A-Infos (en) Alt. Media: David Rovics - the anarchist troubadour - Songs of Social Significance

Since the mid 90s American-born singer-songwriter David Rovics has been 
nurturing and consolidating intelligent, informed grass-roots dissent among 
social movements across the world with his unique brand of protest-folk. 
Although he’s never attained commercial success (one gets the impression he 
doesn’t exactly see that as a bad thing), David’s long association with AK 
Press, his often provocative material and reputation for brutal honesty have 
made him a leader among anarchist and other antiauthoritarian groups in many 
different countries. During his numerous appearances at protests and rallies 
throughout North America and Europe he’s shared a stage with the likes of Noam 
Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Ralph Nader, Michael Moore and virtually every other 
prominent left-wing activist and intellectual you care to name, and his songs 
of human struggle and social injustice have earned him frequent and 
well-deserved comparisons with the likes of Woodie Guthrie, Pete Seeger and 
Phil Ochs.

Ever derisive of the mainstream music industry (a “propagandistic, evil 
corporate phenomenon”), David makes all his albums available for free online 
and spends most of his time on the road, playing literally hundreds of shows 
every year at folk clubs, conferences and college campuses all over the world. 
A voracious anti-war campaigner and perennial champion of the underdog, he’s 
been described in such terms as “the last American protest singer”, “the peace 
poet and troubadour of our time” and “a guy George W. Bush would probably like 
to clamp in chains at Guantanamo Bay”.

After a thwarted attempt to meet in Manchester in January (long story), I 
eventually caught up with him the other side of the Atlantic a couple of months 
later at his gig at Club Passim in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Being the amenable 
fellow that he is, the following morning he agreed to take some time out to 
answer a few questions on music, anarchism and the state of the world.

JH: You’ve described music as “part of the stockpile of ammunition necessary to 
build and maintain a social movement”. Music and politics have always gone hand 
in hand, but in the end can a song, an artist, or a musical genre ever really 
have any lasting influence in effecting meaningful social change?

DR: I’d say that by itself music’s not going to do anything, but I think that 
people always need to be inspired to continue to struggle. Within the context 
of a social movement music tends to play a pretty prominent role in that 
respect, but while the theory might be that music does have an impact, the 
reality is that everybody uses it for different reasons and in different ways – 
whether it does have an impact, or they feel it does, or they just need it. So 
whether you start with the theory or the reality is immaterial, but either way 
music has always had a role to play in social movements – and it’s is also 
recognised by ‘the powers that be’ as a powerful tool for much the same 
reasons; those in power use it all the time as well, and I think that should 
tell us something. I mean, just as militant left-wing movements use music, so 
does the military by the same token, (although it’s usually less interesting, 
but you know…they sing and stuff). Likewise, corporations use music constantly, 
daily, every minute, to sell products. Whatever’s going on, whatever we’re 
doing there’s going to be music involved with it – it’s part of who we are as 
human beings.

JH: But take punk for example, when bands like the Pistols and the Clash hit 
the UK in 1976-77 history shows that the establishment was genuinely worried, 
to the extent that the “treasonable” nature of Lydon’s lyrics was supposedly 
even being debated in Parliament. But aside from the obvious turning point it 
marked in popular culture, did it ultimately make a difference? Thirty years on 
and Britain still has a monarchy, we still have an immensely centralised 
governmental system, we have a dangerous megalomaniac in Downing Street and we 
still basically have the same degree of apathy among the population as we ever 
did – probably more so. The argument could quite easily be made that what was 
seen as little short of a revolution at the time actually made no discernible 
long-term difference whatsoever to the political situation.

DR: I guess when you’re living in a situation with people like Blair, Thatcher 
or whoever running the show it’s easy not to see the possible impact of various 
left-wing movements, individuals, musicians and genres of music, and to 
discount the impact that they may have had.

