KNEECAP have topped the news agenda here in the North for over a week. On a perhaps apposite note, Jeffrey Donaldson was arrested and charged with rape and a number of other sex offences almost exactly a year ago. That story – arguably the biggest news bombshell to have dropped here in the past decade – bestrode the news agenda like a colossus for two or three days and then dropped like a stone from the top of the news to find itself gracing the ‘In other news’ sections.
In other words, a rap band shouting inflammatory words on a stage is now officially a bigger story than an MP, a privy councillor and the leader of the biggest unionist party being arrested and charged in relation to a raft of historic rape and sexual abuse offences.
Keeping a story in the headlines for more than 48 hours requires a lot of work. New angles need to be found, new people need to be spoken to, fresh outrage has to be mined. But to keep a story at the top of the page – online, in print and on air – for over a week requires an effort of Herculean proportions. And it’s a challenge that the overwhelmingly unionist media here has risen to with enormous enthusiasm. Inevitably, the barrel has not only been scraped, but the ground beneath the barrel has been drilled through in the desperation to keep Kneecap in the eye of the storm. A special shout-out must go to ‘Spoon bender Uri Geller’ calling for the three members of Kneecap to be jailed – an article of such jaw-dropping, audacious vacuity that it has emerged out the other side of embarrassing to become almost admirable.
But there’s a deeply serious side to this seemingly ludicrous bout of rage-farming. The popularity of the rap trio has reached a point where their full-throated and theatrical denunciations of Israel’s Gaza genocide were discomfiting those whose task it is ensure that the slaughter of the innocents remains low on the news agenda; to the extent that from the UK, Europe and the United States a dizzying, all-points attack on Kneecap was launched with the aim not only of hitting back at their support for the innocents of Gaza, but to ensure that they would be incapable of doing so ever again.
In that endeavour the band’s assailants have been only partially successful, with Kneecap being cancelled by a number of events and venues, notably in Germany, the most aggressively pro-Israeli genocide country on Earth. Doubtless more cancellations will follow as the hysteria continues to build. An apology by the band to the families of two murdered British MPs distressed by their ‘Kill a Tory’ outburst served only to fill more column inches and more on-air hours.
It’s a statement of the obvious to say that some of the things the band has said would have been better left unsaid. But it’s equally a statement of the obvious to say that as long as young people have been making music, older people have found myriad ways to be offended/disgusted. Now they’ve found ways to be offended/disgusted for longer.
