Note (20/08/21): On 16/08/21, I received an email from a member of GavinDaVinci’s family that included a request that I edit my post “to retain the right information”, along with a letter from Gavin’s solicitor. As such, I have removed my amendment below dated 18/04/21. I wish to still include two important details:

1. the body of this article was written prior to the beginning of this sorry affair; and
2. we all must work hard every day to ensure that the music scene is a safe and welcoming place for women, for LGBTQ+ people, for people of colour, for people with disabilities, and for everyone else. This is non-negotiable.

Note (18/04/21): [redacted]

The release of the GavinDaVinci single ‘Superman’ on February 12th, 2021 was a momentous occasion. This went way beyond the song itself – which is great, by the way – but was more about what the song represented in the ever-evolving history of Irish hip-hop. With Kean Kavanagh on production duties, ‘Superman’ was the first collaboration of the island’s two best hip-hop labels; the clean-cut, indie hip-hop darlings at Soft Boy Records combining for the first time with the raucous, off-the-wall mavericks of Limerick’s PX Music. As well as that, the track highlighted further the wealth of hip-hop talent outside of Dublin, with Gavin and Kavanagh hailing from Tipperary and Laois respectively. ‘Superman’ is indicative of Irish hip-hop in the 2020s, with all of its propulsive energy and seemingly limitless potential, but it likely never could have been released just over half a decade ago. The Irish hip-hop landscape has shifted and changed dramatically in the past six years, and the current scene is unrecognisable from the one that existed just a short time ago.

2015 can be seen as a major inflection point in the development of Irish hip-hop; the old guard of hardworking rappers who had been slaving away for years were taking stock, wondering where to go next, while a fire was lit under a cabal of varied and exciting younger voices. That summer saw the release of the Lethal Dialect track ‘New Dublin Saunter’, which was selected to support Dublin’s bid to become the European Capital of Culture for 2020. The selection of a hip-hop song here was a prescient prediction of the coming tide of Dublin hip-hop and the genre’s growing importance to the city’s culture, even though the track itself was in a much more dated style. On the track, Lethal Dialect (also known as Paul Alwright) returns home to Dublin from America, and at one point acts out a fictional conversation with an old familiar face. The friend asks impatiently about Alwright’s next album, to which the veteran rapper replies “it’s hanging in the balance, because I can’t fathom why our own people hate to hear their own accent”. This seemed to get right at the heart of a frustrating element of being an Irish hip-hop fan: it was acceptable, even commonplace to like hip-hop, but we weren’t supposed to make it.

In the summer of 2015, I was a twenty-year-old Irish hip-hop fan living through a historical high-point for the genre internationally; ‘New Dublin Saunter’ was released three months after Kendrick Lamar’s seminal album To Pimp A Butterfly and just one day before Vince Staples’ excellent Summertime ’06. I was far from alone in my obsession with American hip-hop, which had been steadily growing in popularity in Ireland for years (the following year, in fact, would see the promoters of Longitude Festival change tack and embrace the hip-hop mainstream, booking the likes of Kendrick Lamar, Run The Jewels, and Tyler, the Creator). But still, those Irish people making hip-hop made up a tiny microscene, consisting of artists dedicated to a gritty, boom-bap style and performing to enthusiastic but small crowds. Ironically, ‘New Dublin Saunter’ represented an old style of hip-hop that had struggled to take hold in Ireland for years, and was completely sonically unrepresentative of what was to come.

“I can’t fathom why our own people hate to hear their own accent”. This was a familiar sentiment; the Irish accent was unlistenable, unbearably “cringe”, a feeling echoed a few years later when the entire country recoiled in horror at hearing their own accent spoken back to them when Maura Higgins appeared on the British reality television show Love Island. Unlike other genres that the Irish traditionally excelled at, such as pop and stadium rock, hip-hop as a style primarily centres the performer’s authentic voice, and therefore their accent and dialect. If you showed a friend an Irish hip-hop track pre-2015, chances are that they would use that dreaded word, saying that it was “cringe” and promptly requesting that you turn it off. This was a problem keenly felt by the likes of Lethal Dialect, who had released technically and lyrically impressive albums for years to little fanfare.

