OK Go the band now fighting OK GO! the cereal

Okay, so: OK Go (the band) is now fighting OK GO! (the cereal), over the rights to the OK Go/GO! name, in what we cannot—despite therapy and medications—stop ourselves from thinking of as one hell of an OK Go/GO! Throw (down). (Sorry.)

This is according to Variety, which reports that the L.A. pop rock band (who, we should be clear, have no issue with Pop Rocks, as far as we know) is embroiled in a legal battle with Big Cereal company Post Holdings. That includes actual, no-screwing around lawsuits; as our colleagues at The Takeout reported last month, Post has gone so far as to sue the band for the rights to the name Ok GO!, as part of the latest escalation between the well-known band and the big cereal company, which again: This is about a fight between a band and a cereal company, for some damn reason.

By the way: Technically, OK GO! isn’t its own cereal; it’s Post’s branding for a new series of snack-sized offerings, designed for portable consumption of Fruity Pebbles or Honey Bunches of Oats. (They come with powdered milk, you add cold water, and, bam, there you have it: An approximation of food.) Post says it only took the matter to the courts because the band had been threatening to sue it for months over the product; at the time, lead singer Damian Kulash made a statement to Billboard saying that, “A big corporation chose to steal the name of our band to market disposable plastic cups of sugar to children. That was an unwelcome surprise, to say the least. But then they sue US about it? Presumably, the idea is that they can just bully us out of our own name, since they have so much more money to spend on lawyers? I guess that’s often how it works, but hopefully, we’ll be the exception.”

All of this is complicated, as Variety notes, by the fact that OK Go (the band) has often deliberately blurred the line between music and marketing, arranging lucrative sponsorship arrangements for their high-profile and fantastical videos. (In the past, Kulash has described it as a way to mine alternate revenue streams from an industry that usually forces artists to subsist on either streaming royalties or touring; either way, it adds a pretty hefty motivation for the band to keep its name cleared from unauthorized use.) Kulash was even more blunt in an interview today, laying out his position: “It’s enraging… It seems like such cut-and dry-bullying. There are so many other things you could call your fucking cereal. Just pick one. Nobody looks good in this. Just pick a new name.”