The announcement is the latest escalation in an ongoing battle between NSW police and rappers largely based in western Sydney. In 2019, Mount Druitt-based artists OneFour became the focus of police ire. They release drill music – a sub-genre of hip-hop that emerged from Chicago a decade ago, before spreading to London, and eventually landing in Australia.

Drill is known for its faster, heavier sound and raw lyrics that focus on the grittiness of street life – violence, drug-dealing and run-ins with the police. Musically it’s different to what NWA and Tupac sounded like, but thematically it’s similar: artists born and raised in low-income suburbs, stigmatised by politicians and the media, who have a lived experience of the justice system and living in overly policed communities, turning to music and art to tell their stories.

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NSW police have gone to extraordinary lengths to stop OneFour from performing. They’ve claimed the group are linked to outlaw bikie gangs, and that their lyrics – which reference the so-called “postcode wars” between gangs associated with different suburbs – are inciting violence.

Police have admitted to doing “everything in [their] power” to make the group’s life “miserable” until they stop rapping about these topics. So far, that has included shutting down their shows before they can perform, raiding the homes of the artists, issuing their management with legal orders preventing them from associating with the members of the group, and trying to get their music pulled from streaming platforms.

It’s an intervention without precedent in Australian music history. What’s even more remarkable is that it’s happening decades after similar debates in the US – as though police in Australia have paid zero attention to the real causes of social harm and gang violence (inequality, a lack of opportunity, intergenerational poverty). According to the University of Sydney’s Professor Murray Lee, who researches the connection between criminology and drill music, the genre is “a symptom of cultural violence, not a cause”.

It’s a realisation that seems to be well understood in the US, where hip-hop has become the most popular form of music, and as a result of that popularity has helped mainstream discussion around police violence and racism. The fact that Australia appears to be three decades behind that conversation is an indictment on the power we’ve bestowed on police to control what kind of art can be created and expressed, and an indictment on the politicians who’ve let them get away with it.

The fact an FBI letter trying to intimidate NWA hangs in a museum is symbolic of where that kind of attempt to crush artistic and social expression leads. Maybe one day there will be a similar museum piece for Australian hip-hop artists. On the current trajectory though, I wouldn’t count on it.