Blindboy Boatclub, the Left and New Media Celebrity Culture in Ireland

A long time ago I had intended to write an article about Russell Brand for this blog. This would have been about 2013/14 between the Jeremy Paxman interview and the 2015 General Election. We were at that stage more than half a decade into the crisis and while things hadn’t quite descended into the infernal quagmire we find ourselves in now they were certainly gearing up. During that time Russell emerged as a voice of a type of politics that is as old as power structures themselves, that has been around in something approximating its current form since modernity began and has always been there, though rarely articulated in the mainstream of political or social discourse. Also, the specifics of they way in which it blew up and other people reacted to it said something very interesting about the culture around politics and the media in general at this juncture in our history. As ever and to my own personal annoyance, in spite of the fact that I felt I had some unique insights to contribute to the conversation I never got around to laying those thoughts down in a coherent manner, which is inconveniencing me right now as there seems to be something similar happening right now in Ireland with two other public figures and I don’t have that previous work to refer back to.

So, failing that and without getting into the whole Russell Brand thing at length I’ll now sum up the salient points of this essay that never was, or as I see them the three features of what I’d call The Russell Brand Moment:

1) Revolutionary or even quite a lot of the time left-reformist politics are ruthlessly no-platformed by the gatekeepers of the mainstream media out of the general political discourse. On this occasion an individual circumvents the gatekeepers by already having access to a platform due to their celebrity status built in a long career elsewhere in the media as an entertainer.

2) This was assisted by a use of social media platforms as a way of bypassing said gatekeepers and reaching a wide audience in a way impossible just a decade ago and unthinkable in any other generation.

3) That said, there are limitations that we must understand, no point getting over enthusiastic. The individual at the centre of this is usually part of the movement and reasonably well informed, but about to the level of the average cadre, which is understandable, they already have a full-time occupation, i.e. whatever propelled them to their celebrity status in the first place and may hold contradictory positions; they may slip up on particular issues when called to voice opinions outside of their immediate span of knowledge. Added to that their no more free of any unreconstructed societal attitudes than the rest of us. It would be churlish of us to expect otherwise.

The 3rd point I had actually observed at the time and was bourn out by the trajectory the whole Brand thing took over the course of 2015. Essentially Brand fell at the first hurdle making the rookie error of seeing a modest shift leftwards on the part of the Labour Party as a new dawn in UK politics and backing David Milliband in the 2015 general election. In doing so he shot what credibility he had and retired temporarily from public life and the one man war against the media and political establishment he’d been on since the Paxman interview.  He’s been back since but that moment has tangibly passed. I’m sure he’s kicking himself now that the actual labour left has made a breakthrough, but maybe we’ll look back and see the Brand moment as a precursor to the ascension of Corbynism.

So with that in mind I’d like to talk about what’s going on with a public figure in Ireland; Blindboy Boatclub of The Rubberbandits.

The Rubberbandits

The Rubberbandits are two friends who grew up together in Limerick that go by the aliases of Blindboy Boatclub and Mr Chrome. They were early stars of Irish social media, making their name initially on Bebo and Myspace with a series of humorous prank phone calls. In 2007 they started making comedic hip hop and gigging a live show. In their music videos and while performing they both always wear a plastic shopping bag with eye and mouth holes cut out while their DJs dressed up as disgraced former government minister Willie O’Dea. Their first video Horse Outside went viral and took them from 'internet famous' to genuine notoriety. The humour of these songs has a certain off-the-wall sillyness and broadness to it, but like some of our best (O’Brien, Milligan etc.) it is belied by a fierce wit and satirical eye, the targets of which have ranged from the hyper-sexual machismo in hip-hop to ill informed armchair republicanism to hipsters.

By the beginning of this decade the Bandits were hot shit and have only gone from strength to strength, scoring TV work for RTÉ, The BBC, ITV, Channel 4. They had one of their songs featured in the new Trainspotting film and have played gigs and festival appearances up and down the island and internationally. Through all this they have managed a degree of relative anonymity for two people in the entertainment industry who are household names in a modern country. Their names are out there and can be accessed with a cursory Google but there’s only a single picture of Chrome’s face sans-plastic bag and none of Blindboy. Seriously, you can find a picture of what Burial looks like IRL easier.

More recently, Blindboy has authored and published a book of short stories, The Gospel According to Blindboy in October 2017 and started doing a podcast which was initially to promote the book but has taken on a life of its own, topping the iTunes podcast chart since its first episode continuing to do so through to the time of writing.

