OneFour: Against All Odds is brilliant, infuriating and the year's best music documentary
It's explains the forces which made a controversial Australian rap group disappear
Documentary is a form that has faded from our linear television screens but has seen a resurgence on streaming, with Netflix churning out a parade of excellent features and limited series. Below I review the brilliant OneFour: Against All Odds, which has key emotive scenes shot in Auckland. There’s a couple more Aussie docs worth your time further down. Here’s hoping we get more documentaries from here in the near future.
— Duncan Greive, Rec Room editor
In 2019, Sydney’s OneFour were briefly inescapable: songs like The Message and In the Beginning had that rarest of qualities – a wholly original sound, that of strong Samoan-Australian accents intoning aggressive lyrics over doleful production which recalled UK artists like Stormzy. It was those unaffected voices that first hooked you: this was not the usual sound of Australia, and conveyed life in a community that only existed to hit one of three paths “footy, the factory or a life of crime”, as OneFour’s YP says an excellent new documentary on the group.
Once the novelty wore off, it was the visuals and lyrics that had people spellbound. Videos showed huge crowds of Pacific men, often with bandanas covering their faces, shrouded in smoke and eerily lit. The intro to The Message bore a warning: “the lyrics and characters of this song are all fictional and should not be taken literal”, before muffled audio recorded from prison which strongly implied they should actually be taken very seriously. The song went globally viral, with the blunt, violent lyrics creating unavoidable critical comparisons to NWA, who emerged from a similar community in LA with an electric new sound in the late 80s.
OneFour played a sold out show at Auckland’s Powerstation in 2019 and seemed destined for international stardom. For those not paying close attention, especially here in New Zealand, they seemed to just fade away. This is hardly atypical of artists who break out, especially in the hyperchurn era of social media, which played a crucial role in their rise. The algorithm often gets bored and moves on. The real story is the subject of OneFour: Against All Odds, a new feature-length documentary on Netflix which tells the shocking story of how their past came back to haunt them before Australia’s Police conspired to brazenly harass the group into submission.
The group emerged from Mt Druitt, an impoverished Western suburb a long way from Sydney’s CBD. They were childhood friends who went to the same Mormon church but also lived in rough streets and hung tight together for protection. They don’t dispute that they also got into scraps, including one particularly brutal pub brawl in 2018, which would come back to haunt them. To its great credit, Against All Odds does not flinch in its portrayal of their backstory and includes wince-inducing CCTV footage of that incident. Three members were charged as a result, though the trial would not arrive for another two years.
That was enough of a window. They started working in a community recording studio, and the songs caught the ear of a major label and management, who signed them and helped the group professionalise. Then those singles dropped, the global frenzy happened, and shows were booked. It was at this point that Sydney’s conservative media took notice and drew a line between the knife play in the lyrics and the decades-old “postcode wars” between suburbs in Sydney’s inner and outer West.
From there, it was a short step to the Police’s Strike Force Raptor, the same elite anti-gang force briefly pushed as a model here by National. Despite their pending charges, OneFour don’t profile like any organised crime group and come across more as kids growing up in a tough environment, lacking a natural path, until they carved one for themselves. Strike Force Raptor, though, has a name that sounds like a social media account and operated as if policing for likes and shares. They became obsessed with OneFour, with a leader telling ABC journalist Osman Faruqi that they would “make your life miserable until you stop doing what you're doing”.
The documentary barrels along and uses music journalists to provide context while giving police ample opportunity to present their case. The archive footage is sharply presented, played on televisions in idyllic suburban homes as a way of showing how it must have landed for Australians finding out about the group over breakfast. Yet while it clearly has a point of view, it’s not one eyed, and doesn’t shrink from explaining how the group’s actions were more than enough of an obstacle to success without authorities’ involvement.
As a result, it seems likely that the group’s legacy will be less the reward for their toil and innovation than in watching those they inspire swell and prosper in their wake. A couple of weeks ago, a Melbourne group formed in OneFour’s wake played a show at Auckland’s Ōtāhuhu College alongside TikTokers like Terrell and Uce Gang. The crowd for HP Boyz lit up with a very pure energy – and every part of it was unimaginable without what OneFour brought into the world. It’s appalling that they are unlikely to reap the benefits of what they started. But the abiding message of Against All Odds is that, as with NWA decades earlier, draconian action only serves to make the fire spread and brighten.
See also: If you missed the legend Oscar Kightly’s superb documentary Dawn Raid in 2021, it covers a similar (though thankfully less controversial) territory. Rent it here. My only wish is that we tell our stories sooner – part of what makes OneFour’s story crackle is that it’s still unfolding.
