This week we reached a new frontier of the fun-policing many in New South Wales have come to expect: an announcement so stunningly inane it could only have been written by Mad Libs. This time, *spins wheel* rap music has been banned! From where? *Spins wheel* Sydney’s Royal Easter show! But why? *Spins wheel* Gang violence!
The crackdown is part of a joint safety effort by Easter show organisers and NSW police, after the fatal stabbing of a 17-year-old Easter show employee last year. The police, of course, must respond – but their statement this week blaming “violent crime” on hip-hop borders on self-parody.
“The Comanchero bikie gang last year particularly and proactively procured youths through rapper music,” assistant commissioner, Stuart Smith, said on Tuesday, before doubling down in another sentence that made just about as much sense. “Through rapper music investment they procured a significant youth gang problem to carry out violent crime.”
I wonder how exactly these masterminds are recruiting members through music. You can almost imagine the image running through Smith’s mind: crime dons meeting up over showbags and dagwood dogs, before stuffing homemade mixtapes into jewel cases and hawking them on the street.
The solution to this so-called problem? Preventing ride operators at the Easter show from playing hip-hop and reducing the volume of any music that is allowed to be played – or as I like to call it, year seven camp after lights out.
“We’ve got all the evidence we need to demonstrate that rapper music is being used to lure youth into a life of crime,” Smith continued. It’s hard to understand why we should place any stock in a man who uses the term “rapper music” no less than three times, but let us take his claim in earnest. Earnestly, I say: it is completely insane – though it pales in comparison to similar statements issued by Murray Wilton, the Easter show’s general manager.
“If you look at the psychology of music … there is scientific fact the type of music that is played actually predicts somebody’s behaviour,” Wilton told the ABC, denying that the move was racist – despite the fact that the rap music scene in western Sydney is overwhelmingly dominated by Pasifika and Black communities.
NSW police have since distanced themselves from the decision: deputy commissioner Mal Lanyon said show organisers had decided what styles of music could be played, adding: “We haven’t asked for a ban on the playing of rap music.” The Royal Agricultural Society of NSW chief executive Brock Gilmour disputed that rap music was targeted at all, telling the Sydney Morning Herald on Wednesday that they did not want ride operators to play any music that contained swearing or “aggressive tones”.
At best, this crackdown on rap music reeks of a moral panic: youth culture has always incited a particularly aggrieved, outsized reaction from certain sectors. Maybe you’re old enough to remember the widespread anguish directed towards a few hip gyrations in the 1950s, deemed far too improper for any decent set of eyes. Or the UK’s mods v rockers a decade later, when, for some reason, everyone was afraid of people who dressed like bankers. Or the 1980s “satanic panic”, when heavy metal suddenly became the battleground for a cadre of conspiracy theorists. Or the post-Columbine shooting freakout over Marilyn Manson and video games.
We don’t even have to go that far back. Remember when the media thought teens everywhere were eating Tide pods? Or that bad people were wasting their precious drugs on poisoning children at Halloween?
At worst, the Easter show ban forms part of a wider effort to stigmatise hip-hop. We can’t look at it without considering the long-running police campaign against western Sydney drill group OneFour – who are incredibly beloved by streaming metrics and who have been prevented from playing live at every turn by NSW police. “I’m going to use everything in my power to make your life miserable, until you stop doing what you’re doing,” one policeman told OneFour through the ABC in 2019. OneFour’s lyrics have been used against them in court. The police have tried – and failed – to remove the group’s music from streaming services.
It’s all too reminiscent of the US war on hip-hop, with everyone from Tupac to NWA documenting the pushback they experienced from cops. Except that was four decades ago. The NSW police’s fear of hip-hop remains alive and well – and it is so far out of date that it’s practically antique.
There is one upside. Now that there’s precedent in banning any genre that even mildly rankles a select few, let me be brave enough to say it: let’s ban Michael Bublé in Westfield.