But what made us cringe so badly at Irish hip-hop? Alwright offers up some suggestions: an “inferiority complex” or “malignant shame” inherited from our colonial past, both of which smashed our self-esteem so resolutely that even the sound of our own accent was enough to make us uncomfortable and anxious. This idea of “cultural cringe” was first put forward by the Australian social critic A. A. Phillips to describe the cultural inferiority complex associated with the colonial mentality, which corresponds with the belief in the colonial subject that the cultural values of the coloniser are inherently superior to their own. I suspect that this theory holds at least some weight, not least because you see a similar process playing out in parts of Irish society other than hip-hop; think about when something ostensibly avoidable goes wrong in Ireland – from a bus being delayed to an institutional crisis – and how the failure is with hindsight seen to have been inevitable, and how commonplace it is to hear someone say in these instances “typical Ireland”. We are a nation permanently embarrassed, in many ways resigned to mediocrity.

But if one accepts fully the cultural cringe theory that is set out by Alwright in ‘New Dublin Saunter’, then it is difficult to explain what happened almost immediately after its release; a slew of exciting young Irish rappers appeared seemingly out of nowhere, confidently performing in their native accents and receiving critical and commercial success off the back of it. In May 2015, two months before the release of ‘New Dublin Saunter’, Kojaque released ‘Midnight Flower’, which even at the time felt like a watershed moment in Irish hip-hop, ushering in (directly or indirectly) a new wave of innovative artists and producers that have been growing in number and stature ever since. A year later, Rusangano Family won the Choice Music Prize for their album Let The Dead Bury The Dead, and out of nowhere, after decades of operating at the fringes, Irish hip-hop had finally arrived.

But what changed? The “old guard” of Irish hip-hop – artists like Lethal Dialect, Costello, and Rob Kelly – had a sound heavily indebted to American boom-bap and street rap, with tales of poverty and crime performed over gritty, kick-and-snare type beats. Much like the Mods in the 60s in the UK, and their Northern Soul off-shoots, the Irish rap scene at the time was a subculture mostly made up of young white men who were obsessed with black American music. In the 90s and early 2000s, hip-hop was nowhere near as mainstream in Ireland as it is now, and those who were into hip-hop were into it. “Serious” rappers of that era were interested primarily in faithfully reproducing American hip-hop music (and a very specific brand of American hip-hop music at that) in an Irish context, while anyone who leaned too heavily the other way risked being lumped in with comedy acts. This was a niche, where people that adored a certain type of American hip-hop music got together and replicated that style (not just in their music, too, but even sometimes in their fashion sense). And a lot of the music was good; well-crafted lyrical rap that adopted an American underground hip-hop style to interrogate Irish society.

But perhaps this faithful approach to adapting their influences was precisely the problem; maybe Irish people as a whole were put off by the sound of Irish people rapping because it was Irish people attempting to rap in an American style. Hip-hop is a genre which, arguably more than any other, relies on authenticity. Additionally, hip-hop is fundamentally a folk music, developed from the ground up and as a product of the environment of its creators and purveyors. As soon as it is picked up and transposed to another place, and therefore removed from its source, a folk music has arguably lost its very essence and reason for being. The reason that grime emerged so vigorously in the UK and with so much power and energy, is that grime was the result of a fusion of disparate styles and influences – American hip-hop, dancehall, rave – that came together and formed something new, something that could only ever have been borne out of a multicultural urban Britain¹. Grime was never about copying American hip-hop. As skilled as a lot of the veteran Irish rappers were (and are), there was rarely an attempt to take elements of American hip-hop and to try and forge something new, something truly unique to modern Ireland. In fact, Irish rappers were so dedicated to specific shades of boom-bap and gangster rap that you got the impression of a scene displaced in time, not growing in tandem with the changing world around them so much as existing in a state of stasis, a monument to a time and a place long lost.

