Broken Song: A Documentary About the Irish Hip-Hop Scene

Broken Song is a documentary about the Irish hip-hop scene. But for those at the back expecting Spinal Tap with bigger harps, it ain't happening. Claire Dix and Nodlag Houdlihan's exploration of the outer spiral arms of the Dublin rap underground treats its subjects with real reverence. Even the comedy gold of two trackie-clad rappers consulting an inexplicably-German psychic –turning over Tarot cards to cold-read their weed habits– is played with a straight bat.

Instead, Dix and Houdlihan use the raw hippidy-hopping of Irish 14 year olds freestyling about genital warts on mangy street corners to get into the story of a place that was already wrecked long before the Celtic Tiger hit the shitter. Beyond the characters we meet – ganja-man Costello, his sensitive protege GI, horrible thug with the voice of an angel Willa – it is the landscape of Ballymun dominates. This baddest of Dublin badlands, it looks almost rural on-screen, cannily disguising the fact that it's where they dumped all the hopeless povvos on the back-end of Dublin Airport in the 60s and 70s. It has its analogues in Britain: Glasgow's Easterhouse, or Leeds' Seacroft greenery-ringed concrete shitboxes, but Ballymun has a remoteness all of its own.

The pair decided to open up a zone normally seen only through the harsh colour spectrums of news cameras, ringed by red-and-white police tape, and re-focus it in soft dream-like black-and-white, to tell the story of how a scene centred on GI and Costello has made its own beauty there. Just shown at CPH:DOX, I caught up with Houdlihan to ask her whether she knows about that Irish hip-hop video about taking a horse to a wedding. And other things…

YNTHT: Hi Nodlag. First off. Why shoot it in black-n-white? Isn't that a bit bold? A bit of a 'statement'?

Nodlag: The black-and-white we debated all the way through the production. Dean, the manager of the three main characters, is from there and he just took us to the places where all the lads hang out. We went off tramping across North Dublin with him, and right then we knew that the landscape would be a big part of the film. Also, Claire was very influenced by the Chet Baker documentary Let's Get Lost. We always showed that to people as something we were looking to reference.

Because when I saw it, at first I imagined this Ballymun place was some hicksville in the countryside. It's very green.

The thing about Dublin is there's a lot of green space even in the inner city, but it's often these strange land banks that people have kept. That often relates back to a lot of planning corruption that happened in Dublin. You know, there'll be a big field with a few burnt-out cars in the middle of something else. People are always surprised when they come to Dublin, that very quickly you exit the urban part and go into greenery – but then you go back into the city again. So, showing those kinds of landscapes, were something we always had them in our heads from the beginning. We knew from the beginning that would be an important part of the film.

Was there ever any temptation to ham up the comedy angle?

No! Claire met the guys and heard them rapping, and was really impressed by the lyricism of the writing. We always were really impressed by what they were doing. We liked their honesty, their spirit, and how they were connected to their community. The fact that they'd made something from nothing seemed like a story worth telling.

I'm still a bit troubled by the way you show this Willa kid as a sort of soft floppy man-child who has made a few mistakes. But then there's a bit halfway where he's talking about what the judge at his trial has told him about his victim: that he permanently lost his sense of taste, his sense of smell. And suddenly you get this whiff of real darkness.

I think that's something that the documentary does well is it turns you around a few times. You really like him and you're rooting for him. And then there's this moment where you think "he did that?" I suppose when you meet a lot of kids like Willa, they're actually quite charming. But I think you see in the film that he struggles with that himself. We struggled with it too: when you meet him, you'd look at him and go "No, he can't have done that…".

For those that don't know, what's the Irish hip-hop scene like right now?

There isn't a huge hip-hop scene. Out in Ballymun, there's a kind of an underground scene and it's been building for years out there, and now finally they're starting to break through. But the last time there were big hip-hop acts in Ireland was about twenty years ago. The only really big rap act in Ireland at the moment is a comedy one, actually.

I think I've seen them. They take a horse to a wedding, right?

Yes!

Yes, it's brilliant. Thanks Nodlag.

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