When are people gonna stop taking offense for any stupid reason they feel like and causing everybody else to suffer for their fragile sensibilities?
The Canadian band Viet Cong had a show cancelled in Oberlin College, Ohio not because of their lyrics, not because of their violent behavior on stage but just because of their offensive moniker!! These ‘Communists Traitor to Vietnam’ did a lot of bad things during history – but honestly so did Americans – and this band is not the first or last one to use a so-called offensive name!
‘I cancelled this show after meeting with representatives from the Vietnamese Student Association (VSA) who expressed the desire to see this [show] cancelled,’ explained gig promoter Ivan Krasnov in a reply on the social networking site. He deeply apologized ‘to anyone hurt or made uncomfortable by the name and its connotations’ and was sorry for booking a band whose moniker ‘deeply offends and hurts Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American communities, both in Oberlin and beyond’ … ‘To allow a band called “Viet Cong” to play a show and make money at Oberlin College would be in complete disregard of Oberlin’s radical history and of the values it professes to uphold’ he wrote on his long letter uploaded on Facebook referring to an interview of the band for Impose magazine during which the band declared: ‘That [name] comes from our drummer, and from us being teenagers and watching movies. The Viet Cong were always the bad asses in movies.’…Well, it’s not as if they had chosen this name innocently, of course they knew about the Viet Cong!
Sang Nguyen, a first-generation Vietnamese-American, also wrote a very emotional letter to the band for Impose magazine in response to the band’s interview with the Guardian in February, in which she addressed a bad-taste comment made by Matt Wallace, the drummer of the band describing his bandmate holding his bass like a gun: ‘All you need is a rice paddy hat and it would be so Viet Cong’. ‘This history of violence is what I am reminded of every time I see Viet Cong’s band name pop up on my news feed’, she wrote.
Rightly so, a lot of people came up with a list of bands whose monikers could certainly offend a bunch of people, what about the Dead Kennedys? Gang of Four? Joy Division and New Order with their Nazi connotations? And I could come up with so many others: Circle Jerks, Midget Handjob (damn Keith Morris he is in both bands!) Fucked up, Dying Fetus, Butthole Surfers, Dicks, the Queers, the New Pornographers could sure offend many Christians, and there is much worst than this in the metal world! Believe it or not there are also a bands called the Child Molesters, the Clits, Cunts and I will pass on all the anal references….
So should we still be offended by a band moniker now that we have heard almost everything, aren’t we over that? A band could call itself Hitler’s mustache and I would not be offended, I am offended by people’s actions or lack of actions not by a name that was chosen out of laziness or just because it sounded great. But one thing is certain, I had never heard Viet Cong’s music before but all this moniker brouhaha is sure good publicity.