ONEFOUR Against All Odds Review: Overlooked Violent Side to Australian Music Outside of the Sun-Kissed Mainstream Overview

ONEFOUR Against All Odds Review: Tracing the meteoric rise of Australia’s first drill rap stars, this Netflix documentary has been written and directed by Gabriel Gasparinatos, and portrays the group members’ defiance against police and their limitless resources and powers seeking to stop them from emerging out of their disadvantaged backgrounds. The film, with a runtime of 1 hours and 22 minutes, features the story of how all five core members – J Emz, Spenny, YP, Lekks and Celly – finally found ground to recognition despite all the hurdles put in their way.

The ONEFOUR documentary maps out a completely different, realistic vision of Australia (gang wars and other violence) that’s often been filtered out of the mainstream narratives we see on the big or small screens. This isn’t merely a music documentary, rather it goes beyond to introduce us to the lesser-known world of drill music and how it’s become a mouthpiece for people to share their lived, harsh and threatening experiences. It also features The Kid LAROI playing a significant role as one of their major supporters.

-ONEFOUR Against All Odds Documentary Contains No Spoilers-

ONEFOUR Against All Odds Review

With the same name their EP released during one of the most arduous period of time for the members, this film pens out the hardcore defiance of the ONEFOUR members in the face of defeat against elite and empowered forces hung up on tearing them apart. The movie first begins with briefly explaining to us what the Australian version of drill is about and how it expressively translates the life-threatening experiences faced by these people up front like shootings and other real-life horrors into what the mainstream views as controversial lyrics promoting violence. However, through this documentary, we get to see the flip side of that life and what fuels these rap artists to write what they’re writing and why.

The violence faced by them in the streets is tapped into and then channelled and immersed into vocally through their songs, which ultimately opens up a window for them to emerge out of this fatal lifestyle and dangerous community. Trouble is intrinsically woven into each of their lives that one of the members even mentions that it’s just another normal thing for them. In that sense, the problematic aspects of the violence rising out of poverty strikes their community hard, but none of that has barely made into the picture of what we know about Australia. Mainstream media strictly paints a sanitised version of it all, presenting this place as the ideal picturesque getaway, when it clearly isn’t.

Unlike other hip-hop sub-categories of music, drill music is more about staying as authentic as possible while approaching your target subject matter with a deep rawness. It’s not so much about technicalities, as it then becomes a means of representing a side of the community that’s barely found its face in any other conversation.

Art and music will always come up as a subjective takeaway. Many condemn drill music to be one of the major inciting fuels of violence in the modern age. Since I’m not directly and actively in touch with that community, as an outsider it’s hard to state what is what and what isn’t. But we can certainly ask ourselves one question, is it really those controversial lyrics born out of these people’s lived experiences that’s pushing them to further dive into crime, or is it the pre-existing and unchanging systemic fractures intertwined with poverty, discrimination, inequality and lot more that they’re subjected to ultimately kicking their moral conscience down.

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I don’t condone violence of any sort, but then, I also believe that a person who already believes in this community as the ‘other’ presence in Australia will always seek to differentiate them from himself and continue to dehumanise them every chance he gets. So how and why is that justified when the former is an obvious abhorrent plan of action.

Media and most others who go up against the rappers are essentially white, and so away from their experiences. They don’t truly know the depths of these artists’ reality and yet they’re also acting as another add-on pressure to the pre-existing violence they’re co-inhabiting with on a daily basis.

J Emz says, ” I don’t expect them to understand something they didn’t grow up in. They’re the ones kicking the doors down. They’re not the ones living in the house”, and these words are enough to state the profundity of how unfair this fight is against them.

Even with them finding a way out of that violence, they’re again dragged back into it as victims of having to deal with the so-called policing – and having to live in an unsafe environment all because of forces that seek to eliminate the supposed violence through even worse means and resources possible.

It’s a demoralising process of again falling back to what you first sought to rise up from. ONEFOUR is not simply speaking about the overarching systemic violence that pervades society but addressing the things they’ve seen upfront and been involved with themselves. While those actions should never be glorified, we need to be able to see that they’re also coming from somewhere. With the police forcefully bringing down their attempts to breakout of that cycle, it’s only going to exacerbate the problem, especially with how these higher-up powers are upfront lawfully harassing them.

Moreover, there’s a stark difference in how the people being targeted and the ones pushing them down speak. Their jargon is completely parallel to each other’s words walking in the opposite directions. What for the police is merely a cautionary word out to other platforms putting out their music, for ONEFOUR, it’s a direct attempt at sabotaging their hopes of living and breathing as hip-hop artists in their hometown.

ONEFOUR Netflix Documentary: Final Thoughts

It’s not a greasy and glossy music documentary that barely walks you through the usual up-and-coming trajectory of artists conventionally capturing their passion for music or taking you through breezy car drives to the airport and then to another concert destination. It’s the exact opposite of what ONEFOUR have been through with the police openly targeting their efforts and shutting them down at every opportunity and chance they find – and for what – for them simply breathing and expressing their hardships – which the police has vocalised as something criminal, setting up the propaganda against them – when they’re only voicing out what they’ve been through.

It’s clear that this isn’t the first hip-hop group or artist speaking so openly about violence like this, and it makes you wonder why they’re being targeted particularly and constantly poked around with the reminder that they’re not in control. It goes to show how conditioned the society still is in terms of dragging out a racist agenda and pulling down POCs’ morale. The final scene is loud enough to demonstrate this massively widespread practice of censoring out their voice from the mainstream as a police official spells it out for all of us – “It’s nothing to do with the song. It’s the fact that you guys are here”.

ONEFOUR: Against All Odds is now streaming on Netflix.

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