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Quick pop culture hits
I adored this modern history of 7pm current affairs shows from Alex Casey
She and I also recapped an incredibly strange moment in our TV history – when a “technical death metal” band played after school classic the Erin Simpson Show
Sam Brooks has a fascinating and deeply reported feature into one of New Zealand’s most under-appreciated cultural exports: Path of Exile, played by over a million people each day.
A production that dramatises the Pike River tragedy has just been announced – if (unreported) rumours are true, the cast is incredible. And if anyone is equipped to handle such material sensitively, it’s Robert Sarkies, whose ‘Out of the Blue’ dealt so movingly with the Aramoana massacre.
Peter Jackson will not quit his love affair with The Beatles – he’s directed a video for their “last song”, out on Saturday. This is a tirade I wrote about this phenomenon in 2019; I stand by this unpopular opinion.
Alex Casey, again, with this brilliant review of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour movie. An astounding fact: the concert film has already outgrossed all but six of 2023’s tours.
I gave it a Rec Room rave two weeks ago – After the Party’s first episode is now out and streaming on TVNZ+. Its star Robyn Malcolm told us about her life in TV.
TikTok has announced an NZ part of its new ‘Creator of the Year’ awards – building this kind of infrastructure around a nascent platform seems very smart to me. I’m going to try and figure out a way to fly across to Sydney to report.
As a huge Scrabble guy, I’m particularly excited about a new documentary coming to The Spinoff next Tuesday, covering players building up for the national champs. Here’s the trailer for Every Word Counts
Two very different local productions hit cinemas
Ahi is a film distributor founded by producer Chelsea Winstanley, releasing movies across Australia and New Zealand. It’s having a strong 2023, thanks to the fascinating Israel Adesanya doc Stylebender and a smart bet on horror hit Talk to Me, also picked up by the geniuses at A24 in the US. There’s a tangible talent-centric sensibility to what Ahi is doing, which makes me wonder if they’re not shooting to create a similar feel to A24’s approach for this part of the world (they declined my request for an interview, hence: wondering – but we’re going to talk in the new year).
Their latest is Bad Behaviour, a very specific and strange film starring Jennifer Connelly, Ben Whitshaw and Alice Englert, Jane Campion’s daughter, who also made her directorial debut. It’s about a woman slowly caving in at a cult-like retreat. Despite some electrifying and hilarious moments, I got lost in its moody drift – but other critics have loved it. More to my genre-bound taste is Loop Track, a near-DIY horror-thriller that features Tom Sainsbury writing, starring and directing. I had him on The Fold (out Monday) and really enjoyed digging into the thinking behind his career and why he approached this chilling, against-type film the way he did.
Go see them: Flicks has session times for both Bad Behaviour and Loop Track
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A new report into a NZ music scene in a state of flux
NZ on Air has just released a review of its music strategy, which it toplined at a showcase at Tuning Fork on Wednesday. The crowd was full of people I’ve known since I started going to showcases twenty years ago, but there were a couple of faces less familiar from gigs: National MPs Melissa Lee and Paul Goldsmith, each of whom could be close to culture funding very soon. I chatted with both separately and don’t think it will be any shock to suggest that the pleas for more investment from the stage are unlikely to be met. A more productive industry drum might beat for structural reform of the sometimes chaotic tangle of different bodies representing and funding screen and sound in this country.
The report advocates for changes that are more incremental than radical, with a payment to artists the first to go through. Others, like a desire for an export focus, are clearly a long way outside of NZ on Air’s current remit. The night was highlighted by great performances from Hina, Park Rd, Mim Jensen and Lost Tribe – but there remains a challenge at the core of NZ music: how to stand out when 120,000 songs are released each day. Boiler Room’s Chris Schulz and I discuss this on an upcoming episode of The Fold, and I’ll write more substantially on the report and current challenges to local music in the coming weeks.
Three great shows to stream this week
This England, a drama on TVNZ+ covering then-UK PM Boris Johnson’s response to the pandemic. The Weekly World Bulletin’s Peter Bale says it stars “Kenneth Branagh as a bumbling, confused, Latin-quoting bullshitter we now know to be alarmingly close to the real former British prime minister.”
Debuting at #5 on Netflix’s NZ top ten is another Australian documentary as evocative of the rural hinterland as Against All Odds is of the city fringe. Last Stop Larrimah is a kooky Duplass Brothers (Togetherness) doc on Netflix centring on a missing person case in a town of 11 – make that 10 – outback of Northern Territory.
Lastly, I was already curious about Amazon Prime’s Wiggles documentary Hot Potato (huge week for Aussie docs!) – Tara Ward’s review absolutely sold me.
See also: All that’s new to streaming this week.