The Slants - The Band Who Must Not Be Named

Bassist Simon Tam talks about his band’s Supreme Court fight to trademark its controversial name.

- Meredith Bragg

SIMON TAM DIDN’T think it would be a big deal when he applied for trademark protection on the name of his band, The Slants. It was 2011, and the band—a dance-rock group whose members are all Asian-American—had been getting some buzz. A lawyer buddy told Tam he’d do the application, saying the process would take a couple hundred bucks and six months, tops.

“Things turned out a little bit different,” Tam told Reason several years later, on the eve of Supreme Court oral arguments over his trademark case.

Since 1946, the federal Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) has been charged with blocking the registration of trademarks that “may disparage...persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” It was on those grounds that the agency denied Tam his trademark.

The San Diego–born musician, whose father was raised in the Hong Kong area and whose mother is from Taiwan, says the name of the band was a lighthearted (and hardly unprecedented) effort to reclaim an old anti-Asian slur. Their discography includes Slants! Slants! Revolution (2009), The Yellow Album (2012), and their latest, an E.P. titled The Band Who Must Not Be Named.

Since that initial PTO denial, the case has slowly, painfully worked its way through the legal system. Early on, an administrative review board conceded that the band’s name was “an attempt not to disparage, but rather to wrest ‘ownership’ of the term from those who might use it with the intent to disparage,” but rejected the claim anyway, finding that the usage was still “objectionable.”