Hip-Hop With an Irish Lilt

DUBLIN — The Irish are renowned for their way with words. But the nation of bardic poetry, James Joyce and W.B. Yeats has proved a latecomer to the wordiest of music genres, hip-hop.

“It’s always been corny to rap and be from Dublin,” Rejjie Snow said in an interview in his dressing-room in the Olympia Theater, a plush 19th-century concert hall in the Irish capital. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s the accent, maybe it’s the lifestyle. When I told people I wanted to rap as a kid, they were like, ‘Oh you want to rap?'”

But Rejjie Snow’s eccentric choice of career has been vindicated. A few hours later, one of the rising stars of Irish hip-hop, 24, stood in the spotlight on the Olympia’s stage, microphone in hand, faced by a young, excited crowd chanting “Rejjie, Rejjie” and rapping verses from his newly released debut album, “Dear Annie,” back at him. At one point, a teenager at the front hauled herself onto the barrier separating audience from stage to shout, “Rejjie, I love you!”

The first rap acts in Ireland emerged in the early 1990s. But it has taken until now for hip-hop culture to start flourishing, with rappers and groups proliferating across the country. The situation resembles Irish rock in the 1970s, when bands sprung up in a grass-roots modernization of Irish music.

Two forces lie behind Irish rap’s rise. One is a new generation of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, attracted to Ireland during its “Celtic Tiger” boom years in the 1990s and 2000s. Their numbers are tiny by the standards of other European countries — in the 2016 census, just under 65,000 people identified as black in a nation of almost 4.7 million — but talent in the emerging music scene is disproportionately drawn from among them. Rejjie Snow, whose given name is Alexander Anyaegbunam, has a Nigerian father and an Irish-Jamaican mother.

The other factor is the growth in popularity of hip-hop itself. Since 2010, it has eclipsed other genres to become the global lingua franca of youth culture. In 2016, Drake was the most streamed act in the world on Spotify. He was also the most streamed in Ireland, which has the youngest population in the European Union. This year’s lineup for one of the country’s main music events, the Longitude Festival, has risked rock fans’ ire by turning to hip-hop artists.

Casey Walsh, 20, and his childhood friend Alex Sheehan, 21, make up the duo Versatile, a north Dublin take on the strain of delinquent rap acts running back from Eminem to the Beastie Boys. They made a surprise appearance at Rejjie Snow’s Olympia Theater gig, to a fervid response from the audience.

“Ireland never really took to the hip-hop music. It was just a select few,” Walsh said in a Skype interview. “But now, festival lineups are just hip-hop acts. It’s crazy.”

“I used to cringe when I heard Irish rap,” he added. “Stuff about how the government’s robbing us and our lives are so bad.”

“It’s kind of repetitive,” Sheehan added.

“And no one wants to hear it,” Walsh said.

A do-it-yourself ethos predominates among Irish hip-hop acts. Audiences are built using social media and YouTube videos: Versatile get as many as 1 million views for theirs. But like the Irish rock bands in the 1970s, rappers in search of a record deal are forced to look to Britain or the United States. Rejjie Snow, who lives in Brooklyn, is signed to the influential New York label 300 Entertainment. His latest album was mainly recorded in London and Paris.

“Compared to two years ago, it’s so much better,” Celaviedmai, a 25-year-old rapper from Galway whose given name is Maimouna Salif, said in a telephone interview. “It’s seen as a real career. It’s not seen as a hobby or a pastime.”

Celaviedmai is one of a handful of female rappers in Ireland, in what is still a male-dominated scene. “Ireland is so small that it’s so difficult to do things on your own,” she said. “There aren’t enough resources, or they’re too expensive.”

The positive side effect of limited resources is artistic ingenuity. Irish rap abounds in different styles. Rejjie Snow’s songs are dreamy and off-center. Socially conscious rap is common; its criminal-minded flip side, street rap, does exist, but to a lesser degree. Grime, a vibrant Britain-based offshoot of rap, is beginning to make its presence felt. Other acts fuse hip-hop with Afrobeats, R&B and dance music.

The free-for-all mirrors wider rap trends. The last decade has seen a breakdown of the importance of region to hip-hop, its reliance on place as a marker of a particular sound. The internet has collapsed distances between scenes. But Irish rap’s lack of definition also points to a fluidity within Irish identity. “Thought I had to be American, thought I had to be English, everything else but Irish,” the Rusangano Family, a trio from Limerick, rap on one of their tracks. In an interview, Godknows Jonas, 27, a member of the group, said, “That’s a very personal line, because identity is something that has always been a confusing one as someone who got here from Zimbabwe.”

“When I was younger, I’d feel like I didn’t fit in with my friends, and then I’d go home and feel I didn’t fit in with my parents: They were still holding onto the culture from back home,” he added. “For me, writing those lines was like me staking a claim of who I am. I’m proud to be Irish, I’m proud to be African, I’m proud to be who I am.”

What it means to be Irish in 2018 is up for grabs. “Our identity as Irish people is socially and culturally evolving,” said Mango, whose given name is Karl Mangan, a 27-year-old rapper who makes grime music with producer Adam Fogarty, 35, who is known as Mathman.

The process is not without tensions. In rap, they center on the question of accent. American or mid-Atlantic accents are not uncommon among Irish rappers. Rejjie Snow, who left Dublin at 17 to live in Florida, is an example, though he described his own rapping voice as “neutral.” Fogarty has his own views about how an Irish emcee should sound. He said that there was “a quite significant part of our hip-hop history where artists were using fake accents. Slowly but surely, there has been a shift away from that.”

Lilo Blues, 21, a member of the Dublin rap trio the Hare Squead, groaned when the issue was raised. He grew up in southern Dublin listening to American hip-hop and R&B. “I didn’t have anything in Ireland to grasp onto in terms of urban culture or sound,” he said. “It’s not even conscious. It’s not like, ‘I’ll put this phrase in so they can tell I’m from Ireland.’ No, it’s natural.”

At Rejjie Snow’s gig at the Olympia, issues of accent and music industry infrastructure faded into the background. Here was Irish rap’s acceleration in its distilled form, a propulsive release of energy. Thinking about the destination could wait for another day. “Yo Dublin, are you ready for Rejjie Snow?” the DJ shouted. The answering roar drowned out the beats.