If you were to judge a country by the grim piety of its journalistic depictions, you’d swear Northern Ireland were one big funeral, begetting nothing but more funerals and all of us professional keeners. It’s not that the region isn’t beleaguered, by both design and neglect. It’s more that this abstracted view is incomplete. It’s a distancing, a containment, a denial.
In the opening seconds of Kneecap’s new film, the old cliches we all carry about Northern Ireland are swiftly dispensed. Car bombs, graffiti on gable walls, checkpoints, border signs, Molotov cocktails, barely pubescent British army cannon fodder, hoovered up from Brixton to the Gorbals, kneeling with their rifles on street corners while ragged kids gather round them. If they were following the prevailing models of film in the North of Ireland, as they put it, the movie would be more dewy-eyed trauma porn. People don’t live like that though, not all the time, and even when they are forced to, innate resistances begin.
Kneecap is an inventive, picaresque, often hilarious, fictionalised origin story of the Irish hip-hop trio. It’s defiant in subject and form, rejecting the kitchen-sink misery or Stage Oirish paddywhackery usually demanded of the Irish, while simultaneously flirting with and subverting these modes. The irreverence itself is political, given Northern Ireland was a place where false piety was weaponised by every side to damn the other and whitewash themselves. But the band, and film, embrace the farcical nature of the post-Troubles North with a playful defiance. When the Belfast writer Louis MacNeice wrote of “being various”, it didn’t just mean virtuous things. It is our best and worst sides, and this film shows them, taking place in a contemporary world of dead-end jobs, k-holes and breakbeats rather than newsreels from the Seventies and Eighties.
They go for all the sacred cows of Norn Iron — the PSNI and the British State, philistine Unionists, Republicans who abandon their familial responsibilities and switch to new-age beliefs, anti-drug vigilantes who end up with drug dealers working for them, all the petty lords of their particular fiefdoms. Even tedious Gaelic teachers come in for a bruising, particularly as there’s no excuse for making such a mercurial language boring (“May the lowest stone in the sea be on top of your head” is one memorable line in a film bursting with them). Full of healthy self-ridicule, the irreverence is radical because reverence, as Northern Ireland has shown, is the first step on the road to solipsism, corruption, essentialism and eventually hell.
More than anything, Kneecap the film and the band are concerned with the present, which has long been squandered in the North of Ireland. People chose or were forced to live anywhere but the present. Republicans, for example, were obsessed with the future. Their favourite slogan was/is Tiocfaidh ár lá meaning “Our day will come”. After the Brighton bomb killed five people, the IRA released a statement: “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once — you will have to be lucky always.” There was always a suitably opaque sense of the utopia of a future United Ireland, which untested could become any fantasy the imagination could conjure, rather than what it would and will be — the end of one set of colonial troubles and, after the inevitable sesh, the beginning of a new self-inflicted set of troubles.
Meanwhile, both sides of the divide remain obsessed with the past — King Billy, the Hunger Strikers, the Apprentice Boys, the Easter Rebels… One side trapped and deluded in triumphalism, the other in martyrdom and magical thinking. Catholics could console themselves that the future belonged to them via demographic replacement, something Unionists such as Paisley (“they breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin”) obsessed over. On the other side, Loyalist siege mentality gave way to paranoia and a zero-sum game, whereby a job or house for “one of them” is “one less for us”. This mentality has fuelled a race to the bottom, with the main difference in their deprived neighbourhoods being the colour of the kerbstones and bunting. It is this betrayal of the present, the neurosis of trying to exist in the past and future, that Kneecap reject with a film and discography that are manifestly about the only place we ever inhabit — the now.
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SubscribeNí ceapaim!
Two gaelgoeri (Irish speakers) are having a pint when another man walks into the pub.
‘Ceapaim go bhfuil an fear seo ins an RUC.’ (I think that man is in the RUC)
‘Ní ceapaim,’ answers his companion.
Last week from this author: a massively overblown article on Nick Cave.
Today: a massively overblown article on…. Kneecap.
Who knows? Next week, it could be a lengthy paean on the philosophy of Michael Buble, or even the world-changing dynamics of a Liberace set.
But Liberace had some good ideas. He was definitely in love with his mother and that is good for family values (er..maybe).
‘The Peace Process was hard earned’.
Come off it.
The IRA changed tack and cashed in their war achievements for political gain. Some 25 years later than they could have.
Anyway it is a process, not something in the past, and with a single aim.
I think John Hume described the GFA as “Sunningdale for slow learners” or something like that.
Seamus Mallon.
So true, the rejection of Sunningdale meant 20 years of lives lost for nothing.
Let’s face it the Irish, and I am one of them, love The Struggle. They’ll be bereft, as they permanently are, if they have to give it up.
Sounds like the usual melange of American influenced snake-oil consumerism masquerading as the post-historical panacaea. The Irish appear to be coming to the meagre feast very late on this one.
As if all the world’s problems, all its ancient feuds, can be dissolved in pop music, drugs, irony and shopping.
From Belgrade to Berlin to Jakarta it’s the same scam. The revolt against history, the revolt against organic community. Except it isn’t a revolt really, it’s a coup from abroad.
Irish Hip Hop – they call it diversity, I suppose.
If these 3 absolute chancers are “the future” then God help us all.
Sectarian morons glorifying a grubby and pathetic ‘war’ for monetary gain.
To be fair, I suppose it’s the cool thing to do for youngsters these days.
So basically the Commitments without the talent, music, humour, or any other redemptive features.