it seems the band is indeed in possession of a conscience. But it is one that begins and ends with commercial viability. When faced with consequences, the consummate Irish punks became rather obsequious indeed. We might wonder whether the one thing worse than saying terrible things is saying terrible things and not even meaning them in the first place. Call it hollow, cynical, dangerous – whatever. This is nastiness without the saving grace of conviction.

In recent years there has been a spate of the young Irish embracing old, hardened republican rhetoric: “up the ’Ra [IRA]” has re-emerged as a popular refrain at music festivals; “tiocfaidh ár lá”(“our day will come” – a rebel slogan) has been defanged in the culture, thrown away as a conversational joke. Distance from the realities of the Troubles has blunted its edges. And there has long been a link between this disposition and the pro-Palestine movement: one Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD, or member of parliament) said in 2021 that the Irish “sympathise [with] and understand” the Palestinian plight, “as the northern part of our country experienced similar for many years”.

Kneecap’s popularity emerges entirely from this cartoonish version of history, where the violence of the latter half of the 20th century is a kind of distant and aesthetically admirable mythology; where it can all be dismissed as brusque humour.

The whole thing is a joke, Kneecap is now arguing. Up Hamas? We didn’t mean it like that! Kill your MP? Only if we still get to play our Glastonbury set… I wonder whether the 1916 rebels would have managed to take over the General Post Office were they also to capitulate at the first sign of getting into trouble. Whatever you might want to call the band, “punk” is no longer a fitting attribute.

I am reminded of another Irish rebel singer, Sinéad O’Connor. In 1992 she took a sledgehammer to her career on Saturday Night Live: at the end of a performance of Bob Marley’s “War” O’Connor, then 25, tore up an image of Pope John Paul II and glared down the camera. “Fight the real enemy,” she said. O’Connor was accused of blasphemy; she was promptly banned for life by the broadcaster NBC; copies of her records were destroyed at protests in Times Square. And the woman once considered the biggest rising star of the decade reversed her trajectory on the spot. But she didn’t back down. And none of it ever was dismissed as a big joke to save her career. Devotion to bad politics is one thing; Kneecap’s impulses are nastier – and their lack of conviction is worse.

[See also: Capitalism (Taylor’s Version)]