Irish hip hop meets wrestling: ‘It’s the beauty of the absurd that both these things have’

Don’t be fooled by the stage name that sounds like the end of something: the Dublin-based rapper Ahmed, With Love. – the full stop is intentional – is just getting started.

There is no shortage of energy from the musician born Ahmed Karim Tamu. If the 23-year-old’s music has a sense of ideas bursting forth, that might be because he is one of the emergent Irish artists who were stuck at home during the pandemic. Clash at the Quays!, his upcoming wrestling concert as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, showcases his new wave of Irish hip hop. (More on the wrestling in a moment.)

“It kind of looks like there’s this emerging community. Because everyone was so forced into being alone, when things opened up, people in any creative scene decided on this opportunity – ‘I’ve been deprived of working with people, so now I’m going to work with as many people as possible,’” he says.

[ Dublin Fringe Festival: Full coverage here ]

He cites his brother, the rising Sierra Leonean-Ghanaian rapper Skillz 8figure, as an inspiration. “As a little kid I’d see him do something and think, ‘I can do that better.’ I’d hear him do rhymes, and they’d be a little bit off, and I’d know it’s not right,” he says with mischief in his smile.

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Last summer Skillz posted a video on YouTube for his simmering Afrobeat song Moves, in which he is surrounded by a male posse in front of a luxury hotel, singing about having the self-confidence to attract a woman. Ahmed, in contrast, ended his slinky, self-deprecating song As Luck Would Have It by crying into a bowl of cereal about a one-night stand who never called him.

That gleeful song was one of Ahmed’s collaborations with Killian Taylor, the young music producer also known as Kylté. “I met Kylté at a party and mentioned I’m trying to get into rap music. He said, ‘I’m a producer,’ so we started linking up. For my first live show after lockdown in 2021, I was thinking, ‘Who could be my DJ?’ I asked Kylté, who had been mixing and producing most of my songs, and asked, ‘You know how to work a DJ set, right?’”

Those early collaborations revealed an instinct to rap about good situations going horribly wrong, about humiliations being insightful, in songs that go to unexpected places. The fast-paced track Punto, for instance, begins with Ahmed singing about driving his car, charming women and outracing adversaries on the road. When he runs into some guys from his old neighbourhood, he gives in to pressure and drives them on a ride that becomes a horrifying bender – “I’m not in Blanch any more, man. I live near the Beacon. I got college in the morning, not even the weekend.” In the terror of the spree he pees his pants – and yells at the passengers looking witheringly at him.

Ahmed is drawn to that refusal to end a song on a high note. “A lot of times it just ends up that way. It’s more interesting for a story to have an up and a down than a story where things go completely my way,” he says. He singles out the recent song World Cup!, made with the prolific producer Chameleon, in which a man flirts with a woman, calling her bluff (“‘I got a man see, and he gonna need some answers’ / But where he at, though? You don’t leave no pictures on the Gram”). As verses pass, the promised warmth of a relationship sours into blowouts and cryptic messages.

“Sometimes there’s an air of foolishness and stupidity in my songs, which, by nature, shouldn’t go the way they go. In songs like World Cup! I have a tendency to talk about how good something is and then how bad something is. I like looking at things like a circle: things happen, there are ups and downs, and there’s no point shying away from them. I might as well talk about them, and have fun doing it.”

Not long ago Ahmed received a message from his friend KhakiKid, the alt-rapper, who was looking for advice: as part of an upcoming live show, he wanted to choreograph slamming someone through a table, a popular manoeuvre from professional wrestling. Ahmed has long been a fan of that athletic form of theatre; he has watched World Wrestling Entertainment TV programmes since the early 2000s, a thrilling period when, after the departure of the stars Stone Cold Steve Austin and the Rock, several popular wrestlers ascended to main-event status. “I grew up watching Booker T and Chris Benoit. John Cena had just started. I was fortunate enough to be a fan of Eddie Guerrero before he passed.”

More recently, Ahmed became friendly with creatives from Irish promoters such as Over the Top Wrestling and Fight Factory Pro Wrestling. He makes links between the “beef” stereotype that hip hop gets from disputes such as the rivalry between the east and west coasts of the United States and the false narratives of wrestlers bringing their ring quarrels into real life.

“I was always trying to think of a way to incorporate the two. Both of them are these acts of absurdism. The Irish music scene at times would have people prioritise their image and how they’re perceived rather than the art they deliver. People are restricting themselves to appear serious, and not being honest with themselves to be weird and silly. I don’t agree that being silly isn’t serious.

“Compare that with wrestling, which is this big showcase of machismo and people being larger than life when, in actuality, it boils down to people in underwear fighting. It’s inherently a very silly thing, but they’re delivering an artform which is really beautiful and well choreographed. It’s the beauty of the absurd that both these things have, music and wrestling.”

Clash at the Quays! is Ahmed’s marriage of the two, a concert set inside a wrestling ring that casts him and his musical peers as smack-talking fighters and features matches with professional wrestlers. Alongside performances by him and KhakiKid, the other acts include the neo-soul duo Negro Impacto, the “dreary-rap” artist Curtisy, the bedroom-pop maker Efé and the industrial-rave emcee Julia Louise KnifeFist.

They immediately said yes to performing at Clash at the Quays!, but not all were familiar with the exaggerations of professional wrestling. To prepare, Ahmed brought them to an Over the Top Wrestling show. “I did it so everyone could sit down and see it, and understand the world we’re going into,” he says, as if the concert’s acts were developing their own wrestling personae. (The day after we talk, the musicians feature on Dublin Fringe Festival’s Instagram stories, giving short interviews as braggy wrestlers. “If you’re not down with that, we can fight right now,” says a funnily macho Ahmed, lifting a folding steel chair to strike, just before the feed abruptly cuts out.)

On the Spotify pages for Ahmed, With Love., Curtisy and KhakiKid, songs with guest singers outnumber solo releases, suggesting an emergent hip-hop scene less concerned with ego and competition than with collaboration. That makes stepping into the big interpersonal conflicts of professional wrestling feel like a comic reversal.

“It’s a tongue-in-cheek inversion of what some people might see from the outside looking in: that in a music scene there are cliques, or people who distance themselves to get bigger. It’s a play on that, which is the complete opposite of the Irish scene right now, because everyone is being so friendly and cosy. It’s kind of a joke on that stereotypical hip-hop beef,” he says.

Ahmed believes the freedom to create wrestling characters can allow him and his peers to be unapologetically themselves. One of those Instagram stories showed the group of artists warming up in a rehearsal room, thrashing in a circle to music: not hip hop but the arena rock that accompanies fighters to the ring. Wrestling, everyone knows, is fake. Glory can be real.

Clash at the Quays! is at the Complex, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, on Saturday, September 16th