So cool and awesome and important that when Kneecap performed in Cardiff, they had an opening act that was also a bilingual rap act who performs in Welsh and English. And I do highly recommend Sage Todz, he's really cool.
If you can remember 2022, he created a version of the protest folk song Yma O Hyd, by protest folk singer Dafydd Iwan, before Wales played their World Cup games. Dafydd Iawn wrote and performed it in the 50s and 60s during the language rights protests to officially make Wales a nation of two equal languages, and over the last few years, the Football Association of Wales and its players, who were then young enough to themselves be Welsh speakers and learners, have really picked up and supported the language. (Not every player that qualifies to represent Wales necessarily grew up in Wales and so might not be Welsh speakers at home, nor attended schools in Wales where Welsh has been a compulsory subject in the curriculum since 1988 at least.)
The team had been playing the song and the fans began singing the song during games, and things just escalated from there; the fans were heard singing it before games and it sort of became an unofficial anthem. And all of a sudden, Dafydd Iwan himself found that the protest folk song he had written, with a chorus that said, 'We are still here, in spite of everyone and everything... we are still here' about the Welsh language, that he had written nearly sixty years ago. Suddenly, it was being sung by choruses of thousands of Welsh fans, reverberating around stadiums. And they called him to sing it before the World Cup qualifying game against Austria:
Huge, emotional moment. If I remember right, it went hugely viral too. It was then that Sage Todz remixed the song, sampling sections of it and updating it for the modern day. The FAW posted it and that led to a lot of people discovering rap in Cymraeg for the first time.
So it is lovely to see Kneecap also encouraging that, and exposing their fans, people who are already fans of hip hop in a minority Celtic language, where being used in the modern world and not being relegated to myths and folklore of the past, to another person revitalising a language in revival, and updating it to be true to Wales in 2024. This was at their gig at the Tramshed last year. No doubt this year's shows are going to be significantly larger.
