The bourgeois death cult of Bob Vylan

Punk-rap duo Bob Vylan are cheering the death of human beings again. Though they’ve moved on from Jews to Christians. It’s no longer the youthful Jewish soldiers of the IDF whose bloody demise the tuneless tossers are going all onanistic over – it’s the assassination of Charlie Kirk. ‘Rest in piss Charlie Kirk, you piece of shit’, barked lead singer Pascal Robinson-Foster at a gig in Amsterdam to the wild whooping of the bourgeois muppets who make up their fanbase.

Kirk’s body was barely cold before the meat-dodging, double-barrelled top knob of Britain’s shittest band was salivating over his cruel demise. ‘I want to dedicate this next one to an absolute piece of shit of a human being’, he said. ‘The pronouns was / were. [Because] if you talk shit, you will get banged.’ It’s a brave move, I’ll give him that, to call someone else an ‘absolute piece of shit’ even as you are getting a giddy, perverted kick from the public slaying of a young dad of two. If Mr Robinson-Foster wants to see a man who really does wade in the effluent of hatred and misanthropy, I suggest he invest in a mirror. He could sort out that barnet while he’s at it.

Bob Vylan have form on the death-loving front, of course. The last time they hit the headlines was when they stirred the middle-class saps and squares of Glastonbury into an Israelophobic frenzy by chanting ‘Death, death to the IDF!’. Now, fresh from gobbing more bile into that well of hate called Israelophobia, they’re chuckling over the execution of a man for his supposedly sinful thoughts. I’m fond of the ancient phrase ‘Nothing human is alien to me’. But I struggle to compute such glee in the face of death. To see two kids robbed of their dad and to laugh about it, to witness a man be put to death for his beliefs and cry ‘Rest in piss!’ like some medieval whackjob watching a ‘witch’ get burnt at the stake – that’s a level of nihilism beyond my intellectual pay grade.

Bob Vylan’s macabre cheering of the assassination of a man they disliked sums up the savagery of cancel culture. ‘Talk shit, get banged’ could be the slogan of this new McCarthyism that feverishly seeks to silence everyone from working-class mums who don’t fancy having 900 men from God knows where in the hotel up the road to those uppity bitches who think you can’t have a cock and be a woman. Sure, it’s at the more extreme end – most prissy cancellers prefer to say ‘Talk shit, get blacklisted’ – but there’s a twisted logic to this dream of death for wrongthink. After all, if words are violence – as much of the wet left says they are – wouldn’t that make violence a reasonable response to words?

And the hypocrisy! When Bob Vylan had some gigs cancelled after they chanted for the death of Jewish soldiers, they ran blubbing to Instagram. We’re being ‘targeted for speaking up’, squeaked the poor dears. And what do you think happened to Charlie Kirk? He was targeted with extreme violence for speaking up about the lunacy of trans and the bollocks of BLM. To wail about being cancelled one day and then cheer the barbarous cancellation of a man’s entire life the next – what Bob Vylan lack in talent and charm they more than make up for with brass neck.

Bob Vylan are like a bourgeois death cult. They embody the moral contortionism of those time-rich, middle-class clicktivists who say ‘Be Kind’ one minute and ‘Decapitate TERFs’ the next. The kind of people who think it’s hate speech to say lesbians don’t have penises but fine to echo the neo-fascists of Hamas by hollering ‘Death to the IDF!’ in a field in Somerset. So Bob Vylan love to wang on about their veganism – don’t all vegans? – and posts pics of themselves tucking into vegan ice cream. And then they’re laughing over the violent bleeding to death of a literal human being. Behold the inhumanity of wokeness: don’t you dare touch a cow’s udders as you make my artisan ice cream but feel free to put a bullet in the neck of a man who said things I disapprove of.

This is the hilarious thing about Bob Vylan: they’re the squarest motherfuckers in showbiz. They make the tea-cosied theatre kids of Kneecap look like dangerous radicals. They don’t smoke or drink. They ‘advocate for healthy lifestyles’, including the consumption of ‘plant-based wholefoods’. Robinson-Foster went on his first ‘pro-Palestine’ demo when he was 15, ‘escorted by a friend’s mum’. I’m dying. They rap about how much they hate ‘Brexit-voting Top Gear fans’. It’s more Sandi Toksvig than Sid Vicious. Instead of going to a Bob Vylan gig you could just go into a Whole Foods and eavesdrop on the blue-haired girls spending daddy’s allowance on kale – totally same vibe.

Bob Vylan are basically Guardianistas with guitars. They’re an episode of The News Agents put through a feedback amp. They’re Rory Stewart with dreadlocks. ‘I heard you want your country back. Ha, shut the fuck up!’, they wailed at Glasto, thrilling the assembled entitled arses with a hit of Remoanerism, hands down the most elitist ideology of our time. That taunting of Britain’s riff raff who ‘want their country back’, for the titillation of a sea of EU-loving poshos, is Bob Vylan summed up. ‘Death to the IDF’, they yelped, when the only thing they’ve ever killed is punk rock.

Here’s the thing: that the cult of nihilism now washes over the conformist middle classes reveals what a worrying moment we are living through. ‘Where they burn books, they will in the end burn people’, said Heinrich Heine. Yes, and where privileged youths will cheer the cancellation of ideas, they will in the end cheer the cancellation of life. Let’s give the final word to a proper punk, Johnny Rotten, who knows a fascist when he sees one: ‘Hamas are basically just Jew exterminators, that’s their only real purpose.’ Wait, you don’t want people to be killed by fascists? Fancy that. Rock on, John.

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 latest 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