Identity is a fairly weighty and profound subject.
It lies at the core of us, and of much great art. There are few more profound questions than Who Am I, and What Am I, after all.
The answers are often not set in stone. Your own view of your identity may be fluid. Your own view of your individual identity may be different from other people's view of yours. As we found with Alasdair Gray's controversial categories of English "colonists and settlers", labels and stereotypes tend to not only obscure key differences between virtually everyone, but also incite argument and rancour.
Identity, however, will figure large in the cultural landscape of the coming year or so. A confluence of events this week pointed that way.
Laurie Sansom, new artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) revealed part of what the company will be producing next year. He told me that 2014 would be a unique year in many ways, but of course will be a year dominated in Scotland by the Independence Referendum on 18 September 2014. So two of that year's programme will be productions directly related to that vote.
One will be Kieran Hurley's Rantin, the other David Greig and David MacLennan's (still tentatively titled) The Great Don't Know Show, and both will address the question of identity, with Hurley's directly questioning what it is and means. Greig and MacLennan's show will also showcase a spectrum of opinions which is sure to touch on class, nationality, occupation, ethnicity, race, age and all the other factors that play into identity.
And then I met Jeanie Finlay, the film maker who addressed identity and belonging in her excellent film about the last surviving record shop on Teesside (Sound it Out from 2011), who at the Edinburgh Film Festival premiered her new documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax, to be released later this year.
The story of the film is fairly extraordinary, and at times scarcely believable. Essentially, two Scots felt they had to pretend to be American to make it in the music world. These hip hop artists, Billy Boyd and Gavin Bain, angered by being snubbed by a record company as "the rapping Proclaimers", decided to drown their true identities in that of fake Californian rappers Silibil 'n' Brains. The film, very much aided by the duo's own stark and candid archive material, shows both the credulous music industry reaction – they signed a big deal with Sony – as well as the slow disintegration of the duo's fake identity. Eventually, the film becomes very dark indeed. Maintaining such a huge lie led to dysfunction and illness, and the eventual break up of the duo.
These days, post-X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, a Scottish hip hop duo may not need to lie at all. But the movie is a great reminder (if via an extreme example) of the fragility of the fluidity, imagination and self-creation involved in our daily lives and work.
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