Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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\u2019s official spokesman, the British prime minister \u201ccondemns them in the strongest possible terms\u201d. Irish Taoiseach Miche\u00e1l Martin called on them to \u201curgently clarify\u201d 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\u2019s performances at Coachella. At the second, they showed a screened slogan declaring \u201cFuck Israel. Free Palestine\u201d. 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 \u201cUp Hamas, up Hizbollah!\u201d Another film, from a London gig in November 2023, shows one of them apparently saying that the \u201conly good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.\u201d Politicians from across the political spectrum have expressed outrage. Two British MPs, Jo Cox and David Amess, have been murdered since 2016.\u00a0Punk\u2019s 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.\u00a0These days the Sex Pistols are on the nostalgia circuit with a new frontman, to Lydon\u2019s 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\u2019s gig, have faded into the background. The edges have been smoothed off punk\u2019s history. Last year, a rare copy of the Sex Pistols\u2019 single \u201cGod Save the Queen\u201d sold for \u00a324,320 at auction.A similar process can be found in rap music, punk\u2019s anti-establishment successor. Gangsta rap pioneers NWA caused uproar in the US with their 1989 protest song \u201cFuck Tha Police\u201d, 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 \u201cadvocating violence and assault is wrong\u201d. 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. \u201cWe were all sick of Malcolm\u2019s crazy publicity stunts,\u201d their guitarist Steve Jones recently recalled.\u00a0Kneecap are expert publicity stuntmen, as when they plastered the British Museum with \u201cStolen from Ireland\u201d stickers. The trio, who perform under the names Mo Chara, M\u00f3gla\u00ed Bap and DJ Pr\u00f3va\u00ed, 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\u2019s complicated history is more nuanced than their trolling behaviour indicates. They espouse a Brits-out republicanism, but don\u2019t 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.\u00a0Sectarianism, in Kneecap\u2019s 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\u2019s and David Amess\u2019s families.They have also put out a statement insisting that they don\u2019t 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 Pr\u00f3va\u00ed 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 \u2014 follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":297061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-297060","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=297060"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297060\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":297062,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/297060\/revisions\/297062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/297061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=297060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=297060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=297060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}