They’re suing because Anita White is asking $10 million to let them use the name Lady A. (Sorry if it’s a paywall)
Sounds like a big mess all around.
I really think you should have read the Rolling Stone article I linked before you posted the group’s side of the story uncritically.
From your link:
My, how…um… nice of them to allow her to use her own name.
Maybe they should just change their name to just use a different A-word instead of Antebellum, so they could still just “Lady A” as an unofficial shorthand. Something like Lady Abolitionist, or Lady Antifa.
They definitely should. Because right now, everyone knows the A stands for Antebellum. So they aren’t really changing the name of the band, they’re just obscuring it.
Fuck them.
The band took the name “Lady Antebellum” after posing for photo shoots at antebellum mansions. They knew its association with wealthy white plantation owners; it simply didn’t bother them.
But there’s more to this Lady A story, and I think when you know it, you’ll agree that the band has been disingenuous and should have agreed to the $10 million dollars. [source]
In her very first conversation with the band, on June 15, when its members — Hillary Scott, Dave Haywood, and Charles Kelley — repeatedly asked to take a picture they could post on social media to show the world how they were “moving forward with positive solutions and common ground,” White could see that they weren’t really concerned about her position as an independent artist. The band wanted to record a song with White, she told me just after the lawsuit was announced, and they wanted to record the process, documentary style, to chronicle the proof that they were nothing like the rest of the country standing on opposite sides of life and liberty, unable or unwilling to meet in the middle. But as they spoke during the negotiations over the last two weeks, White began to realize that any meeting in the middle would result only from her own painstaking strides. The band had already made their splashy statement, declaring newfound wokeness by ceremoniously discarding the latter half of their name. Their declarations of faith were meaningless, White now says, because they never engaged with her in good faith.
White says with the band’s use of the name Lady A., her own music has been buried on Spotify and other music sites.
As for the $10 million dollars, White says half was to go to rebrand and half to go to help the Black community, including independent Black artists.
If the band formerly known as Lady Antebellum was going to vow to support to Black lives, Lady A says, she was going to hold them to it.
“Five million dollars is nothing, and I’m actually worth more than that, regardless of what they think. But here we go again with another white person trying to take something from a Black person, even though they say they’re trying to help. If you want to be an advocate or an ally, you help those who you’re oppressing. And that might require you to give up something because I am not going to be erased.”
TL;DR: Lady Antebellum’s sole motivation was to look woke, not to be woke.
It was not intended to be uncritical. Her lawyers must have known that country-Lady A would fight an amount that large.
The uncritical part is that you posted their side of the story only and as the Rolling Stone article clearly shows, their side of the story leaves out a lot of details (that coincidentally happen to make the group look like assholes).
The group is trying desperately to control the narrative here and I don’t think we should allow them to.
And if they don’t want to pay $10 million, they should just change their name. If I were feeling catty towards them (and I might in that situation), I’d have said “sure you can use the name - for $1 billion. Take it or leave it”
Screw them. They should have no claim whatsoever.