What are the historical and contemporary dynamics of popular music and musicians’ encounters with police and state power?
Policing Australian Popular Music
Criminalisation, Resistance, Redemption: A study of the relationship between policing and popular music in Australia
This interdisciplinary project is the first comprehensive study of the relationship between policing and popular music in Australia. It explores how forms of popular music have been criminalised, and the ways musicians and musical communities voice resistance to police and state powers.
The Australian colonial nation state has always had a particular relationship to crime, with sovereign land stolen, and First Nations people policed, in order to build a penal colony based on punishment and redemption. Music has been inextricably involved with this history, with popular music holding complex associations with both state construed criminality and community resistance. Australia's unofficial national anthem, Waltzing Matilda, is about a sheep thief who suicides rather than be taken by troopers; Aboriginal artists have historically been prevented from playing specific types of music. In the 1990s one of Australia's most popular performers Nick Cave made his name singing murder ballads.
The policing of music is not just an historical issue with intensified drug searches of dance parties and police use of various crime prevention orders against drill rap groups often playing out along race-based, ethnic, and cultural lines. Moreover, we have seen feminist singer-songwriters voice support for the #metoo movement, and First Nations hip-hop artists such as Dobby and BARKAA resist state power though the Black Lives Matter lens with songs like I can't breathe.
However, at the same time as attracting censure, rap music is also seen as a legitimate resource for redemption. Rap workshops and ‘hip hop therapy’ are commonly deployed in state institutions for incarcerated or ‘at-risk’ youth. This project uncovers, compiles and analyses the processes by which popular music is policed and explores the power of music to resist policing or regulation, and to initiate positive social change.
Project Team
Professor Murray Lee, Sydney Law School, The University of Sydney
Dr Toby Martin, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney
Professor Jioji Ravulo, Sydney School of Education and Social Work, The University of Sydney
Dr Alexis Kallio, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University
This project is funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Projects (DP) 2024, Grant ID: DP240100531
Banner image: Photo by Ayana Wyse on Unsplash.