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The adage that there is no bad publicity is awarded to the PT Barnum showman. The patella tests it. Since he played the Californian Music Festival Coachella earlier this month, they met at the center of a series of mushroom controversies, even impressive according to their offense standards.
The leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, wants the Rap trio of Northern Ireland to be prosecuted. According to the official spokesperson for Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister “condemns them in the strongest possible terms”. Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin called them to “clarify urgent” if they support Hamas and Hizbollah. Summer shows have been canceled in the United Kingdom and Germany. Festivals, including Glastonbury, are under pressure to remove them from their programs.
The fury started with two of the group's performance in Coachella. In the second, they showed a projected slogan declaring “Fuck Israel. Free Palestine ”. He was incorporated into their set after the group said that their first performance Coachella was censored by the festival. In response, the opponents accused them of anti -Semitic hatred speeches.
Two subsequent controversies focus on events in previous concerts. The film directed by a member of the public in a London show last November seems to show a member of the screaming trio “Up Hamas, Up Hizbollah!” Another film, from a London concert in November 2023, shows one of them apparently saying that the “only good curator is a dead curator. Kill your local deputy ”. Politicians from all over the political spectrum expressed their indignation. Two British deputies, Jo Cox and David Amess, have been murdered since 2016.
Pt Barnum of Punk, Malcolm McLaren, would probably have approved this provocation and upheaval. Fifty years ago this summer, Impresario recruited John Lydon, alias Johnny Rotten, to the new group he managed. Sex pistols have been designed for the value of the shock. Despite its Jewish history, McLaren was not disturbed by the adoption of Nazi swastikas as a punk mode. Acts of violence have been groaned in its advertising research factory.
These days, sex pistols are on the nostalgia circuit with a new leader, in Lydon's Fury. McLaren is dead. The tied crosses and real blood effects, like the woman who lost her eye when Sid Vicious launched a drink during the concert of another group, faded in the background. The edges were smoothed on the history of punk. Last year, a rare copy of the single of the sex pistols “God Save the Queen” sold £ 24,320 at auction.
A similar process can be found in rap music, the punk anti-establishment successor. The pioneers of Gangsta Rap Nwa caused an uproar in the United States with their 1989 protest song “Fuck Tha Police”, in which the Los Angeles group responded to police brutality against African-Americans with threats of retribution against the police. The FBI wrote to their label warning that “defending violence and attack is wrong”. The letter is now exhibited at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, in which the NWA was inducted in 2016.
Musical controversies can acquire a kind of picturesque over time. But while they are raging, they are bruises and confrontations. Any advertising is not good advertising. Lydon left sex pistol after a chaotic tour in the United States in 1978 with a hostile audience attracted by their infamy. “We were all naughty of the crazy advertising waterfalls from Malcolm,” recalls their guitarist Steve Jones recently.
The ball joints are expert advertising stuntmen, such as when they stuck the British Museum with stickers “stolen from Ireland”. The trio, which occurs under the names Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and Dj Próvaí, have exaggerated scene characters based on drugs and Japan Ball joint. But when I interviewed last yearI found them thought about and even serious.
Their approach to the complicated history of Northern Ireland is more nuanced than their trained fishing behavior indicates it. They marry a republicanism to the British, but do not approve of the armed actions carried out on his behalf. Their rapids ridicule the Unionists of the Northern Irish, but have nothing to the offensive that the songs of tragedy with which rivals of fans are committed to British football matches.
Sectarianism, according to the ball joint, is a distraction of the solidarity of the working class which should exist between the Catholics and the Protestants. The ingenious use of Irish and English in their rap resembles the compromise of power sharing designed by the Friday 1998 Friday agreement. They deliberately present the Irish as a young Argot in Artmot rather than something spoken in obsolete rural communities or by linguistic revivalists of higher class.
Placed between ironic mockery and controversial activism, the ball joint is open to accusations of what Boris Johnson, one of the past targets of their satire, would call the cake: having your cake and eating it. Presenting to oppose political violence while shedding light on killed deputies is an example. The group seems to recognize errors on this occasion. They apologized to the families of Jo Cox and David Amess.
They also published an insistent statement that they do not support Hamas and Hezbollah, although they refuse to row their anti-Israeli rhetoric. In my opinion, there is also cake here. In February, the group tweeted an alleged photo of DJ Próvaí reading a hezbollah book. Its tricolor customary Balaclava makes it impossible to discern any ironic arched eyebrow. The tone Grates. The shock tactics designed for the conflict resolved in a precarious manner of Northern Ireland have been applied without nuance to the loss of lives in progress brutal which takes place in Gaza and beyond.
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