Written By: Kieran Simkin
Patriotic Revolution: Rhythm, Restraint and Public Speech
Patriotic Revolution started with the rhythm of public speech. I was listening to two livestreams connected to the protests in Dover and Portsmouth. I kept noticing the cadence: short phrases, repeated ideas, changes in pressure. I noticed how a speaker can pull a crowd’s attention back to one point. I wanted to explore what would happen if that energy became the structure of a hip-hop track.
Building the Track at 140 BPM
The result is a 2 minute 42 second track at 140 BPM. I chose that pace because it could carry urgency without forcing the song into a constant sprint. The beat leaves enough space for the words to land, but it also keeps moving. That balance mattered because the subject is tense. A slower track risked becoming too solemn. Something more frantic could have pushed the message towards confrontation.
I approached the song as an artistic response rather than a report on the events. That distinction is important to me. A track can capture a reaction, a mood or a line of questioning. It cannot establish every fact about a fast-moving public event. The two livestreams are linked from the song’s public EPK. Listeners can see the source context for themselves rather than being asked to take the song as neutral reporting.
Peaceful Assembly and the Writing Challenge
The central thread is peaceful and lawful assembly, restraint and accountability. Articles 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights provide the wider frame. Expression and assembly matter, and so do the lawful limits and responsibilities around them. I am not presenting the song as legal advice. I was interested in the harder cultural question underneath it. What does restraint look like when a crowd, institutions and people filming the scene are all reacting to one another in real time?
That question shaped the writing. I tried to avoid turning a complicated event into a simple hero-and-villain story. I also did not want to write an attack on migrants or use people as targets. The song is about the relationship between public voice, institutional power and the expectation that the law applies consistently. It does not claim that every action at either protest was peaceful. It does not claim that everybody present shared one motive.
There was also a practical writing challenge. Speech written for a livestream does not automatically become a lyric. Spoken emphasis can be irregular. A phrase that feels powerful in a live moment may become clumsy when it has to sit inside bars. I treated the source material as a starting point for pacing and structure. I then built the track around repetition, contrast and breath. At 140 BPM, even a brief pause can change how a line feels. Leaving a gap before a key phrase sometimes did more than adding another line.
Production, Independence and Release
The production follows the same idea. It is direct and compressed, with enough movement to hold attention across a short runtime. I wanted the track to feel like a late-night document made close to the events. It should still be recognisably a constructed piece of music. That is why the public presentation uses an evidence-desk visual language: source links, restrained red annotations and clear boundaries. These boundaries separate what was observed, what I interpreted and what remains disputed or unknown.
Patriotic Revolution is independent. Danny Tommo and Patriot Platform are part of the source context. However, they did not commission, approve or endorse the track. I think that boundary is worth stating plainly. Music made in response to public figures or public events can easily be mistaken for an official collaboration. This happens when names, clips or hashtags travel without their original context.
For me, the most useful thing a topical hip-hop track can do is not tell listeners what they must conclude. It can slow a moment down just enough to make its tensions audible: speech and authority, protest and restraint, anger and responsibility. If it encourages somebody to look at the sources, think about the principles involved and listen critically, then the track has done something worthwhile.
Patriotic Revolution is available now. The full track, lyrics, source links and release context are collected at https://kieransimkin.co.uk/patriotic-revolution/.
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