True Lies: Jeanie Finlay unmasks The Great Hip Hop Hoax

Jeanie Finlay's breakthrough film Sound It Out examined the plight of the independent record shop. In The Great Hip Hop Hoax, she turns her attention to Scottish hip-hoppers turned fake US rap stars, Silibil N' Brains

Feature by Bram E. Gieben | 04 Sep 2013

Jeanie Finlay is feeling triumphant after a packed screening of her new documentary, The Great Hip Hop Hoax, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. As we sit down to speak, she hands over a lie-detecting fish, such as you might find in a Christmas cracker, and breaks out in a wicked smile. Her new documentary is all about the power of truth and lies.

The film tells the story of Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, two Scottish rappers who assumed the identity of US hip-hop artists, convincing everyone from Sony to Eminem cohorts D12 that they were the real deal – up-and-coming rap artists from America's West Coast. Like her breakthrough film Sound It Out, which told the story of a struggling but well-loved independent record shop in Stockton, it is a bittersweet tale: Boyd quit the band and returned to Dundee, while Bain was left almost penniless, and suffered a near-fatal drug overdose before eventually writing a highly fictionalised 'tell-all' account of their adventures, California Schemin'. Finlay came across their story in the Guardian, and was immediately captivated.

“Sometimes you find things when you're not looking for them,” she says. “It just offered so much, it's really rich.” The story keyed in to what has become a recurring theme in Finlay's work: “Reinvention, self-invention.” The tale began when Boyd and Bain were rejected at a London industry talent search run by Polydor, looking for ‘the next Eminem.' The judges had compared them to a ‘rapping Proclaimers,’ a thoughtless put-down that will be familiar to many Scottish hip-hop artists. Their response? They created Silibil N' Brains – drug-fuelled, Californian white-trash rapper personas – and set about reinventing their origins.

This plan, to Finlay, seemed like “a bonkers answer to a ridiculous situation.” Finlay's father is Scottish: “The idea of denying your Scottishness seemed completely crazy. He was like, 'Why would anyone do that?'” Did she have any sympathy for Boyd and Bain? “I did feel sympathy,” she admits. “I don't really go into any film with an agenda. I'm going in to listen and to see what's going on. It just seemed like what they did wasn't logical. It's not like they got turned down [by the record industry] a thousand times; they got turned down once. The next logical step was, ‘Okay, we'll just become American.’”

The thread of the story was the way in which her subjects’ lives began to break down under the pressure of maintaining the fantasy. “Like Billy says in the opening of the film, ‘It's the lies about the lies about the lies about the lies.’ I had years of storytelling to unpick. It’s like unravelling a jumper. Things had been told and then re-told. I was trying to find where the truth lay, in all of that.” The film does a remarkable job of deconstructing these layers of fiction, and exposing the tragic consequences of the duo’s unlikely reinvention.

As with her previous projects, the key was to conduct in-depth, “gruelling” interviews with the subjects. “I never come with any questions,” says Finlay. “I'll sit with the guys for hours. I get them to slow things down, tell me everything in minute detail.” When did she feel she had found the kernel of the story? “It became apparent very quickly that this was a bromance that had gone horribly, horribly wrong,” she says. “The lie had infected everything. So I'm constantly trying to think, ‘What's the reality of this situation, and how do I show that in the film?’ The reality is that they weren't friends by the end of it. So the ending of the film is far apart, geographically, emotionally, physically.”

Hip-hop seems like the ideal subject to examine the nature of truth and lies, with its conflicting values of ‘keeping it real,’ the vivid braggadocio of its lyrics, and the larger-than-life personas of rap stars. Did it feel like going down the rabbit hole? “A bit, yeah. There were points at the beginning where I asked myself, ‘Are these people out of their minds?’” says Finlay. “I even asked myself if I was just a bit-part player in another, bigger hoax. Once I started seeing the evidence, I realised it was real.” Still, there were layers of fictions and counter-fictions to sift through, including separating truth from invention in Gavin Bain’s book.

“There are parts in the book that didn't happen in reality,” Finlay explains. “So for example, the BRITs – in the film I show the truth, that Billy went on his own. But in his book, Gavin describes it in minute detail.” This allowed Finlay to show one particularly pertinent truth: “If you tell lies for long enough, what you end up remembering is the lie,” she says. “There are different layers of invention in all of our everyday lives. When I get up in the morning, I decide what colour my lips are going to be today, whether I'll have a curl in my hair or not. It's all about presenting a face to the public, and a lot of my films are about that. But in hip-hop, it's presented as authenticity. They were ‘genuinely fake.’”

After the success of Sound It Out and The Great Hip Hop Hoax, Finlay has formed her own production company. “It’s called Glimmer Films because I'm always looking for that one moment, that glimmer that gives you the heart of the story,” she says. “I had always been a director-for-hire. I realised I wanted to be much more involved in that, because you live and breathe these films, day in day out. So why not make my own company?” She often works in co-production with Met Films, who co-produced Hoax.


“This was a bromance that had gone horribly, horribly wrong. The lie had infected everything” – Jeanie Finlay


Sound It Out was entirely crowdfunded – one of the first UK films to achieve a 100% budget this way, it went on to be distributed in 50 cinemas in the UK, and five international territories, thanks in no small part to its making a big splash at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The story of the film's genesis is now used as a case study on crowdfunding by the British Film Institute, and Finlay has gone on to lecture on the topic at universities. She is pragmatic about crowdfunding: “There are issues with everything,” she says, “but we live in interesting times.”

For her, the key advantage is audience engagement. “Some people came up to me at the screening at Edinburgh International Film Festival and said, ‘I crowdfunded Sound It Out. It's really good to see you've made another film.’ Part of the battle was that no one had heard of crowdfunding – I had to explain what it was.” She cites Zach Braff's controversial Kickstarter campaign as one of the signs that crowdfunding has become mainstream. “I think it works best if it acts like a pre-buy,” she says.

Her new film, Orion, will be partly funded this way. “If you’re doing it for the money, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons,” she offers. “I think you need integrity – but I like the idea it's democratic, that anyone can do it. It depends what kind of films you want to make. I’m an independent documentary maker, so the budgets are always going to be within reach. If you can nurture a good relationship with your audience, they’ll find your work.”

Orion touches on one of the greatest stories in rock‘n’roll. “It was inspired by buying a record at a car boot sale ten years ago, with a mystery man on the cover, with a mask. I uncovered a rollercoaster story of the music industry that ended in murder. It’s 1978, in the months after Elvis Presley’s death. Another singer was signed to Sun Records and was given a Zorro mask to wear, and hundreds of thousands of people believed he was Elvis, back from the grave. So it’s about the Elvis myth, and the pressures of living as a ghost.”

Another film about the music industry – is this the completion of a trilogy? “My producer keeps joking I'm making the box set,” she says with a chuckle. “I don't know. They all just appealed to me as stories – they had lots of rich layers. I'm working on another film called Pantomime, which is very similar to Sound It Out in tone, but it’s about an amateur dramatic pantomime in Nottingham – about their lives and loves, on and off-stage. It’s more about reinvention,” she says, returning to her favourite theme. “What happens when you're not yourself? A mask enables a fantasy.”

The Great Hip Hop Hoax is released 6 Sep by Vertigo Films

DCA host a special screening introduced by Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, aka Silibil N’ Brains, on 6 Sep. Jeanie Finlay will also attend and take part in a post-screening Q&A about the film and its local connections, before an exclusive live performance from Silibil N’ Brains.

@JeanieFinlay

www.orionthemovie.com/