Kneecap reveal the scourge of phoney radicalism

Is there a more cringeworthy band than Kneecap? This is the rapping trio from Belfast who are a mix of punk brio and Provo cosplay. One of them wears a tricolour balaclava. He is 35 years old and a former schoolteacher. I’m dying. They rap about taking ket and hating the Brits. This gets middle-class millennials hot under the collar and Tory types frothing at the mouth. But the only emotion these Fisher-Price hoods evoke in this Irishman is pure mortification.

Kneecap have been hitting the headlines all year. The ponces of Britain’s bourgeois press love them. One writes of meeting them in a ‘giant gravel puddle on the outskirts of Letterkenny’, as if he were mingling with exotic tribesmen in deepest Africa. The Guardian garlands them with such fawning adjectives as ‘raucous’ and ‘riotous’, conjuring up the tragicomic image of some fop in Kings Place saying ‘Henrietta, you MUST hear this’ as he plays ‘Get Your Brits Out’ on YouTube.

They rap in English and Irish. They rap about taking rhino-strength ket. ‘Let’s rob a vet’, they say. I’ll bet my Irish citizenship they never have. They rap about how much they hate the filth. ‘Fuck the RUC!’, they say on ‘Incognito’, referring to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which hasn’t existed since 2001. ‘I’m a hood, lowlife scum’, they cry. They aren’t. They’re basically Irish-language activists who, in the words of Malachi O’Doherty, have ‘worked diligently at presenting themselves as worthless layabouts’. They’re the cultural class larping as chavs, the Rachel Dolezals of republican chic.

Sometimes the cringe is too much. Like when they sued ‘the Brits’ for denying them an arts grant. Earlier this year, Kemi Badenoch, the then business secretary, blocked the cash on the basis that Kneecap ‘oppose[s] the United Kingdom itself’. Kneecap’s besties at the Guardian sped to their defence, giving rise to the most squirm-inducing article I’ve read in years. ‘Blap!’, writes the Guardian hack as the doors to a Belfast pub fling open. Then ‘the energy levels leap’ as ‘in bowl three young men’ who ‘grin like a smiley shark’ and wear ‘excellent Lacoste tracksuit[s]’ and engage in ‘Guinness and discussion [and] rampant piss-taking’. Not since the sex-starved daughters of the aristocracy lapped up Lady Chatterley’s Lover has the upper crust’s lust for ‘noble savages’ been on such grim, garish display.

Kneecap won their case against the British government. Of course they did. The judiciary, like every other wing of the capitalist order, loves the larping layabouts. The band appeared outside court, the auld one in his trademark balaclava, and said: ‘We took £14,250 from the king’s stash.’ What a sad spectacle: phoney punks suckling at the teet of state handouts while cosplaying as IRA men who’d just robbed a bank to fund their guerrilla war on the Brits. Liam Gallagher, not for the first time, is right: Kneecap are ‘a bunch of squares in knitted face thongs’.

Dressing up a government grant as a Provo-style theft of the monarch’s money is Kneecap summed up. This band is essentially bourgeois values in a balaclava, cultural orthodoxy in IRA fancy dress. For all their expletives and Provo nostalgia they hold not one view that would be out of place at a soiree at Daunt Books. Wait, you think Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza?! Like every other ill-read luvvie and silver-spoon leftist in the kingdom? How daring. They obsess over mental health, sounding more Oprah Winfrey than Bobby Sands. Ireland is a ‘country that has serious mental-health issues’, they say, the patronising gits.

They hate the Daily Mail. Well, how else are they going to stay chums with the Guardian and Radio 4 other than by indulging in that loftiest and leafiest of pastimes: Mail-bashing? One of their chief concerns is ‘generational trauma’. It’s this trauma that trickles down from father to son that explains Ireland’s high suicide rate, says the eejit in the balaclava. ‘Eight hundred of years of oppression [was] enough to bring us to this point’, he says. Catch yourself on, you condescending weapon. This patrician treatment of the Irish masses as the bruised, broken remnants of centuries of British oppression is so Dublin 4. Kneecap doll up as republicans while giving voice to the wildly anti-republican, New Ireland view that the Irish are too traumatised to get their own shit together, far less shape the destiny of the nation.

This is Kneecap: they steal valour from physical-force republicanism to give their bien-pensant ‘West Brit’ views the lick of radicalism. They pull on a balaclava to hide the truth that their every utterance is likely to get the Trinity grads at the Irish Times rattling their jewellery in vociferous agreement.

It’s the performative nature of Kneecap’s radicalism that endears them to so many bourgeois youths in Britain and Ireland. I would wager that a majority of the people leaping up and down at Kneecap gigs as they rap ‘Brits Out!’ and ‘Fuck Israel!’ are kids of privilege. Indeed, the Irish Times published a piece earlier this year titled: ‘A middle-class millennial at a Kneecap gig: am I just cosplaying at republicanism?’ Yes, you are. But you’re not alone. Disguising milquetoast guff in radical garb is all the rage. So where posh young Brits will don Novara Media’s 25-quid earrings that say ‘Literally A Communist’ before wanging on about how fucking dumb ‘the gammon’ are, Kneecap fans will pull on a t-shirt featuring a Mick in a balaclava before wringing their untoiled hands over how pitiably traumatised the Irish are. Everyone hides their class prejudice behind class politics these days.

We might have reached peak Kneecap this week. The band said the Northern Irish police banned the sale of certain merchandise at their big gig in Belfast, including a t-shirt featuring a cartoon of a burning police landrover. But the cops say it’s bullshit: ‘The concert is taking place at a private venue and there has been no police involvement.’ Belfast City Council confirmed that it hadn’t imposed any restrictions on Kneecap’s t-shirts, either. This, I suppose, is what ‘police repression’ looks like to bourgeois bores posing as republican radicals.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy