'Music is my AK-47': Performing Resistance in Belfast's Rebel Music Scene (original) (raw)
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From the Shankill Defence Association's Orange-Loyalist Songbook to the UDA's appropriation of 'Simply the Best', music has long been used to celebrate loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland. During the troubles, loyalist songs served a variety of functions, from community fundraising and entertainment to the transmission of loyalist cultural memory and the articulation of political perspectives ignored by the mainstream media. Yet, in addition to celebrating local practices and political traditions, loyalist songs now feed into a broader 'culture war' in Northern Ireland where, in the absence of intercommunal violence, the commemoration of paramilitary groups is used to continue the conflict by other means. this article traces the origins of contemporary loyalism's culture war against Irish republicans, unravelling the role loyalist songs played during the troubles and their ongoing legacy.
Ethnomusicology Forum, 2021
During the Northern Ireland conflict (1968-1998), paramilitary groups were supported and sustained by a sociocultural apparatus that helped legitimise their position within the community and disseminate their political message. From the use of flags and murals, to loyalist and republican parades, working-class vernacular culture revealed who was in control of various districts within the Province. For many working-class Protestants, loyalist songs were a key component of this culture, connecting the past and the present. Unlike the better-known marching band scene, which is a huge public spectacle, the loyalist song scene is much more private. Performed in a closed setting, within local bars and clubs, loyalist songs are reproduced for internal consumption rather than outward expression. Yet, in addition to celebrating a particular loyalist culture, such songs also serve an important function in authenticating and legitimising paramilitary groups, connecting them to older organisations, whose legacy they draw upon. This paper focuses on one such song, exploring how 'The Ballad of Billy McFadzean' is used to connect the Ulster Volunteer Force of the 1960s onwards, with the 1913 organisation of the same name. In so doing, the paper attempts to illustrate the political utility of song and how songs can be used to launder and legitimise conflict, as well as those engaged in political violence.
‘This is not a Rebel Song’: The Irish Conflict and Popular Music
Race & Class, 2001
The ability of popular music to link in with and advance popular progressive politics has, at times, been beyond doubt. Take Jamaica in 1978. Political violence between armed gangs loyal to prime minister Michael Manley and opposition leader Edward Seaga was rife. Bob Marley performed at a peace concert in Kingston where he brought Manley and Seaga on stage. Standing between them and holding their hands high, he and his group, the Wailers, sang`One Love'. It was, says Denselow,`one of the great, strange moments of political pop history'. 1 Twenty years later, Irish group U2 staged a concert in Belfast a few days before the referendum held to ratify the Good Friday Agreement. U2's lead singer, Bono Vox, brought on stage the leaders of two of the main pro-Agreement parties, David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party and John Hume of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Standing between them, he held their hands aloft and sang U2's One', followed by John Lennon's`Give Peace a Chance' and Ben. E. King's`Stand By Me'. 2 The difference between Marley's gesture and Bono's would have been even more stark if Bono's initial choice of song had been accepted; incredibly, it was Rolf Harris's anodynè Two Little Boys'.
2016
The narrative of how Ireland was transformed in the early months of 1916 is something subject to many variations, but the general consensus among academics follows a narrative that most consider to be correct; the failure of a tolling rebellion, organised to regain an independent Ireland, resulted in the the execution of the rebellion’s leaders. Suggesting that the results of the 1916 rising would create a more militant strand of nationalism in the years following the event is only logical, which in turn would suggest a shifting change in cultural expression. Therefore, the cultural elements present in the Irish domain in the decades following the insurgency should have been rich in relevant material expressed through art forms, particularly in the realm of nationalistically fuelled song and music. But, going forward to examine the lasting effects of the Rising on music culture, was this still the case? Indeed, the 1916 Rising might have been a tragedy, but in terms of cultural inspiration, it should have provided an immense amount of material that may have been subject to inspirational draw for decades following the insurrection. But the way that cultural expression took its place following the newly formed state, particularly in relation to music, was very different to what one might have predicted.