Through that time Blindboy has used his media presence to articulate the common sense perspective of his generation, using his platform to talk about pertinent issues if the day, mostly looking at them through the lense of mental health, sharing his own experiences to destigmatize something that’s still heavily taboo in Ireland. An early intervention was in 2006 when he spoke out against Bebo’s use of profile views, which he considered psychologically unhealthy to the point where it might lead to someone taking their own lives and called for the practice to be discontinued. This lead to his page being shut down without discussion by Bebo in spite of their popularity (the interview has now been reproduced in the feb 20th podcast God's Posture where he speaks about it at length). The evils of social media and potential deleterious effects on the psyche of the users and unconscionable business practices of the various platforms is something that we’re now all familiar with and has been discussed and analyzed to the point of cliché but in 2006 looking at that type of media through psychological theory was quite novel. He understood social media as only someone who grew up using it could.

He’s also used this as a way into the wider issues effecting Irish society, critiquing capitalism by looking at the socio-economic conditions which drive metal illness and talking about the psychological benefits for men of embracing feminism on the Late Late Show where he’s a frequent guest and expanding on these themes at length in the podcast. More recently he’s weighed in on the movement to repeal the 8th amendment. In a recent podcast he interviewed the film and TV star Cillian Murphy, who rarely gives interviews but had reached out to him to collaborate on some repeal propaganda, specifically orientated towards young men who the usual political discourse wouldn’t reach and might otherwise be apathetic on the issue. When the referendum was won by a substantial margin what most activists in the field have known for years was accepted, finally, by the establishment, i.e. that the pro-choice position had (in Gramscian terms) transcended good sense to become the common sense position. One can’t underestimate the role of pop-cultural figures in expressing and solidifying cultural turns like this.

Getting back to what I’ve proffered as the three features of the “Russell Brand moment”, the first two points seem to be fairly self evident based on what’s been outlined so far. There are differences though, he’s not been as confrontational or taken on the beast as directly as Brand had been doing, even now much later it still astounds me that Brand with his YouTube channel was in a running dialogue with the Murdock media empire and that he could goad them into responding to him on the nightly Fox news shows.

Also, Blindboy’s personal politics are quite different to Brand who consciously and overtly identified with the revolutionary tradition and specifically Anarchism (though a somewhat muddled and idiosyncratic one). Instead Blindboy talks about his family history in the West Cork IRA in the 1920s though he doesn’t identify with any contemporary Irish republican organisation. When he gets down to it he’s decidedly left-reformist, stopping a good way short of anti-capitalism though decidedly to the left of the Irish Labour Party. Which seems fair enough to me as it would put him about where most Irish people, and in particular those around the great social movements of recent history are at the moment, i.e. conscious and even proud of the republican revolutionary tradition, to the left of consensus politics on most issues and if not up for a full overthrow of the state, are certainly disillusioned with it as-is and yearning for change. 

Which brings me to the question of how should organisations of the left ought to relate to him? Is there a right way to respond to these figures that as they occur in the culture, especially since with the continuing prevalence of social media and the disintegration of the institutions that were traditionally the gatekeepers of the cultural discourse this sort of thing is liable to happen in the future.

Again, I’m sorry that I never managed the Russell Brand post because a lot that happened on the left in the wake of the Newsnight interview and subsequently is instructive. You had stuff like the “I Support Russell Brand’s Call for Revolution” facebook page. I will be generous and assume this was the work of one Brand fanboy who was an SP member rather than a party social-media initiative, but it struck me as a bit band-wagon jumpy and opportunist. Basically it was an SP member using the Brand moment to proselytise for his specific fraction by creating the page to share Brand content and SP content, often content specific to his local branch in Coventry. Now I wouldn’t want to pick on the guy unduly but I am singling him out as an example of people on the left getting overly enthusiastic and just being narrowly focused on how to further their sectional or even personal agenda without looking at the bigger picture, which ought to be inclusive.

Still, I prefer this approach to the churlishness and negativity that a lot of leftists and activists responded to Brand with. For those unfamiliar I’ll refer you to Mark Fisher, one of the few people on the left who at the time had what I’d call the correct take on Brand:

The next night, it was clear that Brand’s appearance (on newsnight) had produced a moment of splitting. For some of us, Brand’s forensic take-down of Paxman was intensely moving, miraculous; I couldn’t remember the last time a person from a working class background had been given the space to so consummately destroy a class ‘superior’ using intelligence and reason…. Brand had outwitted Paxman...

