Canadian indie rock band The New Pornographers faced an unpleasant dilemma this year after drummer Joseph Seiders’ arrest and subsequent conviction on charges of possessing child pornography. After firing Seiders and thinking about it a while, the band has decided to keep the name.
“The day [we found out], we were all like, ‘Obviously we can’t call ourselves the New Pornographers anymore.’ And then time passed,” Newman said. …
“A few weeks later, I ran into my friend Zach Djanikian, who played on this record and Continue as a Guest, and I was talking about the band name possibly changing, and he had the first violent reaction, which was, ‘No! You can’t change your name. You worked too hard for that name,'” he explained. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, you’re right.'”
The striking name has several inspirations. I read once that it was to spite famed televangelist and patron of sex workers Jimmy Swaggart, who described rock music as the new pornography, but here founder A. C. Newman’s cites a love of Japanese film The Pornographers and folk legends The New Seekers.
“The more I thought about it, it just seemed like a bad-faith argument [for changing the name]. I named it after a Japanese movie by Shōhei Imamura [1966’s The Pornographers], so, should we go to the estate of Shōhei Imamura and say, ‘You should change the name of that movie because there was a band that named themselves after your movie, and this happened?'” Newman said.
Well, one difference between The New Pornographers and The Pornographers is no-one in The Pornographers was jailed for filming an 11-year-old boy using the toilet at Chick-fil-A.
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