SCREEN
Belfast rappers’ riotous backstory; identities blur in a ’90s TV-show nightmare; a Turkish teacher stands accused…
KNEECAP Even Uncut readers, secure in the belief that rock’n’roll and the movies are the two most vital cultural forms of the last 70 years, have to concede that the overlap between the two is vanishingly small. Although everyone from Dylan to Prince has chanced their arm, you can count the number of good rock films on the fingers of one hand: A Hard Day’s Night, Head, Slade In Flame and 24 Hour Party People. And, you might have thought, there was precious little prospect of any more coming down the line.
Amazingly, Kneecap – an origin story of the Belfast hip-hop trio of the same name, starring and co-created by the band themselves – is a bona fide addition to the slim canon. It’s a riotous, fearless, honest-to-goodness modern classic that also serves as an irresistible punchline to the hooley that’s been brewing in Irish culture for the last decade, from Blindboy to Lankum, from The Stinging Fly to Fontaines DC.
It’s a tale as old as time, a song as old as rhyme. Two young Belfast hoodies, inducted by an absconded republican father in the belief that “every word of Irish spoken is a bullet in the fight for Irish freedom” (but also tactically useful when collared by the RUC for dealing), encounter an unusually sympathetic interpreter in the interrogation room. Turns out he’s a frustrated music teacher at a local school, as well as part of the respectable middle-class campaign for state recognition of Irish in the north. When he discovers that the two hooligans have notebooks full of rhymes and have half-assed ambitions to rap, he convinces them that it’s their responsibility to “smash the glass” that’s preserving the Irish language like a stuffed dodo. Or maybe even to smash up the language itself?