The Irish Underground

Originally Appears in Issue 8 of One More Robot.

We may have built our cities on rock’n’roll, but underground a small clutch of rappers, DJs and producers are path-finding for a new breed of musicians. Dean Van Nguyen met some of Ireland’s hip-hop artists.

Last month the Irish music blogging community were all unified in their praise for emerging Dublin-based rapper Lecs Luther. The teenager – real name Alex Chieduv – dropped some impressive tracks throughout August on various social mediums including videos to accompany the jazzy ‘Dia Dhuit’ and amorous ‘Trumpets’. With his laidback flow and sophisticated beats, Lecs Luther (whose name is frustratingly close to major American hip-hop producer Lex Luger) immediately drew comparisons to Earl Sweatshirt, member of the LA-based rap collective Odd Future, who have been the critical darlings of the indie rap world for the past year, and MF Doom, who has enjoyed the same status for well over a decade.

Immediately, the Internet got excited. “Irish hip-hop has had a raw deal,” wrote Nay McArdle on Entertainment.ie’s Harmless Noise blog. “But that means things can start getting better as soon as some real talent comes along.” McArdle’s comments echoed what many Irish music followers were saying on less formal forums like Twitter and Facebook: Finally, Irish hip-hop fans had a local hero we could all get behind.

Despite being prominently placed in the Irish music charts for many years now, relatively few artists from our island have dared to take to a stage and perform hip-hop music in any sort of serious way. Indeed, if The Rubberbandit’s Christmas assault on our singles chart last year proved anything, it’s that there’s a market in this country for novelty rap. Hip-hop, after all, is an easy genre to parody as it requires little or no skill to perform it badly, and there’s seemingly much fun to be had flipping those American rap stereotypes and performing them in a Limerick accent. But for many Irish artists, hip-hop is no joke. Dwelling in cellars and basements around the country, there are a number of rappers, DJs and musicians dead serious about their craft, and they’ve been performing rap music to small audiences and cutting little-heard records.

Scared Crows

“When you say to someone ‘oh yeah, we’re a rap band’ it’s the same reaction every time: ‘What, you serious?’” says Cillian Grant, the primary MC of Scared Crows, a hip-hop double act based out of County Meath. Scared Crows’ music is made up of battering, synthetic beats, instrumentalist John Farrell’s heavily manipulated electric guitar and Cill’s raspy voice pushing out each song’s lyrics with the timing of a well-tuned jazz drummer. “I think once they hear the music and understand the point of view we’re coming from they get it, and they relax up,” adds Cill. “Having [their] expectations not met, but it’s something they can relate to. I think that’s why people connect with it.”

Scared Crows have moderate ambitions. John describes them as simply being “happy enough to be making the music.” Perhaps these uncomplicated aspirations are due to the fact that there has never been a breakout hip-hop artist spawned from this country. But, the question is, why has an island with such a grand musical history failed to produce a breakout hip-hop act? I emailed a relatively well known Dublin-based rap group requesting an interview, to which one member replied, “I can’t really think of any Dublin hip-hop that we really want to be associated with.” In such an unreceptive environment, it’s hard to imagine any of our hip-hop artists being truly embraced by a larger audience.

Satyrix (photo by Aoife Forrestal)

This attitude might have been formed by a lot of poorly executed music being produced. Perform a quick internet search for an Irish rapper and you’re more likely to find a heavily-accented Dubliner performing awkwardly over an instrumental version of Puff Daddy’s ‘I’ll Be Missing You’ than something with any artistic merit. But a group taking the music very seriously is Satyrix. A play on the words ‘satire’ and ‘lyrics’, the duo, consisting of members Jimmy Hulk and The Mysteron, have spent the last 10 years treading the fine line between the two. Satyrix often incorporate politics and current affairs into their lyrics, sometimes capturing the mood of more than just themselves. This is something that has been seen throughout rap music’s history. Chuck D, member of the influential rap group Public Enemy, once described hip-hop as “the black CNN”, as it allowed African-Americans to air their grievances in a way Chuck felt they couldn’t in the mainstream media. Satyrix have approached the genre in a similar fashion. For example, in 2004 they recorded a song called ‘Bertie’s Bashins’ where they described breaking into Bertie Ahern’s house and assaulting the then Taoiseach. “We were just angry at so many things,” says Mysteron. “This was before the shit had hit the fan regards the economy, but we had this inherent distrust of the government, especially Bertie Ahern. We just didn’t feel we were being represented by our leaders and that was our way of venting.”

Instilling relevant meaning into their lyrics is clearly important to Satyrix. Rather than walking the normal hip-hop gambit, they naturally infuse their own Irish identity into their songs and believe there’s no reason why this template should not work as a musical genre. “There’s a tradition of spoken word, and there’s a huge tradition of prose and poetry [in this country] so I don’t think [hip-hop is] such a big leap,” says Mysteron. “Internationally, people mightn’t be used to hearing rap music in an Irish accent but, sure, if you think of MC Solar, the French MC and there’s Die Fantastischen Vier, the German rap group, y’know? I think rap can work in lots of different languages and lots of different accents. I think you just have to find your own identity.”

Harnessing their accents and using them as an effective instrument has been one challenge Irish hip-hop artists have tended to struggle with. While Lecs Luther raps without a trace of his Dublin background, deciding on whether to go with their own accent or traditional hip-hop drawl can prove puzzling for some rappers, with many falling between a hybrid of the two, which can sounds awkward and insincere. “We discussed this quite a bit,” emphasises John of Scared Crows. “We just tried to neutralise our accents as much as possible. The main this is we don’t want to sound like we’re from America or anything like that. But we know what we speak like, and it’s not going to translate onto a good record.”

Of course, over the past few years, Ireland has been economically decimated on every conceivable level. If there’s one thing that links us to the climate in which hip-hop was forged, it’s disenchantment with much of our surroundings. But in a burgeoning hip-hop scene, Ireland perhaps has a voice that is waiting to be embraced by the masses. It’s lingering in the underground.

“I think it’s good for your music to be about something,” says Hulk. “We kind of like to write songs about things people generally don’t write about, y’know? I think it’s good to get a reaction. Sometimes it’s good for your songs to make people angry as well as to make people dance.”