Irish Nationalism, British Imperialism, and Popular Song
Twentieth-Century Music and Politics, ed. P. Fairclough, 231–48., 2012
In his book Culture and Imperialism, the cultural historian Edward Said describes Ireland as a “continuous colonial problem” for the British in the nineteenth century, yet offers little by way of explication. In that he is not alone. It would appear that the conviction is widespread that no matter how fraught British and Irish relations have been, they have had little impact on cultural production. Ireland became part of a United Kingdom with Great Britain in 1800, after the defeat of the United Irishmen’s revolt. This never satisfied the majority of the population, and huge meetings were held calling for Repeal of the Union in the 1840s. In Belfast, whose shipyards served the needs of the British Empire, a divided population existed in the nineteenth century—already living in clearly demarcated areas, such as the Catholic Falls Road and the Protestant Shankhill Road. In musical terms this division can be found in the contrast between ‘Rebel’ songs and ‘Orange’ songs. These political songs of Ireland present us with their own account of imperialism to set alongside that of historians. In this chapter, I ask what they add to our knowledge, looking at both content and choice of subject matter. I am also asking what sort of music is found suitable for these ideas, and why. Other issues to consider are the feelings the songs are designed to evoke and how the music can be used to police sectarian divides. My findings provide evidence of the means by which music provides symbolic support for and against imperialist ideas, or, in other words, how imperialist or nationalist sentiment can be constructed and valorized by music.
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Popular Music, 2016
Irish rebel songs afford Scotland's Irish diaspora a means to assert, experience and perform their alterity free from the complexities of the Irish language. Yet this benign intent can be offset by how the music is perceived by elements of Scotland's Protestant population. The Scottish Government's Offensive Behaviour Act (2012) has been used to prosecute those singing Irish rebel songs and there is continuing debate as to how this alleged offence should be dealt with. This article explores the social function and cultural perception of Irish rebel songs in the west coast of Scotland, examining what qualities lead to a song being perceived as ‘sectarian’, by focusing on song lyrics, performance context and extra-musical discourse. The article explores the practice of lyrical ‘add-ins’ that inflect the meaning of key songs, and argues that the sectarianism of a song resides, at least in part, in the perception of the listener.
Irish Republican Music and (Post)colonial Schizophrenia
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Northern Ireland remains part of the United Kingdom, yet its postcolonial position is subject to fierce debate amongst Ulster loyalists and Irish republicans. Using Tommy Skelly's 1972 " Go On Home British Soldiers " as its central focus, this article unpicks the various (post)colonial narratives played out through republican music in Northern Ireland, challenging the parameters of the postcolonial, and demonstrating how Irish rebel songs continue to function as a form of political engagement and cultural resistance within and against the British state.
Irish Rebel Songs in the GDR: Popular Culture and Anti-Imperialist Resistance
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Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research, this article explores the performance of Irish rebel songs among former members of the GDR folk-scene (1976–1990). It proposes that the political and nostalgic alignment of East German revivalists with folk songs in which Irishness is inscribed as a longue durée of oppression and anti-colonial rebellion constitutes a powerful discourse that has recursively shaped performance practices. The article argues that this top-down imaginary, circulated through popular culture, could be harnessed by GDR artists from the bottom up. Simultaneously, this adaptation of Irish Republican leanings resonated with the official socialist rhetoric of anti-imperialist resistance.
This article examines some of the ways in which defining a set of musical practices as “national” reproduces both the stereotypes adopted by colonizers and inverted in anti-colonial movements, and also the exclusions that are integral to the processes of nation formation. As one of the cultural forms nationalists enlist in their project, music is regarded by them as reflecting the imagined political, territorial, and cultural unity of the putative nation’s people. I use the case of Irish traditional music, and the exemplar of the song “Danny Boy,” first to demonstrate that the meanings attributed to musical texts are contingent upon the social and political circumstances of their production and consumption, and then to argue that the ideal Irish musician is discursively constructed as masculine.