Celtic Hip Hop - Celtic Hip Hop

Celtic Hip Hop

The first Celtic-identified hip hop group to gain mainstream notoriety was House of Pain, a Los Angeles based hip hop group which incorporated rhymes about the Irish-American experience into their music. With a few exceptions, however, their actual instrumentation did not incorporate traditional "Celtic" instruments, though they did use time signatures typical of Jigs on several songs - a major deviation in a hip hop market where virtually everything is done in 4/4 time.

Marxman, an Irish-Jamaican hip hop group, whose explicitly nationalist and Marxist politics gained them notoriety and infamy in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, incorporated traditional instruments into several songs on their first album, but largely abandoned them on their second album for a more electronica- and blues-oriented sound that would later form the basis for the emergence of trip hop.

Sinéad O'Connor contributed vocals to several of Marxman's songs and even tried her hand at rapping on her 1994 album Universal Mother with a track about the Great Irish Famine (1845-1849).

Starting in 1998 Manau, a French hip hop group of Breton origin, created the first truly consistent fusion of Celtic music and hip hop in two critically acclaimed albums incorporating a wide range of traditional instruments and melodies and combining them with hip hop beats. In one of their songs they used part of an arrangement of a traditional tune ( Tri Martolod) by Alan Stivell, and were subsequently sued by him for copyright infringement.

1998 also marked the release of Seanchai and The Unity Squad's second album, Rebel Hip Hop. The sound was equal parts folk-punk, rock, and old-school hip hop and marked the first time Celtic hip hop had been performed exclusively with live instruments instead of samples. The album was selected as the Hotpress "Album of the Year" and received positive reviews but failed to break into the mainstream. The band has released 4 more albums since and are still active, playing primarily at Rocky Sullivan's in NYC which is owned by Chris Byrne, the band leader.

More recently, Emcee Lynx, a hip hop artist from Oakland, California of primarily Scottish and Irish descent who is best known for his anarchist politics and anti-war activism, has incorporated samples of traditional instruments into his music. His song "I'm a Celt", from his 2003 album "The UnAmerican LP", marked his first foray into overt fusion; combining samples of a traditional Irish harp with bass, drum, and lyrics about the Highland Clearances, the Potato Famine, and growing up as a Celt in America. In 2005 that evolved into a full band, Beltaine's Fire. They played a live fusion of hip hop, funk, rock, and Celtic music. They released three full length albums and their biggest performance was at the KVMR Celtic Festival in 2008, an event which drew over 10,000 people.

The definition of 'Celtic Hip Hop' is contested. Some people use it to refer to all hip hop by self-identified Celts; Ammunition, an Irish rapper who runs http://celtichiphop.net is one pillar in this camp, while most critics use it to refer to music that actually incorporates traditional instrumentation and melodies. Rappers who spit primarily over conventional hip hop beats and self-identify with Celtic hip hop include Rob Kelly, Emcee Lynx (as a solo artist), Terrawrizt, MetaBeats, Collie, Scattabrainz, Lineage, and many more.