I mean, in the end, yes, Iraq is still being occupied by British troops, and 
Britain is still part of the whole global empire of wealthy countries 
oppressing the rest of the world, but I think that certainly from my own 
experience, punk rock and other recent forms of music have had a huge impact on 
so many people, folks perhaps like yourself, and certainly a lot of people that 
I know who discovered political ideas through music first and then became 
intellectuals or academics or activists, or maybe just continued into the 
musical exploration or whatever we did. People went on to do all kinds of 
stuff, but the point is that it was through music that they first became 
politicised.

For example, in the introduction to the People’s History of the United States 
Howard Zinn writes about how the first time he heard about the Ludlow Massacre 
in Colorado, a seminal event in U.S. labour history, was through Woodie 
Guthrie’s song Ludlow Massacre. You know, this is a real respected historian 
but I think it’s true of a lot of people, from teenagers discovering the Clash 
for the first time to people who are already accomplished historians 
discovering a Woodie Guthrie song – music definitely has a valuable impact.

JH: Like Guthrie and the other “protest singers” to whom you’ve been compared, 
the impact of your songs is derived not just from their lyrical content, but 
also from the fact that you’re clearly a technically impressive musician. Even 
so, most descriptions of you concentrate on the political nature of your music 
to the extent that you’re most frequently labelled an activist. Would you say 
that you are a musician first and foremost, or an activist?

DR: I’d say there’s no real line between the two, but for me that question 
always opens up an interesting point; the fact that you’re even asking this 
should tell you and everybody else that we’re living in a society which is 
profoundly impacted by the corporate music industry, and I think that that’s 
the real relevant issue here.

It’s only since the advent of the music industry – and where you draw the line 
as to when exactly that phenomenon came into being is a matter of opinion, but 
it certainly doesn’t go back more than fifty or a hundred years at the very 
most – it’s only since the advent of the music industry that we’ve come to 
think of “political” music or music with a so-called “message” as some kind of 
novelty, or something separate from the norm.

It’s the music industry that has caused us to think that this kind of music is 
marginal, or eccentric or strange or whatever, and that the normal thing to do 
is to write songs about heterosexual relationships. Certainly that has been 
normal for a long time; in music from all over the world going back thousands 
of years you’ll find songs about heterosexual relationships; that’s been a real 
standard thing – love lost, love found and so on. It’s a traditional subject to 
write about and probably half the songs out there, maybe more than that, are 
about that. That’s all fine and good, but if you look at the collections of 
music out there you’ll find that just under half or so of the stuff that people 
have been singing about is what we’d today call ‘political’ – songs about life, 
songs about conscription, songs about, you know, joining the army and having 
your leg blown off, songs about not wanting to fight in a stupid foreign war, 
songs about being tired of spending all your days in the factory, songs about 
mining disasters, songs about police brutality, songs about your land being 
stolen by the rich.

You know, it’s people writing about reality. Certainly it’s what has been 
reality for ordinary people living in industrial societies for the past several 
hundred years, and before that in feudal societies where most people were very 
poor and oppressed. This kind of music has existed in so many different 
societies through the ages, basically wherever there tends to be written 
language and an oral tradition passed on through song – the tradition goes way, 
way back.

Basically, where there’s a struggle people are writing songs about it, and the 
music industry has done its best to marginalise that and to say that it’s 
“political”, and to call people like me “protest singers”.  I don’t reject that 
term because there’s certainly a lot to protest about, and I write a lot of 
songs that you could definitely call “protest songs”, but I think that that’s a 
genre that was created by the music industry. In the context of the history of 
music and society what I’m doing is mainstream. It’s totally mainstream. What 
you’re hearing on the commercial airwaves is only one side of what has been 
going on for thousands of years – it’s a strange sort of bizarre creature 
that’s had half of its brain cut out.

JH: You have a pretty sizable following among anarchists across the world, but 
although you’re obviously sympathetic to the aims and ideals of anarchism I’ve 
never heard you explicitly align yourself with “the anarchists” as a group, or 
other political or ideological movement for that matter. It strikes me that 
there’s probably a very good reason for that. What is it?

