Van Halen's David Lee Roth jokes that he's changing his name like Lady Antebellum

As you may have heard, country pop group Lady Antebellum changed their name to Lady A due to the slavery connotations attached to the world “Antebellum,” though the name change came with its own controversy because Lady A was already the name of a Seattle blues singer, who said, “They’re using the name because of a Black Lives Matter incident that, for them, is just a moment in time. If it mattered, it would have mattered to them before.” (Eventually, Lady A the blues singer said the country pop band could be Lady A too.)

Now, as MetalSucks points out, Van Halen singer David Lee Roth has made what appears to be a very dumb joke about all of this. He’s been posting paintings to his Twitter which are almost all signed “The Soggy Bottom” and almost all feature frogs, and one of them reads: “Diamond Dave following Lady Antebellum’s (now “Lady A”) example, will be dropping the ‘Lee.’ From now on he wants us all to call him ‘David L. Roth’ or simply ‘El Roth.'”

As MetalSucks also points out, this is not the same thing as dropping the word “antebellum,” a word which is inseparable from slavery. The “Lee” in Diamond Dave’s name comes from his father Nathan Lee, and unless they are related to Robert E. Lee and this fact has just never been reported, the name “Lee” does not imply anything about slavery the way “antebellum” does. More than anything else, this comes off like an unwise joke.