Why is the history of death metal and grindcore “improbable”?
Well, something that’s so extreme, that at the time was as heavy and fast and over-the-top musically as you can get—I think that it ended up appealing to a pretty wide audience. That in and of itself is improbable. As it relates to Choosing Death and the broader picture, in the early to mid-‘90s, there were a lot of bigger labels that thought it was going to be the next big thing. For a band like Napalm Death, where they started out, playing little shows and clubs in Birmingham (England), and almost doing it half as a joke when they started, to getting to a point where they’re being distributed through Sony, and they’re getting big budgets and advertising campaigns, and people pouring money into them as a product—to get it to that point, even though it didn’t cross over to big commercial success, and to get it on the cusp of things seems to me an unlikely story. One of the most interesting parts of your book discusses what happened when independent labels like Earache and Roadrunner si