DR: Yeah, I have a more sort of populist orientation in terms of my 
understanding of reality and history. I have lots of respect for people who 
want to use the term ‘anarchist’ to describe their politics, or ‘socialist’ or 
‘communist’ for that matter, but I think that if you start attaching labels to 
your way of thinking most people have no idea what you’re talking about. I 
think that if you use terms like that you end up pigeonholing yourself and 
marginalising yourself, and people don’t know what you’re talking about and you 
have to explain yourself every time you use the word.

Sure, it’s efficient shorthand for people who already understand each other and 
understand where they’re coming from – maybe then they can use terms like ‘oh 
he’s an anarchist’, ‘he’s a Trotskyite’, he’s whatever, but once they get 
outside of their circle, even among other left-wingers, most people don’t know 
what they’re talking about.

I think that basic anarchist views are totally commonsense and held in common 
by huge numbers of people, and I just don’t feel the need personally to sort of 
pigeonhole myself by calling myself an anarchist and then have a large block of 
people discount my perspective as a result of my having chosen to attach that 
label to my viewpoint. I just want people to read my essays and listen to my 
songs and see what kind of political conclusions they get to from that.

But I think that so many of the things that I’m writing about are basically 
talking about anarchist principles, but are they not socialist principles as 
well? I certainly wouldn’t want to say that, because a lot of anarchists (by 
many people’s definitions of anarchism, whether they’re anarchists or not), 
have definitions of anarchism that I think are just ridiculous. On the other 
hand, other people have very sensible definitions. But the same can be said for 
socialism, and communism for that matter, although I have real issues with most 
people who call themselves communists – I have real issues with their 
perspective because you tend to find that if they call themselves ‘communists’ 
and not ‘socialists’, it often means that they have a real reverence for Josef 
Stalin, which I don’t share. That’s not always the case of course, and I think 
I have a lot in common with some of the anti-Stalinist, antiauthoritarian 
elements within the group who like to describe themselves as ‘communists’ or 
‘socialists’.

Depending on one’s definition I would certainly either be a communist or an 
anarchist or a socialist; I’ve just never found it helpful to pick one of those 
things and reject the others because I think the lines are all too blurry.

JH: Anarchism of course is, and has always been, one of the most singularly 
misunderstood of all political ideologies. There is this common perception of 
anarchists that there are plenty who are to tell you what it is they want to 
get rid of, but fewer who are capable of telling you what they would put in its 
place. In other words, although anarchism does present a coherent idea of 
post-capitalist society, its followers often come across as being all about 
what they’re against, rather than what they’re actually for. It seems to me 
that a lot of people who call themselves anarchists these days don’t actually 
do much to remedy this situation.

DR: Yeah, absolutely; there’s a real element, particularly among anarchist 
youth, of simple, mindless rebellion and antiauthoritarianism, or people who 
don’t like their parents or don’t want to go to school or whatever. All of that 
is a perfectly understandable reaction to living in a relatively authoritarian 
society with values that are all messed up, and people have to go through these 
phases, but hopefully they come out the other end with some kind of analysis of 
what kind of world they’d like to see.

Rebelling against the world they don’t like is a perfectly reasonable thing to 
do, but at the same time, naturally, growing up in a basically conformist sort 
of society, anarchists are actually also quite conformist, often very dogmatic 
as anarchists, and this can get very scary. Conformist, stylistically means, 
you know, wearing black or having the right kind of tattoos and facial 
piercings – nothing wrong with any of that, but often you’ll find that there’s 
a real dogmatism about it, and a real fear of straying from the party line, 
even though technically there isn’t any party line.

