On June 28, at the Glastonbury music festival in the U.K., the BBC staff were on high alert. Scared of the possibility of protest music that could discomfit the powers that be, they had already decided not to live stream the performance of the Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap, which has in the past used its shows to accuse Israel of committing genocide in Palestine. Bob Vylan, the British punk rock duo, was nowhere in their radar.
This meant that all those who had tuned into the BBC stream heard the chants “free, free Palestine” and “death, death to the IDF” (referring to the Israel Defence Forces), initiated by lead singer Bobby Vylan (real name Pascal Robinson-Foster) and repeated by the large crowd waving Palestine flags. The band, which was just beginning to make its mark outside the punk underground, suddenly found itself at the centre of the global music spotlight as well as a political storm. Although a few pro-Israeli voices criticised them, the band found overwhelming support online, but the establishment was swift in its crackdown.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who had earlier demanded that Kneecap not be given a platform at the festival, called it “appalling hate speech”. The Avon and Somerset Police launched a criminal investigation against the band. The BBC issued a formal apology, asked some senior staff involved in the event to step back from their duties and put Bob Vylan in the “high risk” category. The U.S. State Department revoked the visas of the band members, making the band lose close to 20 scheduled shows in the country. Music festivals in France and Manchester dropped them.
But Bob Vylan appeared to expect the blowback and was aware of what they stood to lose for saying what they said. “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people. We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine. A machine that has destroyed much of Gaza,” the band wrote on Instagram.
Bob Vylan emerged in 2017 in Ipswich, catching attention with their music which brings together the anti-establishment soul of punk rock and hip-hop. Some of their songs — which have over this week found lakhs of new listeners — and the issues that they talk about are reminiscent of rap metal legends Rage Against the Machine, known for their politically-charged performances. Strongly protective of their privacy from the “surveillance state”, the duo adopted the stage names Bobby Vylan and Bobbie Vylan.
Protest music
A pro-Palestinian stand has always been a part of the band’s ideology, with the lead singer participating in protests since a young age. Their lyrics such as “The government, their not helping no one out, except for the rich people… It makes me violent” or “Give Churchill’s statue the rope and see if it floats” are designed to provoke and call attention to pertinent issues. In a way, they are sticking to the conventions of the genre, for sparking outrage is par for the course for punk bands.
Banning musicians is not a first for the BBC either. It had issued a total ban on the punk band Sex Pistols in 1977 after they released the song God Save the Queen, which asked uncomfortable questions about the British monarchy. Bob Vylan also belongs to a long tradition of protest music, which witnessed its heights during the Vietnam War, when there were songs like Phil Ochs’s Draft Dodger Rag, Pete Seeger’s Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Fortunate Son and Bob Dylan’s Masters of War.
The current spring of protest music led by Kneecap and Bob Vylan is certainly more direct and hard-hitting, partly due to a sense of helplessness. That is probably why their voices resonated with such a large number of music buffs, who have hit out at even the much-loved band Radiohead for their unclear stand on Palestine.
At one point, Bob Vylan appeared to be getting even more media attention than the ongoing deaths in Gaza. But as the band said, “We are not the story. We are a distraction from the story. And whatever sanctions we receive will be a distraction.” Gaza remains the story.
