The Great Hip Hop Hoax

A follow-up to Sound It Out, her 2011 documentary about a Teesside record shop, Jeanie Finlay forays into darker aspects of the music industry with The Great Hip Hop Hoax. Described by subject Billy as “the lies behind the lies behind the lies,” it follows the rise and fall of a pair of Scottish musicians who, in a search for musical fame and fortune, donned phoney American accents.

In a Behind the Music fashion, Finlay follows Silibil N' Brains’ trajectory from Dundee clubs to MTV’s TRL through interviews and archive footage of the boys behaving extremely badly. Early on, Finlay’s doc trades on its frenetic energy and some suitable shock value, but as the story progresses and Jackass moments proliferate, these deplorable characters and their elaborate and unrelatable egos become increasingly tiring. Some of the film’s most interesting moments come from the pathological behaviour of its subjects, but the wall of lies is as impenetrable as the search for sympathetic characters in this documentary of the damned. [Nicola Balkind]