The moralising left quickly ensured that the story was not about Brand’s extraordinary breach of the bland conventions of mainstream media ‘debate’, nor about his claim that revolution was going to happen. (This last claim could only be heard by the cloth-eared petit-bourgeois narcissistic ‘left’ as Brand saying that he wanted to lead the revolution – something that they responded to with typical resentment: ‘I don’t need a jumped-up celebrity to lead me‘.) For the moralisers, the dominant story was to be about Brand’s personal conduct – specifically his sexism.

Rather than be happy that our politics were suddenly being articulated in the mainstream he was lit on for past personal indiscretions and problematic material from his old stand up routines. Now I’m not going to defend any of that, just saying that when something like that happens that this was a lot of people’s first response does not speak well of them as individuals or the movement they inhabit. It felt to me at the time that after decades of defeat and retreat and so many years in the bunker that a lot of these activists just didn’t know how to take it when something good happens. There was also a tangible element of jealousy relating to the whole thing. These h8rs were people who had spent years or decades in the trenches being patently ignored by the media. Seeing someone from so far outside their club, who is a bit of a clown, doing what they could and would have done if only they’d been given the opportunity. I can only imagine how that smarted.

And I’ll reiterate, its not like he’d done nothing, a lot of the criticism was legit to some extent. Nobody should be afforded a pass for bad behaviour just because they’ve done some good work. But, again getting back to Mark Fisher’s peice:

It is right that Brand, like any of us, should answer for his behaviour and the language that he uses. But such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance – although when Brand was questioned about sexism by Mehdi Hasan, he displayed exactly the kind of good-humoured humility that was entirely lacking in the stony faces of those who had judged him. “I don’t think I’m sexist, But I remember my grandmother, the loveliest person I‘ve ever known, but she was racist, but I don’t think she knew. I don’t know if I have some cultural hangover, I know that I have a great love of proletariat linguistics, like ‘darling’ and ‘bird’, so if women think I’m sexist they’re in a better position to judge than I am, so I’ll work on that.”

So far though there seems little sign of anyone of any significance on the left doing that to Blindboy. Partly this is because of how he’s been handling himself. Also, I’d put that down to the political culture on the Irish left as not being so hostile, unlike Britain four years ago we’ve not had a series of defeats, disappointments, organisational schisms and wasted opportunities to build a culture of begrudgery out of. Far from it. The backlash might happen, some of the stuff from the Rubber Bandits is pretty off the wall and if one were so inclined one could go back through his work looking for stuff you could decontextualise and paint as problematic I dare say you could nitpick enough out of it to make whatever point you wanted if you were so inclined.

But then why would you?

Which brings me in a roundabout way to what I propose as the right and sensible thing to do in this instance and in general: constructive engagement. When the political discourse gets opened up beyond the usual quarters of the activist left we should be in there, not just to capitalise on it for our own benefit but to engage with the people coming to it from that direction with our ideas and the good sense we’ve acquired through decades of struggle and also to be open to what we can learn from them.

One thing that I’d also propose is to acknowledge the immense potential someone like Blindboy has in overcoming something that’s been a bit of an issue on the left. Again because we’ve been on the defensive for so long we’ve got to a point where we seem to spend a lot of time concentrating on telling people what to not do. I think that having a vision of how things could or should be is also important if we are to get anywhere. It’s particularly good to have this discourse directed towards men. With the cultural revolutions and progress towards gender equality a lot of the traditional role of men in society has come to be seen, quite rightly, as oppressive. The traditional narrative of patriarchy has been torn down but we should do more to provide something for men in its absence, if for no other reason than if we don’t somebody else will. Jordan Peterson has made a bit of a splash doing exactly this. That said, depending on your position in the movement that might not be prudent or appropriate, so when Blindboy talks on the podcast about physical exercise, mental exercise and how one relates to the other, that is what he’s providing. In fact since the early drafts of this piece when I wrote the last sentence he has basically said this on the podcast in response to a listeners query about the Jeepster.

It also means to an extent acknowledging that while he does have a part to play in the struggle he’s not an expert by any means in organising or experienced in the practical side of the movement. So, when he does drop the ball, as in his recent comments on the Trump protest or letting his podcast guest Vincent Browne rabbit on in an ill-informed and inaccurate manner about the organised left parties in Ireland (including mine), that we at least have that in mind when we engage him back on these issues.

For now though, I’m just looking forwards to enjoying the show. It is a part of a national conversation that people my age are having in public that isn’t going on anywhere else and I’ll be happy to see it continue. I am interested to see where he takes what he’s doing in the future.