Anticolonial Hip-Hop
Fenian, by Kneecap
By John Foster
With Fenian, Belfast rap trio Kneecap continues the balancing act that has made them one of Europe’s most important cultural forces, a mix of language activism, comedy, and provocation.
Following the combustible energy of 3CAG and the more expansive, formally assured Fine Art, Kneecap were due for a musical change anyway. But a few years of making the headlines made that demand more acute.
Now that members of the band are treated, however unwillingly, like public intellectuals, they are held to a more exacting standard than most musicians. Their fanbase has grown, but so has the number of haters.
Many artists in this position have faltered, unable to cope with the weight of increased expectation. When Fenian‘s release date was announced, many people were curious to see how Kneecap would handle the pressure.
There are few things the British establishment enjoys more than Irish rebellion safely quarantined in the past. Dead revolutionaries are manageable. Commemorative murals can be folded into heritage tourism.
The Troubles, sufficiently softened by prestige television and the melancholy lighting of retrospective documentaries, become the sort of thing one discusses in measured tones over wine, preferably with a former intelligence officer available to explain that everyone, really, made regrettable choices.
Considerably less welcome is Irishness that insists on speaking in the present tense, particularly if it arrives loudly, profanely, and with enough bass to loosen plaster. Kneecap embody that discomfort. They are not emissaries from the archive but reminders that colonial memory occasionally develops a taste for ecstasy beats.
Kneecap’s political convictions are messy, instinctive, occasionally contradictory, and almost entirely devoid of academic varnish. Which, paradoxically, may be exactly why they matter.
One of the stranger afflictions of contemporary political culture is the tendency to assume that legitimacy is possible only after someone has acquired the proper vocabulary. Before speaking, the argument goes, you need to read first. There is an entire ecosystem of credentialed radicalism in which the ability to recite theoretical keywords substitutes for any serious encounter with power as lived experience.
Kneecap have little patience for such rituals. Their politics emerge not from seminars on coloniality or carefully annotated editions of Fanon but from growing up in post-Troubles Belfast, a city where history casts a moist chill over everything. You may not see it, but you always sense the dampness.
Understanding Kneecap’s politics requires grasping the peculiar temporality of Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. Belfast is peaceful, certainly, if peace means the absence of sustained, organised violence. Yet it remains a city of segregated neighbourhoods, inherited grievances, and political arrangements that feel more like a carefully administered suspension than a resolution.
The war ended. But it also didn’t, fully. One inherits memory in Belfast as much as language. Children grow up, not amid active insurgency, but absorbing its residue: the stories, the absences, the uneasy geography of neighbourhoods where everyone quietly knows who belongs where.
Kneecap’s political instincts emerge from this inheritance. Although their understanding of power is not especially scholarly, it is phenomenological in the deepest sense. They know what domination feels like because they were raised inside its afterlife.
When the band rails against policing, surveillance, cultural suppression, or political hypocrisy, they do so not as theorists but as witnesses to structures that have outlived the formal conditions that were once used to justify them. This rootedness imparts a heft to Fenian that separates it from the endless supply of politically themed music produced primarily for social media circulation.
Protest music has demonstrated a distressing tendency toward moral pedagogy. Too often, it feels less like art than mandatory training. Listeners are expected to nod solemnly while absorbing approved conclusions.
Kneecap understand something older and more effective: politics travels farther when attached to pleasure. This is fortunate, because Fenian would be substantially less persuasive if it were not so compulsively listenable.
The group’s greatest strength remains their ability to convert grievance into propulsion. The beats hit hard, the hooks linger, and their flows maintain the peculiar elasticity that permits them to oscillate effortlessly between menace, absurdity, and outright comedy. Even at its darkest, the album remains animated by an unmistakable sense of fun: not frivolity exactly, but the conviction that joy itself constitutes a refusal.
“Carnival” is one of the best examples of Kneecap’s balancing act. The track pulses with confrontation, turning public scrutiny and institutional backlash into something almost theatrical. The band have become a familiar object of controversy in Britain, and the reaction to their politics says nearly as much about contemporary liberalism as it does about the trio themselves.
The UK, like many liberal democracies, possesses an enormous tolerance for dissidence so long as it remains safely aesthetic. Rebellion is charming when dead, marketable when symbolic, and positively delightful when confined to museum exhibits. What causes discomfort is dissent that insists on contemporary relevance.
Irish republicanism, in particular, occupies a strange place in British political culture. Sanitised versions are acceptable. Historical suffering may be acknowledged, provided it culminates in reconciliation narratives tidy enough for educational programming. But contemporary anticolonial politics—especially when linked to living geopolitical questions—still has the unsettling tendency to make respectable institutions instinctively reach for disciplinary language.
Kneecap’s refusal to soften their edges has made them awkward participants in a culture industry that wants its radicals to be either nostalgic or apologetic.
This tension becomes particularly evident on “Palestine,” perhaps the album’s most politically explicit track and undoubtedly the one most likely to provoke pearl-clutching among cultural gatekeepers who otherwise pride themselves on cosmopolitan sensitivity. Yet to dismiss the song as opportunistic sloganeering would require a remarkable indifference to Irish political history.
