The Kettle's Boyled: All you need is love, love is all you need

Rap music had its origins in the USA in African-American inner-city street culture. The genre was a level or two below the kind of music where you had to have any music skills. Rap could be performed by anyone who could speak, in essence; you didn’t have to be able to sing or play an instrument to express yourself through rap. A dress culture also developed around it – hoodies down over the eyes, and baggy trousers that appeared about to fall down. This style developed when police officers took away the belts of arrested suspects in case they might use them to harm themselves.

Clothing manufacturers quickly began to cater for this trend. One well-known chain even put some of the new styles on racks near the doorways of their New York stores so that they would be easily be grabbed by shoplifters and in that way would quickly appear on the streets. Demand quickly grew worldwide, and soon young people in rural towns in Ireland were hiding their eyes under hoodies and loosening their belts, trying to look like they were selling drugs or suffering terribly because of their African origins, even if they came from Boyle or Ballygar.

That’s the nature of fashions in music and dress, they develop even if an earlier generation can’t see the appeal. It was ever thus; in our young days we grew our hair long and bought Beatles records, singing songs of peace and love as we rounded up the cows of an evening, even though we didn’t live in some kind of a hippy colony in San Francisco.

The current rise of the band ‘Kneecap’ has just filled a gap left behind by ballad groups that catered for an older generation of barstool ‘republicans.’ Their name is grotesque when you consider the thousands of people maimed or killed by paramilitaries, including the 2,000 victims of punishment beatings that have taken place since the Good Friday Agreement.

Their straying over the line into calling for the deaths of elected representatives is wrong, as are their chants in support of other terrorist groups, but I wouldn’t worry about them.

When Barry McGuigan’s 1985 world boxing title success was parodied by the late Dermot Morgan with his song ‘Thank you very much, Mister Eastwood,’ McGuigan killed off the song with a pithy comment that it was about as funny as a Mass Card, and the same will happen with the tasteless and formulaic ‘music’ produced by Kneecap. Their day might have come, as their idols would have put it, but they will soon be viewing that day in the rearview mirror. In all fashions, quality is all that survives, in the end.