Simon Tam & The Slants: Worth the Fight

In her new podcast, Stage & Studio's Dmae Lo Roberts talks with The Slants' cofounder about the band's battle to trademark its name, the Portland Chinatown Museum's exhibit on the band's history, and more.
Simon Tam of The Slants, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he fought to get the band's name trademarked -- and won. Photo courtesy of Simon Tam.
Simon Tam of The Slants, on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court, where he fought to get the band’s name trademarked — and won. Photo courtesy of Simon Tam.

Simon Tam is one of the few, if any, rock musicians to have received a major award from the American Bar Association. Co-founded in 2006 as an all-Asian American dance band paying homage to ’80s music, the Portland-originated The Slants were denied the right to trademark their name. Tam had to fight a case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to get the band name trademarked. 

In 2017, Tam won his case against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office which initially refused to grant a patent, saying the name The Slants was “disparaging to people of Asian descent.” Simon later wrote about the experience in his book Slanted: How An Asian American Troublemaker Took On The Supreme Court.

The Portland Chinatown Museum is featuring The Slants in an exhibit called What’s Worth The Fight: The History Of The Slants, continuing through May 11, 2025.

The museum holds its ninth annual Lunar New Year Dragon Dance Parade and Celebration on Feb. 9, 2025. Starting at 10 a.m., members of The Slants will perform to kick off the parade. Then, starting at 11 a.m., other performances follow, with the International Lion Dance Team, Lee’s Association Lion Dance Team, White Lotus Dance Team, the Yo-Yo team and Rip City Crew.

Listen to the podcast

Featured music: Sakura, Sakura by The Slants. Subscribe and listen to Stage & Studio on: AppleGoogleSpotify, Android and Sticher and hear past shows on the official Stage & Studio website.

In this podcast, Simon Tam talks about …

The Trademark Office denying the trademark of their name:“And the government said that’s not good enough because of urban dictionary. com. It just seems like there was such a disconnect with trying to do like the right thing or the politically correct thing and went against you. They’re being offended on our behalf. And actually the Oregon Commission on Asian Pacific Islander Affairs wrote to the trademark office asking like ,’what folks from our community, did you have involved in this decision?’ And they wrote back and they said, ‘Well, nobody, but we have a lot of Asians that work in this building.'”

The work of The Slants Foundation:  ”We serve maybe 500 artists across North America, and we … both provide trainings and funding and research for them. But we are also in the midst of doing other things like filming television shows and, and film and filming movies to try and highlight the next generation of troublemakers.”

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About being half-Taiwanese and moving to Taiwan: “ After spending a few years here in the States doing our respective arts, I think we realized we (partner and him) wanted to be in a place that we felt better represented our values. And it’s a culture that really takes care of its own people. And that was something I really liked. Plus, I want to be at the epicenter of the very best food on earth. So, Taiwan is definitely the place to be for that. It does. It does have the best food, I have to say.”

Simon Tam talking with Dmae Lo Roberts from his home studio.
Simon Tam talking with Dmae Lo Roberts from his home studio.

See a video clip of the opera Simon Tam and Joe X. Jiang created about their Supreme Court fight. Slanted: An American Rock Opera was commissioned by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and the Mellon Foundation.

More about Simon Tam

Tam, the recipient of the Mark T. Banner Award from the American Bar Association and the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award, may be best-known for winning a landmark case at the Supreme Court of the United States in 2017. The case (Matal v. Tam) was named Milestone Case of the Year from Managing IP Magazine. His memoir, Slanted: How an Asian American Troublemaker Took on the Supreme Court, was named “One of the Best Books on the Constitution of All Time” by BookAuthority, and won an award for Best Autobiography/Memoir from the Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Simon’s work in arts and activism has been highlighted in thousands of media features across 150 countries, including: The New York Times, the Washington Post, Rolling Stone, NPR, and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. He is the founder and bassist of The Slants, one of the first all-Asian American dance rock bands in the world. He is also a co-founder of The Slants Foundation, a nonprofit organization that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible for arts, activism, and civic engagement.

Dmae Lo Roberts

Dmae Roberts is a two-time Peabody winning radio producer, writer and theatre artist. Her work is often autobiographical and cross-cultural and informed by her biracial identity. Her Peabody award-winning documentary Mei Mei, a Daughter’s Song is a harrowing account of her mother’s childhood in Taiwan during WWII. She adapted this radio documentary into a film. She won a second Peabody-award for her eight-hour Crossing East documentary, the first Asian American history series on public radio. She received the Dr. Suzanne Ahn Civil Rights and Social Justice award from the Asian American Journalists Association and was selected as a United States Artists (USA) Fellow. Her stage plays and essays have been published in numerous publications. She published her memoir The Letting Go Trilogies: Stories of a Mixed-Race Family in 2016. As a theatre artist, she has won two Drammys, one for her acting and one for her play Picasso In The Back Seat which also won the Oregon Book Award. Her plays have been produced in Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, NYC and Florida. Roberts is the executive producer of MediaRites, a nonprofit multicultural production organization and co-founder of Theatre Diaspora, an Asian American/Pacific Islander non-profit theatre that started as a project of MediaRites. She created the Crossing East Archive of more than 200 hours of broadcast-quality, pan-AAPI interviews and oral histories. For 23 years, Roberts volunteered to host and produce Stage & Studio live on KBOO radio. In 2009, she started the podcast on StagenStudio.com, which continues at ArtsWatch.

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