Newer rappers, like Strange Boy, Citrus Fresh, Hazey Haze and GavinDaVinci – all either part or affiliate of Limerick’s PX Music label – also recognise the value in adopting a hip-hop approach in Ireland; after all, Ireland has a rich history of folk music, and hip-hop is the ultimate contemporary folk music, a style that not only allows for vivid storytelling and a DIY, punk approach to production, but also for the infusion of humour and off-the-wall ramblings, something that seems to fit perfectly into the Irish landscape. What the new crop of exciting Irish rappers realise, however, that perhaps the old guard did not, is that you can use those elements of American hip-hop without copying the style outright. You can adopt a hip-hop sensibility and develop something fresh, something unique, and something that could only ever exist in Ireland (for an even more obvious example of this, look at Kneecap, the riotous and thrilling Belfast duo who rap almost exclusively in the Irish language). You do that, and the people won’t cringe anymore; they’ll love it.

When developing their own vocal delivery, an accent-conscious Irish rapper has three options: stop rapping; start rapping in a neutralised or non-Irish accent; or double down on the Irish accent. It would be easy to observe a nation cringing at its rappers and to adopt a neutral, even American, delivery in response. Many rappers have, regrettably, felt the need to do this (and at least one has gotten international success as a result). But PX Music and others have gone the opposite direction, resolutely sticking to their Irish accent but rapping in a new, embryonic and still-developing Irish style, rather than falling into the trap of impersonating Tupac if he was from Dublin. Just listen to the intense Limerick accent of Strange Boy and Citrus Fresh on their recent releases. This music is not just the transposition – with minor tweaks – of hip-hop from America to the small towns and cities of rural Ireland, but is a new hip-hop developed from the Irish soil upwards and outwards, a new style that we can be proud of.

One notable characteristic of this new genesis of Irish hip-hop is an impressive level of musicality, and an approach to production and song structure that borrows from indie, punk, trad and electronic styles just as much as it does hip-hop. While the early Soft Boy releases borrowed heavily from Madlib and LA-style beat music, by the time Kojaque released Deli Daydreams in early 2018 his sound had developed into something much more interesting; with its holistic approach to beat-making and the rapper’s tendency to flit effortlessly between rapping and singing. A more recent example of this is Citrus Fresh’s 2020 album Operating System, which is perhaps now the paradigmatic Irish hip-hop album; showcasing an impressive musicality, idiosyncratic bits of humour mixed with often grim and depressing lyrics, proficient rapping ability, heavy use of native accent, and zero cultural cringe. Citrus Fresh’s Spotify bio reads simply “Music for driving forklifts”; this is not an Irish rapper shying away from his Irishness, stuck between that old rock and a hard place of being embarrassed to be Irish in the hip-hop scene, and embarrassed to be in the hip-hop scene in Ireland. This is an artist with full confidence in his ability to synthesise hip-hop successfully with his Irish background.

The ‘new’ Irish hip-hop scene has perhaps failed as of yet to generate a true bonafide anthem, and is perhaps still too small for one to fully take hold, but the most deserving candidate is probably Hazey Haze’s ‘What’s That’. Hazey Haze is PX Music’s bearded terror-rapper, and along with GavinDaVinci represents the heavier side of PX Music’s output. Haze combines quick flows with guttural, horror-movie raps, and ‘What’s That’ is one of his scariest tracks. The song’s hook is deceptively simple: “What’s that sound from around the corner?”, but his delivery elevates it to something more, simultaneously a call to arms for the scene itself and a warning shot to the rest of Irish society; Irish hip-hop is lying in wait around the corner, ready to pounce.

The emergence from obscurity of Irish hip-hop over the past half-decade can also be partly explained by the increasing influence of Ireland’s black population on the scene. Modern Ireland is a country with an ever-growing black population, and as elsewhere young black voices have been at the centre of the development of the nation’s hip-hop sound. Many of these artists were born in Ireland, while others immigrated at a young age. As early as March 2016, Irish hip-hop writer Dean Van Nguyen had a feature published in Pitchfork profiling a number of “African-born, Ireland-raised rappers”, who in Van Nguyen’s words used hip-hop “to combat their adopted country’s entrenched racism and expand what it means to be Irish”. When I talk about an “Irish style” of hip-hop, I am not necessarily talking about trad-fusion (although trad plays an important part in it, as we will see) and I am certainly not talking about a style of hip-hop that is diluted to be made appropriate for an older, whiter, more conservative Ireland. The best new Irish hip-hop is in effect a black music imbued with Irish identity, but equally hip-hop is an arena where one can witness Irish identity being imbued with blackness. In the aforementioned Pitchfork feature, members of preeminent Irish rap group Rusangano Family put it simply: MuRli tells Van Nguyen “my perspective is shaped by everything that I’ve been through both in Africa and in Ireland”, while God Knows asserts “I’m an Irish person full-stop”. It is God Knows who has perhaps done the most in recent years to drive the scene forward, bringing together various rappers from across the country to produce “East Coast” and “South West” remixes of his track ‘Who’s Asking?’, which has recently been performed on RTE’s Tommy Tiernan Show.

