Who is the Irish band Kneecap? : NPR


Mo Chara, Dj Próvaí and Móglaí Bap de Rotula during the fourth day of the Glastonbury Festival.
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Leon Neal / Getty Images / Getty Images Europe
London – When Kneceecap was played at the Glastonbury Music Festival this year – a performance to which the British Prime Minister opposed even before the group goes on stage – the member of the Mo Chara group told the crowd: “The three we have no right to be on this scene in front of as many people, mainly tapping in a language as even people at home do not even speak.”
The ball joint, three young men from Northern Ireland who rap in Irish, have achieved their importance in recent years, with a controversy surrounding its shows and its political declarations.

The hip-hop trio was formed in 2017, made up of members of the Mo Chara band, Móglaí Bap and Dj Próvaí, who come from Belfast. The group is part of the generation known as “Babies of ceasefire”, which grew up in the aftermath of the 1998 Friday agreement in 1998 which officially ended the decades of violence in Northern Ireland known as troubles. The words of the group cover everything, from the culture of the young people from the working class to Belfast, to the rights of the Irish language, to the desire of Northern Ireland to join the Republic of Ireland.
Why the Irish rap trio
The ball joints says that Irish rap, long marginalized under British domination in Northern Ireland, is a political choice. When NPR met the group in an Irish language cultural center in the west of Belfast in 2023, the member of the Mo Chara group explained: “It is impossible not to be political here [in Northern Ireland] If you are going to speak Irish. It is very difficult not to be political by growing up in Belfast. “”
The Irish language – that the British prohibited from the government of Northern Ireland and the courts under a recently repealed law of the 18th century – now see a revival, especially among young people. Northern Ireland has experienced a constant increase in the Irish in recent years, and Irish has been made official from the region in 2022, where about 12% of the population speaks it now.
The ball joint was credited for having directed what some called an “Irish language revolution”.
In addition to being a political choice, the group says that Rapping in Irish is also creative. The ball joints pushed the limits of the language in rap, with Mo Chara saying at NPR that the Irishman is not “only violins and traces”.
“Our youth culture now involves much more paraphernalia and drugs,” explains Móglaí Bap. “We had to create new words to be able to talk about these things. It was part of the group, creating this new vocabulary which did not really exist.”
The group’s first song, “Cearta”, means “rights” in Irish. The balloon says that she was born from a night when Móglaí Bap and her friends painted Belfast during a demonstration in support of the Irish language. This is the right to speak Irish, known as Móglaí Bap, but it is also “the right for us to get off our heads, to raise ourselves”.
The group’s influences are large, from American hip-hop to Irish rebellious music. The members grew up listening to Irish rebel songs, said Mo Chara. “These are songs that spoke of the unification of Ireland,” he said. “They were very anti-British in Ireland.”
Mo Chara quotes songs like “Sortir Ye Black and Tans”, an Irish rebellious song from the 1920s to resist a notoriously brutal British police force named for the color of their uniforms, which were sadly famous for having killed Irish civilians during the Irish independence war in the early 1920s. from England who came out of people who murdered “and says that” he would be seen today to have a hip-hop theme. “
Knecap’s own music speaks of a desire that Northern Ireland is also freed from British domination. One of the group’s greatest successes is entitled “Taking out your British”.
A semi -fictional film on the origins of the group – in which the members play as themselves – were acclaimed by critics and a series of awards, including a BAFTA earlier this year.
How the group attracted controversy
The group is also vocal in its criticism of Israel and calls for the War of Israel in Gaza a genocide-statements that have attracted the anger of politicians and public figures in the United Kingdom and beyond.
In Coachella this year, the ball joint led the crowd in songs of “free Palestine” and ended all the pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli messages projecting on the screen, including one who declared “Israel commits a genocide against the Palestinian people” and “he is activated by the American government who armed and finance Israel despite their war crimes”. The whole has aroused criticism, with some, including Sharon Osbourne, calling for the revocation of the American visas of the group.
Shortly after the Coachella set, two older videos appeared online from previous concerts, which seemed to show members of the group shouting “Up Hamas, Up Hezbollah” and saying that “the only good conservative is a dead curator”, referring to the legislators of the central-right-right conservative party. British terrorism fighting police said that they were investigating the group and that Mo Chara was then accused of an offense to terrorism, for alleging a flag in support of Hezbollah, which is a proscribed terrorist organization in the United Kingdom
In a declaration on X, the kneecap said: “We do not do, and we have never supported Hamas or Hezbollah. We condemn all the attacks on civilians” and “we reject any suggestion that we would seek to encourage violence against any deputy or individual”. The group said that the videos had been “withdrawn from any context” and that there had been a “smear campaign” against the group after its performance Coachella.
The group saw some of its programs canceled after the terrorist load. Some politicians have said that the ball joint should not be allowed to perform in Glastonbury, including British Prime Minister Keir Starmer who said it would not be “appropriate”.
In the end, the organizers of Glastonbury said that the balloon performance would continue. The BBC, which broadcasts the live festival each year, said that it would not broadcast the Knecap program live but later made it available online. In a press release, the BBC said “although the BBC does not prohibit artists, our plans guarantee that our programming responds to our editorial directives”.
The group attracted a crowd of hundreds of thousands, and he used the whole to reiterate his support for the Palestinians in Gaza and to retaliate to criticism from the group, starting with a montage of the various Knecap convictions received on both sides of the Atlantic. At one point, the group led the crowd in songs of “F *** Keir Starmer” and described the accusation against Mo Chara as a “accusation of thwarted terrorism”.

Mo Chara made parallels between the Irish struggle and the fate of the Palestinians in Gaza, saying to the crowd that “the Irish suffered 800 years of colonialism under the British state”, adding: “We understand colonialism and we understand how important it is for international solidarity”.
British police have now opened a criminal investigation into the Glastonbury set of Knecap Glastonbury “relating to hatred crimes”, alongside another set of the British Punk group Bob Vylan, in which the main singer, Bobby Vylan, led the crowd in songs of “Death, Death To The Idf” Israeli.