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David Lee Roth Jokes About Changing His Name, May Be Getting Crazier

  • Axl Rosenberg
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Folks, I think it’s safe to say that the heat has finally gotten to David Lee Roth in the worst possible way.

Roth has, as of late, been sharing paintings he himself has created on social media. Apparently, this has been his way of dealing with the sheer bug-fuck-nuts-ness that has been 2020. Okay. Fine. Fair enough.

But the paintings are, well… weird. And I don’t just mean “weird” as in “surreal” or “impressionistic.” I mean the general theme of the paintings seems to be… well…

All of the pieces have been shared under the name The Soggy Bottom or some variation thereof, and they all include “humorous” text, like Diamond Dave was making his own personal The Far Side or something. They often center around frogs. And they all carry a muddled political message (if anything, it leans conservative, the sardonic elements are so poorly used that it’s hard to know for sure). In fact, I keep wondering if the frogs are meant to be a reference to Pepe the Frog.

For example:

DLR’s most recent painting, though, is by far the most confounding of all. It appears to show a painter look at a frog’s ass (excuse me, soggy bottom), and the accompanying text suggests that Roth will be “following Lady Antebellum’s example” and changing his name to “David L. Roth” or simply “El Roth”

In case you the reference went over your head: Lady Antebellum is a popular country band that recently announced they’d be changing their name to Lady A, since “antebellum” is a term that has been used largely in reference to the South before the civil war — i.e., when white people owned black people as slaves (although “Lady A” is a name that comes with its own set of issues).

Thing is…

  • David Lee Roth is David Lee Roth’s birth name.
  • The name “Lee” does not have automatically have predominantly racist connotations.
  • The name “Lee” in this context does not have racist connotations — for example, Roth is not, to the best of my knowledge, related to Robert E. Lee.

So what point does Diamond Dave think he’s making? That Lady Antebellum needn’t have changed their name? There’s no real 1:1 correlation here to make the metaphor work. This is such a bizarre failure at satire that it makes me think Frankie Palmeri has taken over DLR’s Twitter account. Roth might as well have written, “Since everyone is taking a good hard look at casual and institutional racism right now, I will be doing multiplication tables on Vero.” It would have made roughly the same amount of sense.

[via Rock Feed]

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