Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.The adage that there is no such thing as bad publicity is attributed to the showman PT Barnum. Kneecap are testing it. Since playing at the Californian music festival Coachella earlier this month, they have found themselves at the centre of a mushrooming series of controversies, impressive even by their standards of offence-causing.Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch wants the rap trio from Northern Ireland to be prosecuted. According to Keir Starmer’s official spokesman, the British prime minister “condemns them in the strongest possible terms”. Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin called on them to “urgently clarify” whether they support Hamas and Hizbollah. Summer shows have been cancelled in the UK and Germany. Festivals including Glastonbury are under pressure to drop them from their line-ups.The furore began with two of the band’s performances at Coachella. At the second, they showed a screened slogan declaring “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine”. It was incorporated into their set after the band claimed that their first Coachella performance had been censored by the festival. In response, opponents accused them of antisemitic hate speech.Two subsequent controversies centre on events at previous gigs. Film made by an audience member at a London show last November appears to show a member of the trio shouting “Up Hamas, up Hizbollah!” Another film, from a London gig in November 2023, shows one of them apparently saying that the “only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.” Politicians from across the political spectrum have expressed outrage. Two British MPs, Jo Cox and David Amess, have been murdered since 2016. Punk’s PT Barnum, Malcolm McLaren, would have likely approved of all this provocation and upset. Fifty years ago this summer, the impresario recruited John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, to the new group he was managing. The Sex Pistols were designed for shock value. Despite his Jewish background, McLaren was unperturbed by the adoption of Nazi swastikas as punk fashion. Acts of violence were grist to his publicity-seeking mill. These days the Sex Pistols are on the nostalgia circuit with a new frontman, to Lydon’s fury. McLaren is dead. The swastikas and real-life bloodshed, like the woman who lost her eye when Sid Vicious threw a glass during another band’s gig, have faded into the background. The edges have been smoothed off punk’s history. Last year, a rare copy of the Sex Pistols’ single “God Save the Queen” sold for £24,320 at auction.A similar process can be found in rap music, punk’s anti-establishment successor. Gangsta rap pioneers NWA caused uproar in the US with their 1989 protest song “Fuck Tha Police”, in which the Los Angeles group responded to police brutality against African-Americans with threats of retribution against police officers. The FBI wrote to their record label warning that “advocating violence and assault is wrong”. The letter is now on show in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, into which NWA were inducted in 2016.Musical controversies can acquire a kind of quaintness with the passage of time. But while they rage, they are bruising and confrontational. Not all publicity is good publicity. Lydon quit the Sex Pistols after a chaotic US tour in 1978 with hostile audiences attracted by their infamy. “We were all sick of Malcolm’s crazy publicity stunts,” their guitarist Steve Jones recently recalled. Kneecap are expert publicity stuntmen, as when they plastered the British Museum with “Stolen from Ireland” stickers. The trio, who perform under the names Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, have exaggerated stage personas based around drug-taking and laddish japery, as shown by their comical biopic Kneecap. But when I interviewed them last year, I found them to be thoughtful and even earnest.Their approach to Northern Ireland’s complicated history is more nuanced than their trolling behaviour indicates. They espouse a Brits-out republicanism, but don’t endorse the armed actions carried out in its name. Their raps ridicule Northern Irish unionists, but are nothing like as offensive as the tragedy chants with which rival sets of fans goad each other at British football matches. Sectarianism, in Kneecap’s view, is a distraction from the working-class solidarity that should exist between Catholics and Protestants. The ingenious use of Irish and English in their rapping resembles the power-sharing compromise engineered by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. They deliberately present Irish as a slangy youth argot rather than something spoken in antiquated rural communities or by graduate-class linguistic revivalists.Poised between ironic mockery and polemical activism, Kneecap are open to accusations of what Boris Johnson, one of the past targets of their satire, would call cakeism: having your cake and eating it. Claiming to oppose political violence while making light of MPs being killed is an example. The band appear to acknowledge erring on that occasion. They have issued an apology to Jo Cox’s and David Amess’s families.They have also put out a statement insisting that they don’t support Hamas and Hizbollah, although they refuse to row back on their anti-Israel rhetoric. In my view, there is cakeism here too. In February, the band tweeted a photo purportedly of DJ Próvaí reading a Hizbollah book. His customary tricolour balaclava makes it impossible to discern any ironically arched eyebrow. The tone grates. Shock tactics designed for the precariously resolved conflict of Northern Ireland have been applied without nuance to the brutal ongoing loss of life taking place in Gaza and beyond.Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
