Fontaines D.C.: Gentrification and The Commodification of Culture

by Conor

Irishness is an industry. Visit any major city on this island and you will see it yourself. In Dublin there is a famous chain of souvenir shops called 'Carroll’s Irish Gifts'. It’s impossible to walk 200 meters in the city without spotting one, there are ten of them in the city centre alone. These establishments are decorated with all the usual tat, “Kiss Me I’m Irish”, Guinness Fridge Magnets, Ireland Rugby Shirts, all the hits. Usually, the only local accent you hear in these shops are from the cashier, or sometimes even the bouncer. The abundance of ‘Carroll’s Irish Gift’ shops is just a mild annoyance in comparison to the real problems the city has now. Ireland has an utterly broken housing system, which has resulted in a massive homeless crisis. Dublin is the epicentre of this. Gentrification is another massive problem in Dublin. If you look at a Dublin City Sky you will see a flock of cranes, constructing an endless mass of ugly, oppressive, empty hotels and office spaces. Dublin is not a city for Dubliners anymore, it’s a city for people who buy properties, knock them, and convert them into cocktail bars. One of the biggest proponents of the gentrification of the city is a company called the Press Up Entertainment Group, who now manage forty venues across Dublin. I’ll come back to this later.

When I first heard Fontaines D.C. (Dublin City) in 2017 I was somewhat perplexed. ‘Boys In The Better Land’, their breakout single, came on the car radio, and I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was unheard of to hear someone on the radio with an inner-city Dublin accent who wasn’t a Garage MC or a caller into Joe Duffy’s radio show. It was a breath of fresh air to hear a real working-class Dublin accent instead of the typical posh west-brit newsreader drawl that is endemic in ‘Oirish Mediuh.’ On top of this were the portraits of everyday, blue-collar people that were being painted by wordsmith and lead singer, Grian Chatten. Lines on ‘Boys like “Driver's got names to fill two double-barrels,” he spits out "Brits out!", “only smokes Carroll's,” were, in this respect, stunning. Another recurring character in Chatten’s lyrics is the city itself, in their preceding single ‘Too Real’ Chatten describes a cold, wet evening in Dublin, followed by the rallying cry, “Is it too real for ya?” Various publications such as The Guardian and Pitchfork have picked up on the band’s representation of the forgotten people of Dublin, and their longing for the city to overcome its problems. In almost every interview they mention how gentrified the city is and how the culture is dying, how they feel kicked to the curb by the state, as do many other young folk in this country.

This is where something altogether more sinister comes into play. Contrary to this authentic image there is something meticulously crafted and marketed to people overseas by their PR company, Fontaines origin story is all too familiar. I suppose I was somewhat naive to think that these were five lads who were born and raised on the streets of Dublin, five lads who just all happened to get into The Fall at the same time. Of course, their origin is the same as every other rich kid post-punk band in the UK and Ireland. The five lads met in BIMM, Irelands best music college, and bonded over a love of poetry and began playing gigs in venues like The Workman's Club (for those unfamiliar, it’s sort of the Irish equivalent of the Windmill Club in London.) If you dig even further you find out that only one of the members of the group, Chatten the singer, isn’t even from the inner city but Skerries, a suburban coastal town far removed from the working-class. Hilariously, it is obvious that the band noticed that people have caught on, and now their bass player wears a Mayo GAA jersey in every promo shot that they take. For all the pining the band does for Dublin City Skies, they don't even come from their namesake, the city. They don't 'hail from The Liberties' like their artist bio would lead you to believe, and wait for it, here comes the most shattering part, Grian Chattens accent isn’t even real, he’s doing an impression of a true-blue Dub. The mystique around the band completely shatters when you find out that they’re all middle-class kids LARPing as born and raised Dubliners.

But, the most disturbing part of the Fontaines story is their management. Fontaines D.C. are managed by a bar manager named Trevor Dietz, who works for none other than Press Up Entertainment. That’s right. For all the wistful, forlorn lamenting that this band does for the death of Dublin city’s culture, their own manager—the guy who makes things happen—who gets them articles in the NME—who gets them Mercury Prize nominations—works for a company that makes an enormous amount of money by knocking down properties in Dublin and replacing them with soulless coffee shops and shitty faux art deco cocktail bars. Even The Workman’s Club, the very venue that Fontaines got their start in, is ran by the Press Up Entertainment Group. Fontaines, by extension are making money for Press Up Entertainment, every week The Workmans club is filled with 50 kids doing their best Ian McCulloch/Nick Cave/Ian Curtis impression, hoping they might catch the eye of the right people.

This wouldn’t be the first time that the band has made themselves out to be hypocrites. In interviews Fontaines have name dropped The Pogues as an influence, which is plain to see as Dublin City Sky, the closer of their first album ‘Dogrel’, is an embarrassingly obvious Pogues rewrite. They’ve also shown appreciation for more traditional Irish artists such as Luke Kelly of The Dubliners, going so far as to open their shows with his poem ‘For What Died The Sons of Róisín?” Not one year before these references, Fontaines faced major backlash in the country for saying that the only way to make it in the Irish music industry was to play ‘didley eye’ music. Not only is that a completely misguided and childish view on the state of the music industry in Ireland, it’s also an incredibly dismissive way of describing the traditional music that they claim to love so much. What right do they have to associate themselves in interviews with Irish heroes like Luke Kelly and Oscar Wilde? This is the essence of what really annoys me about how these artists are marketing themselves. Fontaines draw so much from Irish culture as a way of marketing themselves as legitimate overseas, but what have they given back to the culture? Two half baked Fall-lite post-punk revival records, with production and songwriting as flat and bland as the hotels and bars that their employers build. Is that really all it takes to get compared to James Joyce in the fucking Guardian? (That actually happened.)

After everything that these guys have done, including making money for property developers who have tore the heart out of the city they claim to love, after commodifying and selling our culture like a Carroll’s Irish Gifts, where has it gotten them? They got nominated for a Grammy that they didn’t win, and got to perform their little Brendan Behan minstrel show in an Irish bar on Jimmy Fallon. That’s your legacy. Nice one.  So, when Grian Chatten asks “Is it too real for ya?”, I must say no, it’s not real enough.