I think that’s why a song like I’m a Better Anarchist than You tends to go over 
really well in the anarchist community, because most people within that 
community, with very, very few exceptions, are all thinking the same thing – 
they’re all thinking “yeah, I really like the anarchists, and if I’m going to 
be in a community anywhere this is it….but jeez they’re dogmatic”. They’re 
thinking these things, but at the same time they’re thinking ‘maybe I shouldn’t 
say them, because I want to be like these people too, and I don’t want to get 
criticised for being bourgeois or something’. But when you actually say it, 
when you say look, come on, just fucking relax, people really appreciate the 
sentiment.

JH: I imagine you play that song in some places and you’ll get a few 
uncomfortable looks…

DR: Yeah! Yeah, that’s the best part! Most everybody loves it, but then you get 
a couple of people who are looking like, “uh-oh, he’s talking about me, and I 
know everybody else is thinking he’s talking about me”.

JH: There’s a line in that song actually where you poke fun at the anarchists 
who are uncompromisingly against working within the structures of 
representative democracy to achieve socialist or anarchist objectives. I’m 
interested in hearing more about where you stand on that whole issue of working 
within the existing democratic structures as a means of effecting social 
change. Because a lot of anarchists would, I think actually with a certain 
degree of justification, say that not only are electoral systems ineffective, 
but that by voting you’re merely legitimising the very structure which the 
basic tenets of anarchism hold to be illegitimate.

DR: Obviously representative democracy doesn’t work very well in most places, 
but I would tend to say that it’s a bit dogmatic to say that you shouldn’t have 
anything whatsoever to do with electoral systems. On the flipside of that, of 
course – to use the U.S. as an example – I think it’s completely naïve to think 
that there’s any hope in reforming the Democratic Party. But if somebody’s 
going to run as a Democrat I’m not going to tell them they shouldn’t be doing 
that, or that they’re selling out, because I don’t think that’s true. I think 
that actually there are some fantastic Democrats in the U.S. congress – sure, 
there’s only about twelve of them out of five hundred, and that’s clearly not 
enough to have any kind of real impact, but I think if we had a lot more 
Democrats like Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich, then the face of 
politics in the United States would look a lot more like, you know, Denmark, 
which I think works, or Sweden or wherever. It could be a massive improvement 
anyway.

Also I think in local elections it’s actually really possible to have all kinds 
of impact, although it’s somewhat limited in terms of how much large-scale 
change you can actually make because so many of the most important laws are 
state and federal in this country. Even if you run the city there’s only so 
much you can do while running the city, oddly enough, even though the 
population centres are the cities. I mean, the bottom line is that it’s really 
not a very democratic democracy. If we had a more actually representative 
democracy, that would be a very good thing.

I think reform is possible, but I think that one sort of revolution or another 
is the only way to advance the cause of the survival of our species or not 
having hunger and starvation or racism or these kinds of things. I think it’s 
really naïve to think that there’s only one way forward to do that, and 
actually reality in all kinds of places demonstrates how many different ways 
serious social change can happen. The one thing that is clear to me though, is 
that there’s really no way you can have social change without a mass movement – 
I think if you want to make blanket types of statement then I think that’s a 
blanket statement you can make; there’s no way forward without a mass movement; 
there’s no way that individual acts of “terrorism” or heroism or individuals in 
any other situation are really going to by themselves do much of anything.

We need a mass movement, a sustained, militant mass movement. Whether that’s a 
movement bent on overthrowing the government or not is a different thing – 
there’s all kinds of ways forward, and I think recent events of the past ten 
years in Venezuela are a real example. Certainly there are many perfectly 
legitimate criticisms of Chavez, and I have plenty of them, but I think that 
what’s happening in Venezuela is accurately described as a revolutionary 
situation; and it’s not a violent revolution – it’s not non-violent either, but 
the fact remains that Chavez is elected, and he’s been elected over and over again.

On the other hand I think the kind of work that Michael Albert is doing on 
economics is really important, thinking about how an anarchist society would 
really function and how, if we’re really going to completely reject the market 
how are we going to do things economically, and how, if we’re really going to 
completely reject representative democracy, how are we going to structure 
things so that everybody has a voice.

