Music Film: Slave to The Grind

A film by Doug Brown

100 Minutes | Canada | 2018

If you lived in Flint Michigan, USA in the 80s, you likely worked in an auto factory. If you lived in Birmingham, England in the 80s, you likely worked in an industrial setting. If you were a teenager in either of these cities during those years, you either accepted your fate or broke the mold. In defiance of tradition, groups of punk rockers and metalheads in these respective cities created a new sound, and consequently a new genre of music, that was too punk for metalheads, and too heavy for punks.

Grindcore fused the anarchistic attitudes of the UKs Punk scene with the speed and drunken aggression of Death Metal, which was simultaneously being created in the US. When Napalm Death released ‘Scum’ in 1986, world-renowned BBC DJ, John Peel, announced that ‘Grindcore’ was the fastest and most abrasive sounding music imaginable, and he was right.

Immediately musicians were torn. Many believed Grindcore to be an anticapitalist, cathartic blast of jokingly short songs. Lyrics were often aggressively pro-choice, anti-homophobic and anti-racist. While others inverted the genre with the hopes of becoming as offensive as possible when it came to band names and lyrical content; likely a ‘fuck you’ to the mainstream.

Slave To The Grind is the first documentary on Grindcore to capture the genre’s 35 year life span. The film takes you to Japan, the United States, UK, Australia, Singapore, Finland and Sweden to discuss why the genre has persisted, and changed, over time.