One can see this expansion of “what it means to be Irish”, along with the expansion of what it means to be an Irish rapper, in the recent performance collaborations between Denise Chaila and Sharon Shannon. Chaila was born in Zambia but moved to Ireland when she was 3, her family eventually settling in Limerick. It is out of the burgeoning Limerick scene, alongside Rusangano Family and PX Music, that Chaila has emerged, with the potential to be the next true star of Irish hip-hop. Shannon, meanwhile, has been a mainstay on the Irish traditional music scene for decades, an accomplished player of both the button accordion and the fiddle. She has also, though, always been a forward-thinking musician; she was previously a member of the kaleidoscopic British-Irish folk rock band The Waterboys, and as far back as 1994 she was releasing trad music tinged with black music styles such as reggae and ska. Together, Shannon and Chaila have performed a number of times on Irish television (alongside God Knows and MuRli), smacking the unsuspecting Irish public across the face with a clash of both style and generation that feels genuinely revolutionary.

And then there’s Strange Boy, the most exciting young Irish rapper of them all. Strange Boy’s Spotify bio describes him as “one of the pioneers to take rap into the realm of Celtic music”, and suggests that his sound combines “Luke Kelly with Kendrick Lamar”. Strange Boy is the reclusive one when performing with the PX Music crew, rapping from the back of the stage and at times disappearing and having to be called back to the stage by the others. But it is undoubtedly Strange Boy who has the most potential to “blow up”, who has come closest to synthesising a new “Irish Rap”. Blindboy of Rubberbandits (a band that also deserve credit for the growing acceptance of Irish hip-hop) has been singing his praises for years, and he recently featured on a delush song that made up part of the soundtrack of international TV sensation Normal People.

Technically, Strange Boy is frighteningly proficient, and he seems to have an infinitely deep well of material to draw from lyrically. His music is unavoidably sad, as he raps openly and honestly about depression, poverty and suicide attempts. To see him on stage is to be reminded in ways of tormented figures such as Ian Curtis, artistic geniuses who seem to use performing as their therapeutic outlet. Just watch his performance below at Ireland Music Week; backed by the minimalist trad sounds of Enda Gallery (fka delush), Strange Boy begins his performance with obvious nerves, but seems to be propelled onwards by his own singular talent and ability. The video is uploaded by Gallery’s Berlin-based label Welcome To The New World, a name that, when it comes to Strange Boy at least, seems decidedly apt.

I’m not suggesting that the way forward for Irish rap is simply to fuse hip-hop with trad music, as even that would merely be the rehashing of old styles, nothing more than pastiche. Indeed, neither Strange Boy or Denise Chaila’s recorded output sounds very trad at all. But in the combined spirit of trad, folk and hip-hop and in their shared themes, history, and humour, there is a potential way forward that is being mined by the brightest musical talents in Ireland. The innovative approach of Rusangano Family and Soft Boy Records, who both emerged at the midway point of the last decade, seemed to set the wheels turning on the formation of a new Irish hip-hop identity. PX Music and countless others have since followed suit while always remaining resolutely unique. Now that Soft Boy and PX Music – two of the primary creative forces in underground Irish hip-hop – have joined forces, who knows how far, and in which myriad directions, Irish hip-hop can go.

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¹Just as Lethal Dialect and his peers looked to America for inspiration, a similar excavation of foreign styles was more recently undertaken by Mango & Mathman, who looked instead to the U.K. and the grime and garage scenes there. Mango is a phenomenal talent, an artist who makes fantastic music that remains faithful to a style that he loves whilst also successfully imbuing it with his own Dublin energy and outlook. But as great as the music is and as snugly as those U.K. scenes might fit into Irish society, it’s not “our” style, and fails to point the way forward for a new Irish hip-hop to emerge.