Tiocfaidh Ár Lá, get the brits out, lad: masculinity and nationalism in Irish-language rap videos

Abstract

While the Irish language has long been closely tied to Irish national identity and political nationalism, it has also been strongly associated with the perceived rural, traditional lifestyle of those regions where it remains the everyday community language. These associations have been disrupted with the emergence of Kneecap, bilingual (Irish/English) rappers from West Belfast whose lyrics and visual imagery contain sexual innuendo, references to illicit drug-taking and the IRA, jokes at the expense of the police (P.S.N.I.) and established political parties (notably the Democratic Unionist Party), as well as calling for Irish reunification and an end to the British presence on the island of Ireland. We draw on a theoretical framework which integrates “everyday nationhood” - how “ordinary citizens” perform nationalism in everyday life - with Banerjee’s “muscular nationalism”, which draws attention to the gendered history of Irish Republicanism. Adopting a multimodal critical discourse analytic approach to the study of gender and language, we analyse four music videos self-published by Kneecap on Youtube. We argue that these everyday texts reproduce and disseminate Irish Republicanism while centring normatively masculine identities, although in a way which sets Kneecap apart from previous incarnations of “muscular nationalism”.