What are you having? Welcome to The Rutz: the imaginary West Belfast pub where controversial rap trio Kneecap have set their long-awaited debut, ‘Fine Art’. If you just nipped in for a quiet Guinness, though, you’d best call your mum – you’re going to be late home.
Here’s an evening of getting laid, getting out of your head, sniffing and selling gear, pegging it from the police. This isn’t hedonism for the sake of it, mind. Feeling voiceless, powerless, unseen, unheard and unwanted, Kneecap formed to represent their reality in music and deliver it in their native tongue; a language that many in Northern Ireland wanted extinguished.
Móglaí Bap and Mo Chara rap over DJ Próvaí’s intoxicating beats without ever losing your attention. Skipping between English and Irish, language is no barrier to a good time. Opener ‘3CAG’ (which stands for “3 chonsan agus guta”, Irish for “three consonants and a vowel”, that’s MDMA, kids) features Lankum’s Radie Peat to deliver a modern spin on soulful Irish folk before Kneecap tell you exactly who they are on the title track. Named after their two-word response to the media frenzy that followed their 2022 unveiling of a hometown mural that showed a Police Service of Northern Ireland jeep on fire, they fill in on the headlines from their favourite place, “in a dimly-lit shit run-down pub… seeing how high I can get on government funds”.
Between the skits and the bants, there are highs: the feral rush of cutting loose and buying a packet on payday on ‘I’m Flush’, the sweet R&B romance of ‘Love Making’, the trash meets tradition of ‘Drug Dealin Pagans’. But, as they spit on the profound ‘A Better Way To Live’ featuring Fontaines D.C.’s Grian Chatten, that’s only “the upside of the seesaw”. You gotta come down, too.
‘Sick In The Head’ points out how drugs and booze are ultimately cheaper than therapy (“I’m too far gone when it comes to mental health, rather be sick in the head with a little bit of wealth”). Tthe bittersweet ‘Way Too Much’ speaks of weighing up the release vs the aftermath, and ‘Rhino Ket’ is a nightmare race to the depths (“I can’t hold up my head, this shit puts rhinos to bed”). This is the poetry on the cubicle wall: sometimes funny, sometimes sad, sometimes aggravating, but it’s got your attention.
“This wall was built years ago to stop the Protestants on this side fighting with the Catholics on the other,” comes a quote from the ‘90s documentary Dancing On Narrow Ground on the clubby ‘Parful’, telling the story of how drugs and dancing helped bring some temporary peace in Ulster. “But every Saturday night, hundreds of people go out, just go out clubbing and forget about the divides between each other”. An ode to the abandon and unity that come from chain-smoking with your mates and getting lost in the rave, ‘Parful’ perhaps best captures ‘Fine Art’ and the spirit of Kneecap.
In the dark of the night out, the moment is all that matters and the rave will set you free. To shout that in a ‘dying’ language on a record that couldn’t sound any more alive? That’s power – and Kneecap have it.
