Why The Slants Are Getting Operatic

For a band that announced their effective retirement three years ago, The Slants have been remarkably busy.

The Portland-based dance-rock group’s charitable foundation continues to support Asian American artists across the country. A long-gestating new album featuring both original members and celebrity guests has been tentatively scheduled for an autumn release. And the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis commissioned a 20-minute work based on The Slants’ landmark Supreme Court victory—the culmination of a decadelong legal battle to safeguard their trademark.

Speaking to WW just before the world premiere of Slanted: An American Rock Opera in March, Slants founder Simon Tam looked back on the peculiar challenges of singing about dance music.

WW: Your opera! How did that happen?

Simon Tam: The Opera Theatre of Saint Louis launched a program called the New Works Collective where they commission works outside of the traditional opera world. They’re known as an edgier house willing to roll the dice, but many of the recent pieces they’ve developed have gone on to the Met. If we’re the first for this particular program, it’s still in line with what they do.

When did you hear about it?

A fan from St. Louis, this Asian American community leader on their board who has known the band for some time, reached out to me and said we should apply to turn our story into an opera. I put together a pitch, we were selected, and, over a few months, we created something that brought everybody to St. Louis along with about eight to 10 singers to perform the different parts. That was December. After staging and choreography, now it’s March.

Was this the band or just you?

Before filling out the application, I spent a bit of time talking to my guitarist Joe Joe [X. Jiang] because I really didn’t want to go it alone. That’s how these conversations started. We’ll do this, but it has to reflect The Slants a bit more. They invited us here to St. Louis last summer so we could see a couple of operas in production, and we were just, like, wow, this is awful. We wanted to do the complete opposite.

Basically, pitching the opera, they were excited about bringing rock ‘n’ roll into the opera world, but we wanted, like, a synth-pop thing.

You contributed new material for the project?

Yeah, we wrote all new stuff because the songs have to more explicitly tell a story, you know? Opera lines are very much in dialogue form, like Broadway theater, as opposed to traditional verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge format. We originally just started writing songs the way we would anyway—maybe a bit more theatrical—with the thought that they’d, like, opera-fy them, but things turned out a little different…

It was hard to get ideas from the world of opera because the music seemed so inaccessible. Once we had our core vision down, we went back and listened to soundtracks and other operas and only then started figuring out how to bring some of those ideas back into the work but make it still fit the overall vibe or vision we were looking for.

We wrote the pieces like we were developing songs for an album—recording full demos with multiple parts and actually creating fully produced songs for them to listen to and learn—but they completely ignored all of that. They only wanted the music in written form and would only work with what they call a piano-vocal score throughout rehearsals.

So, instead of chopping up RBG samples…

I took a bunch of her speeches from the arguments during our oral hearing at the Supreme Court and rewrote them as a song. The lines sung by the person playing Ruth Bader Ginsburg are basically all words that she actually spoke. We tried to make it as authentic to her as possible.

There’s a courtroom scene?

As you know, [the opera is] loosely based on our experience at the Supreme Court, but that particular journey took almost 10 years. In order to really compress the timeline, we start the story in court when attorneys are already launching full debates and arguing against each other.

Midway through, the character playing me begins this inner monologue. I had to stay silent in the courtroom so the character’s singing out the thoughts in my head—frustrated, feeling very invisible until actually seen. Taking a little break from reality, Ruth Bader Ginsburg acknowledges me, we share a duet, and we’re able to sway the court, which eventually leads to the decision in our favor.

Which did not happen in real life?

She did acknowledge the band, but there was no exchange. It wasn’t like we had a dance number.