For many Irish republicans, Palestine is not some distant geopolitical abstraction encountered through hashtags and activist infographics. It is legible through inherited memory. Occupation, partition, military presence, contested sovereignty, imprisonment, settlement, cultural suppression: these are not abstract concepts but familiar political grammars.
There’s no need to insist upon a perfect equivalence between Ireland and Palestine to understand why Irish solidarity with Palestine emerges so persistently. Political affinities are rarely born from exact historical correspondence. More often, they emerge from a mode of recognition founded on analogy.
Kneecap’s support for Palestine reflects precisely this logic. Their politics operates less through formal theoretical comparison than historical intuition. They recognise patterns. More importantly, they refuse the increasingly common demand that artists either remain politely apolitical or restrict themselves to causes already approved by respectable consensus.
There is something quietly admirable in the band’s willingness to remain committed to this position despite legal scrutiny, public condemnation, and institutional pressure. You don’t have to agree with every formulation to recognise integrity when you see it.
If Fenian possesses an intellectual centre of gravity, it lies not only in geopolitics but in language itself. Kneecap’s importance to Irish-language culture cannot be overstated, though one suspects this fact makes certain cultural custodians deeply uncomfortable.
Minority languages are often treated by states—and occasionally by their defenders—as fragile heirlooms requiring careful preservation. They become respectable, educational, faintly mournful, suited for classrooms, museums, and earnest policy discussions. Living languages, however, are vulgar.
Kneecap’s real achievement has been to rescue Gaelic from the suffocating embrace of reverence. In their hands, Irish becomes contemporary, profane, funny, libidinal, and occasionally threatening. People flirt in it. Argue in it. Get intoxicated in it. Mock police in it. Swear enthusiastically in it.
This matters more than many cultural commentators appreciate. Languages do not survive because institutions preserve them. They survive because people discover reasons to live inside them.
In this sense, Kneecap’s solidarity with other marginalised language communities makes perfect sense. Whether among Welsh speakers, Basque activists, Indigenous language revitalisation efforts, or Kurdish cultural movements, we can perceive shared resistance to the flattening tendencies of empire.
Colonial power frequently operates through linguistic compression: one language elevated as universal, practical, inevitable; others gradually repositioned as backward, ornamental, or sentimental. Kneecap reject this logic through sheer irreverence. Irish is not a relic awaiting respectful stewardship. It is alive enough to offend people.
“An Ra” captures something of this broader anti-imperial sensibility while retaining the group’s characteristic humour. Kneecap have always understood that ridicule remains among the most effective political weapons. Power hates being laughed at. Empire, especially, prefers solemnity.
The track manages to evoke historical memory without collapsing into nostalgia, a distinction the contemporary left occasionally struggles to maintain. There is no romantic longing for an uncomplicated past here. Only the insistence that history remains unresolved and that memory, if sufficiently animated, can still become politically dangerous.
This willingness to inhabit contradiction has been one of Kneecap’s greatest strengths since 3CAG. If that album felt like an insurgent arrival—chaotic, hilarious, unapologetically regional—and Fine Art represented a clear expansion of ambition, Fenian feels like the work of artists who are increasingly comfortable with the burden of symbolic expectation, but refuse to surrender to it entirely.
That is no small achievement. Political musicians often deteriorate into self-seriousness once they realise they have become symbols, writing manifestos instead of songs. Humour evaporates. The music starts to sound like homework assigned by someone very concerned about listeners’ moral development. Kneecap, thankfully, remains too mischievous for that.
Still, Fenian occasionally reveals fatigue beneath the bravado. Tracks such as “Irish Goodbye” suggest a subtle emotional deepening, an awareness that living perpetually in opposition exacts a cost. This gives the album an emotional complexity sometimes absent from politically charged music, which often mistakes certainty for depth. Kneecap seem increasingly aware that historical inheritance is both burden and fuel.
The only criticism worth making is that Fenian sometimes risks leaning too heavily into its own mythology. Kneecap now occupy an unusual cultural position: simultaneously insurgents and institutions, outsiders and internationally recognised symbols of resistance. That tension occasionally threatens to calcify into rote performance. But here, too, the music generally rescues them. The charisma remains too potent, the jokes too sharp, the production too infectious for the band to devolve into self-importance.
Ultimately, the power of Fenian lies in its refusal of the false choice between political seriousness and pleasure. Kneecap comprehend something both older and wiser than much contemporary activism: people remember what delights them. A slogan fades. A hook lingers. Politics sustained entirely by outrage eventually exhausts itself; politics attached to joy acquires stamina.
There is something deeply moving, too, in the persistence of Kneecap’s project at this particular historical moment. We inhabit an era that repeatedly announces the triumph of frictionless globalisation, only to discover that history continues speaking inconvenient languages. Empires have always preferred universality. They like one language, one story, one acceptable memory.
Kneecap’s particular offence is not merely that they dissent but that they insist on dissenting exuberantly, bilingually, and with enough confidence to make it seem fun.
Britain can tolerate rebellious ghosts. What it finds harder to manage are young men from Belfast refusing to become heritage artefacts. Kneecap succeed because they understand this intuitively.
Fenian does not ask permission. It does not seek rehabilitation. And perhaps most importantly, it never forgets that, if you want to carry memories into the future, you should pack them in music worth dancing to.
Photograph courtesy of Allan Leonard. Published under a Creative Commons license.