I am not sure who will be more insulted when I suggest that Kneecap have a lot in common with Boris Johnson. What they share is a mastery of the dominant argot of contemporary culture, the self-cancelling statement expressed in the idiom we might call Notspeak.
Kneecap famously use and champion the Irish language but their native tongue is the slippery mode of expression that sums itself up as “just putting it out there”. This is what they were doing in 2023 when one of the trio told a crowd in London that “the only good Tory is a dead Tory. Kill your local MP.” It is also what they were doing in 2024 when one of them shouted “Up Hamas, up Hizbullah” during a gig.
Notspeak is the art of saying but not really saying. It is the opposite of straight talk – speech that loops back on itself. Things are stated but not meant, meant but not really meant, real but only as a game. Notspeak occupies the porous border between “only a joke” and “no joke”. In this linguistic no-man’s-land, all utterances come with visible quotation marks. Everything is meta: knowing, ironic – and deniable. The importance of not being earnest defines the boundaries of who is “in” on the in-joke. If you take offence, it is because you are stupidly literal-minded.
Notspeak is a solution to the problem of political correctness. It became broadly unacceptable to use racial slurs or misogynistic gibes, to mock people with disabilities or to call for those you don’t like to be shot. But these very prohibitions enhanced the thrill of transgression. The pay dirt is in the terrain that lies between these imperatives: verbal violence spun into performatively playful outrageousness.
Notspeak has made possible a kind of politics that is clownish in its expression but deadly serious in its consequences. Think of Johnson’s bozo act, his deliberately ruffled hair, rumpled clothes and ludicrous language. Or of Giorgia Meloni, the first Italian prime minister from the far right since Benito Mussolini, posting on election day in September 2022 a TikTok video of herself holding two large melons (meloni in Italian) in front of her breasts: fascism as adolescent snigger.
And of course think of Donald Trump. At his rallies, Trump uses straightforwardly Nazi language (immigrants are “poisoning our blood”) but embeds it in schoolyard insults, mocking impersonations, surreal digressions, wild exaggerations. Contrary to the cliched idea of taking him seriously but not literally, he is half in jest but all in earnest. Today’s playful provocation is tomorrow’s authoritarian power-grab.
Notspeak is always post-something. It is an after-language. Johnson’s was post-imperial; Meloni’s post-fascist. Trump’s is post-American greatness. (His Maga slogan implicitly acknowledges that America is not great any more.) And this is where Kneecap come in. They are post-Troubles.
I would go so far as to suggest that if you want to reassure yourself that the Troubles really are over, watch the Kneecap movie. It is funny – and oddly liberating – precisely because it turns the aftermath of 30 years of horror into an anarchic, drug-fuelled hallucination: the armed struggle as an all-night rave so wild you can remember it only in delirious flashbacks. The Provos become DJ Próvaí, the balaclava a carnival mask, the IRA‘s torture and maiming of working-class kids a hip-hop brand, the Irish Tricolour an emoji. None of this would be remotely possible if the IRA were still in business. Kneecap’s raps would be drowned out by the sound of Black and Deckers on actual kneecaps.
But there is still the problem of reality. Kneecap’s own movie acknowledges that “Brits Out”, which the trio likes to chant on stage, begs the question of who precisely you want to expel. If you arrive at the Sundance Festival waving smoke canisters from the roof of a vehicle mocked up as a Police Service of Northern Ireland vehicle and commission a mural of a burning police vehicle, is it “only” a joke?
On one side of the no-man’s-land of Notspeak, there is the theatre of the absurd. But on the other there is the terror of the actual – real people in real places with real political conflicts still shaping their lives and, in the worst circumstances, their deaths.
When Trump spins entertaining fabrications about Haitian immigrants in Springfield eating people’s pets, it’s not the Springfield of The Simpsons – there is an actual city where decent families are trying to make their lives. When Johnson “jokes” about black children being “piccaninnies” and Muslim women looking like “letterboxes”, there are racists only too happy to consider themselves permitted to insult real children and real women. The performance bleeds out far beyond the audience.
Kneecap’s transgressions are pretty minor when compared with those of people who have used Notspeak to get themselves into positions of power. But they do dramatise the loss of personal responsibility implicit in this mode of speech. According to last week’s statement from the trio, when they urged English people to kill their MPs, they did not mean “to incite violence against any MP or individual. Ever.” When they appeared to shout “Up Hamas, up Hizbullah” they meant everyone to understand by this that “we do not, and have never, supported Hamas or Hizbullah”.
[ Vittorio Bufacchi: Kneecap should be commended rather than condemnedOpens in new window ]
Art thrives on ambiguity and transgression – but political expression does not. The bad politics that are undermining democracies are, apart from everything else, an invasion by politicians of the artistic realm. They occupy the space that artists generate, the zone in which meanings are open, uncertain, even contradictory.
The appropriate response to this invasion is not for artists to inflict the same thing on the political realm. Kneecap have every right to make political interventions but they have to recognise that those claims on reality are not mere performance. The fun of “putting it out there” stops when what is out there is violence. You can’t send a message (as the trio says it wants to do) of “love, inclusion and hope” in a language that dices with the death of all meaning.