JH: Moving from Chavez, someone who was elected to someone who quite clearly 
wasn’t, you’re also known for your outspoken criticism of the Bush 
Administration, and in particular the events surrounding 9/11 that you talk 
about in Reichstag Fire.

DR: Hmm. It’s been a very interesting experience having written that song. What 
happens when you write certain songs about certain subjects is that you become 
in touch with a community that you might not otherwise have become in touch 
with, not to the same degree. Certainly this happened the first time I wrote a 
song about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict – I started meeting a heck of a lot 
of people on both sides of the divide. But when I wrote Reichstag Fire a lot of 
people were very quick to assume that I have a certain belief-system that I 
don’t have, purely based on my having written that song, which is interesting.

I think that what we’re talking about here is the whole 9/11 truth movement, 
which is a very mixed bag, and really a fascinating phenomenon. I mean, clearly 
some really, really big things happened on 9/11 and there are some major 
unanswered questions which very directly implicate the CIA and U.S. Foreign 
Policy in general, U.S. support of the Taliban, U.S. support of Islamic 
extremists all over the world which is actually still going on now. As Seymour 
Hersch has recently exposed, for example, the U.S. is sending huge amounts of 
money to support Al-Qaeda-linked Sunni groups in Iraq because they’re afraid of 
the Shia being dominant, you know, this kind of thing is still very much going 
on. The U.S. is up to the same old tricks that led to the blowback which was 
9/11 itself and has led to many other events that the United States presumably 
did not want to happen, such as the Islamic Revolution in Iran.

So there are a lot of really interesting questions here that need to be 
analysed, and are being analysed by people like Seymour Hersch and others. But 
then at the same time there are a lot of the other questions which are not 
really particularly relevant and are really distractions. I think it’s a 
combination of well-meaning people who are not very scientifically-minded, who 
have no background in investigative journalism, or science, or architecture, or 
any of the other fields that might be relevant for what they are supposedly 
trying to study or write about or make movies about, and they end up doing 
really shitty work that gets used in various ways by both well-meaning people 
and people that I think are actually just trying to confuse things.

I have absolutely no doubt that there’s a lot of involvement of various 
intelligence agencies – I have no idea to what extent, but the FBI by its own 
admission has 1500 people employed to write disinformation and send it out to 
newspapers. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair discuss all this kind of 
stuff in their book Whiteout, as does Gary Webb in Dark Alliance – these are 
very well-researched books about the various intelligence agencies and their 
involvement with the press and the drug culture. But I think that questions 
like ‘was there a bunch of explosives lined up in the building?’ ‘Did building 
7 fall because of a demolition?’ ‘Was it a plane that hit the Pentagon?’ You 
know, all of these kinds of questions are just non-questions. It seems 
abundantly clear that these are just distractions, and that they’re not real 
questions that any serious investigative journalist really looking into this 
stuff, or anybody who actually knows anything about the architecture of 
skyscrapers, such as the editors of Popular Mechanics who did a really 
excellent issue debunking a lot of these myths.

I think these kinds of conspiracy theories like Loose Change is full of – these 
are good questions to ask, good questions to get answered, and now irrelevant 
because the answers are there: we know that there were no explosives in the 
building; we know that building 7 fell because it was on fire, I mean these 
things are quite clear. What’s not clear, or what I think needs to be looked 
into and exposed much more, is ‘what is the involvement of Pakistan?’; ‘what is 
the involvement of Saudi Arabia?’ ‘What is the involvement of the CIA?’ You 
know, look at the history and you can see that so often the government is 
always wanting to blame Iran for all sorts of things, it’s always wanting to 
blame Syria for all sorts of things because of a political agenda. In reality 
though, it’s the Saudi government and the Pakistani secret intelligence 
agencies and the CIA which have been involved with funding all kinds of Islamic 
fundamentalist groups, including Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, for decades.

For more information see:

www.davidrovics.com

www.myspace.com/davidrovics
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