GET YOUR BRITS OUT BY Alina Kulman ILLUSTRATION Sage Jennings DESIGN XingXing Shou
In 2017, Irish rapper Móglaí Bap (a pseudonym) spraypainted the word cearta (‘right,’ in Irish) on a bus station. Bap was graffitiing his hometown of Belfast during protests over the Irish Language Act, a law that proposed giving the Irish language equal status to English in Northern Ireland. When undercover police pulled up, Bap escaped while his friend was arrested. His friend refused to speak English to the cops, and spent the night in jail waiting for a translator. In the Republic of Ireland, every citizen has the right to engage in government business in either Irish or English. The same right is not granted to people like Bap in Northern Ireland, a province of the United Kingdom, even as Irish republicans have long pushed for the legislative change. The incident inspired Bap and his bandmate Mo Chara (also not his real name) to write their 2017 hit, “C.E.A.R.T.A”—the same word he had graffitied earlier that year. Bap and Chara, known as KNEECAP (along with their collaborator, the balaclava-clad DJ Próvaí), regularly combine humor, drug references, and antiBritish sentiment in their songs. On “Your Sniffer Dogs are Shite,” they oscillate between mocking the police for unsuccessful drug busts and the simple message of “We want our country back.” Songs on KNEECAP’s
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2018 debut album 3CAG flow seamlessly between Irish (also called Gaeilge, or Gaelic) and English, sometimes within the same lyric. Their song “Incognito” even includes an Irish introduction lesson for beginners: “When you see your mate you say ‘Dé an fucking craic?’ / Nó ‘Cad é mar atá’ if you wanna be polite / You say ‘Maith go leor!’ if you think he’s alright.” One lyric in “C.E.A.R.T.A” seems to perfectly embody their cause: “raithneach dleathach in fuckin’ Éire Aontaithe,” which translates to “legal weed in a fuckin’ United Ireland.” As Chara explained in an interview with The(091)Show, “The revolution’s fucked until we’re buying fucking gear [drugs] in Irish.” The band has faced criticism for their controversial subjects and unapologetically nationalist rhetoric. Members of the Democratic Unionist Party—Northern Ireland’s pro-British party—condemned KNEECAP’S music and concerts as “hate-filled” in 2019. Not even a week later, bouncers for their concert at University College Dublin escorted them offstage for cheering revolutionary slogans. RTÉ, the national Irish radio broadcaster, banned their music in 2018 for its explicit content. KNEECAP joyously responded to the political condemnation with an Instagram video of Mo Chara dancing, middle finger raised, to an EDM remix of a
traditional Irish rebel song, “Come Out Ye Black and Tans.” Bap told i-D magazine that he had expected the pushback: “Everything that came before us in Irish was so radio-friendly, and we’re like nothing that’s come before,” said Bap. “When we first put out music, we had local politicians and stuff sharing it and praising it, going, ‘Oh this is Irish language hip-hop, this is great,’ but they weren’t bothering to actually listen to it or translate what we were actually saying.” The status of the Irish language in the nationalist movement has been contentious for centuries, especially during the violent sectarian conflict that consumed the island from the 1960s to the 1990s, known as the “Troubles.” KNEECAP’s Irish raps combine a political message with humorous parodic elements, creating a new shared revolutionary vocabulary for Ireland’s young people, who have grown up in relative peace. After attending a KNEECAP performance, Irish photographer James Forde told Vice, “I’d imagine that about 90 percent of the people at the concert didn’t understand the lyrics, or wouldn’t be able to sing along to them. If you don’t speak Gaelic— which most of us don’t—it would be difficult to follow along or understand sentence for sentence. But then you have this pride that they’ve brought out in Irish
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