Credit: Dangerous Minds / Sascha Grey / Reddit / Album Cover

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat: whether they’re a famous name like Sasha Grey, or a struggling OnlyFans model, sex workers are uniformly utter badasses.

It’s a grotty, dangerous job in an industry that’s crawling with predatory men, and anyone who does it deserves your respect, whether you like it or not. From the people who were conned into it or did it out of desperation, all the way up to the people who do it because they love it. In fact, sex work comes with such severe risks that the average worker has bigger things to worry about than how patronising pretty much everyone is about them.

The idea that a sex worker can be anything other than a witless doll is treated with smirking disbelief. The revelation that someone who works in porn has interests outside of the lowest common denominator comes as an astonishing shock to people. Well, it’s true. Sex workers are human, which is news to most people, seemingly. Just look at how millions lost their tiny, tiny minds over the existence of Sasha Grey.

Grey, born Marina Hantzis, caused an enormous scene after her debut in hardcore porn shortly after her 18th birthday. For one, she looked nothing like the platonic ideal that most people have of a porn star (despite checking all the boxes for normal beauty standards, let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves). For another, she was completely unapologetic about her career in porn. Above all, she was smart, really fucking smart.

Grey spoke eloquently and intelligently in defence of her line of work and her presence within it. Something that most people in her line of work could probably do as well, mind you, but they weren’t getting prime slots on The Tyra Banks Show and The Insider.

What’s more, while Grey was unafraid and unashamed of her presence in porn, she is a creative at heart and wanted to try her hand at several other mediums like film, TV and, most of all, music.

Grey’s music taste, like her, is achingly cool. She’s such a devotee of industrial music that she took the part of her stage name from Sascha Konietzko, frontman of industrial Godheads KMFDM. So, when she formed a band in 2008, naturally, that was the music they made.

Formed shortly after Grey turned 20, aTelecine was a collaboration between her and producer Pable St. Francis, with the duo expanding to a quartet by adding Anthony D Juan and Ian Cinnamon shortly afterwards.

In true industrial fashion, the roles in the band were vaguely defined, with each member doing a little bit of everything from guitar to drums to bass to samples and synthesizers and everything in between. This was far from a pose as well. aTelecine were fairly active while Grey was a member, releasing a set of EPs and LPs before releasing their first studio album, The Falcon and the Pod, in 2011, and performing their first live shows the following year.

However, the early 2010s were when the celebrity of Sasha Grey was at its peak, and many more opportunities were being offered to her. Grey left the band in 2013 and has since gone from strength to strength, working with everyone from Steven Soderbergh and Elijah Wood to the Smashing Pumpkins and Eminem. Cinnamon is the sole member of aTelecine still active in the band, running it as a duo with new singer Ništa Nil Nada since 2020.

The last thing worth bearing in mind is that while her music is very cool, and she’s clearly a smart person, the last thing that Sasha Grey is, at least within the porn industry, is unique. No doubt thousands of others would have just as much to say and do as her, given the opportunity, but hers was a lifeline that vanishingly few people get due to the stigma sex workers still get to this day.