David Lee Roth is back with another dance video, this time performing and singing along to a solo recording of Van Halen‘s “Panama.”
Roth’s dance clips fall somewhere between Britney Spears’ selfie dances and the absurdist humor of Robert and Toyah Fripp’s musical parodies. There’s a very DLR cheekiness to them — and they’re not too far removed from his actual stage antics.
Here he’s essentially singing karaoke with himself, as the audio of this version of “Panama” hails from recordings with the Roth Band from a 2022 session at Henson Recording Studio in Hollywood. Opening with a routine featuring a large pole and some rather random background images, DLR transitions into a barebones stage set where he struts and belts out the lyrics. He looks like he’s actually performing on an empty stage in some venue or theater.
The clip ends with the following text: “Don’t use me, rent me..”
Once again, Roth offered little else to go on, just the clip and its cryptic sign-off. One YouTube commenter gave a succinct summary of what they had just seen: “Me shitfaced doing karaoke at the local bar.”
It’s tough to read too far into DLR’s motives anymore, especially after his wishy-washy statements about retirement, but the “Panama” video does come after some heated remarks from Alex Van Halen. In his first interview since the death of his brother Eddie Van Halen, the drummer claimed that DLR didn’t want to honor Eddie during a proposed tribute tour, thus nixing the planned tour altogether.
You can watch the clip of David Lee Roth dancing and singing along to “Panama” below.