Viet Cong Are Changing Their Name

Photo by Tom Spray

Earlier this year, a Viet Cong show was canceled due to response over the band’s “offensive” name. The band subsequently released a statement saying, “We never intended for our name to be provocative or hurtful.” Today, the band have announced that they will change their name.

The band released a statement explaining that after many conversations with “members of the Vietnamese community” about their name, they’ve decided to chance their name. “Through this dialogue and hearing about what the name means to so many people, we have decided we will be changing the name of our band.” They wrote:

Art and music are about creative expression. However, our band name is not our cause, and we are not going to fight for it. This is not what our band is about.

There are many individuals more eloquent than us who have recently had a lot to say about the topic of the name and our appropriation of the name Viet Cong. For more insights into the arguments we encourage you to read some of these. We are a band who want to make music and play our music for our fans. We are not here to cause pain or remind people of atrocities of the past.

The truth is, we’ve been planning to change the band name for the next record for months; it has not been an easy decision by any means. We are a band of four people with four individual voices; this debate has been long and difficult for us and it took time for everyone to settle on a plan of action.

We don’t know what the new name of our band will be, and we owe it to our fans to honour the concerts we have booked. We rushed into our last band name decision, we don’t plan to rush into this one, but know that will be rolling out a new name as soon as we agree upon one.

We realize this won’t satisfy everyone, but that’s certainly not the goal of this band. We never expected this kind of attention in the first place and just want to return to playing music, which is the only thing we (kinda) know how to do.

We’ve had an incredible amount of support from fans, and we have to thank everyone who has said supportive words to us as we struggle with this. As always, we welcome people talking to us in person.

– Matt, Mike, Monty & Danny.

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