David Rovics
David Rovics (born April 10, 1967) is an indie singer/songwriter and outspoken grassroots political protestor from the United States. His music is most accurately described as protest-folk and concerns topical subjects such as the 2003 Iraq war, anti-globalisation and social justice issues. Rovics is an outspoken critic of George W. Bush, but also of John Kerry. He is vocal on these subjects on stage, radio shows and in press releases.
Although most of Rovics' work is fully-copyrighted and commercially-distributed, Rovics has made most of his music freely available on downloadable mp3 files from his website. He encourages the free distribution of his work by all non-profit means to promote his work and spread political messages, and speaks out against websites or programs like iTunes that charge money for downloading his songs, deeming a price of 99 cents per song as "too expensive". Rovics has also advocated the performing of his songs at protests and demonstrations and has made his sheet music and lyrics available for download to this end. It is worth noting that this means of promotion contains elements of the copyleft licensing scheme.
Although Rovics is not strongly associated with any particular political or ideological movement, his lyrics and recorded interviews encompass a wide range of left-wing, humanitarian interests. He has suggested a commonality or synthesis between these varied ideologies in several of his radio interviews, and cites his music as a means to disseminate these ideas. His provocative and catchy lyrics bring to mind a modern-day Woody Guthrie or Phil Ochs.
Biography
David Rovics was born in New York City. His family moved to Wilton, Connecticut when he was young. Rovics was politically inspired during his adolescence by his experiences with the conservative-oriented, fundamentalist Christian milieu of his home town. His parents, both skilled musicians and educators, were liberal in their outlook. Perhaps for this reason, Rovics was to become a hippie in his teens and acquired interests in nuclear disarmament, vegetarianism and other counterculture issues. Rovics, an ethnic Jew, is an atheist.
In his early twenties, Rovics dropped out of college and moved to Berkeley, California. He worked in varied occupations, including as a cook, barista, secretary and typist, while pursuing his musical interests as a street and subway performer and in small clubs and bars. He immersed himself in the popular leftist counterculture and made contact with other songwriters and performers on the underground circuit. He is a Wobbly.
On May 1st, 1993, Rovics was involved in a traumatic incident in which a close friend was shot dead after intervening in a gang shoot-out. This was a turning point in his life, forcing him to concentrate on his songwriting career, initially as a means of dealing with the grief over his friend’s death. He had already amassed a fair collection of lyrics and songs by that time, but his own admission, his compositions prior to this time were inferior and ‘preachy’, and none were used in his later albums.
From around the mid 1990s, Rovics has spent most of his time on concert tours around the world. In 1996 he self-released his first album, Make It So, which consisted mostly of covers of other artists’ songs. He released his second cover album in 1998. He produced a series of five original song albums between 1998 and 2003 as self-release titles. The album Who Would Jesus Bomb? is notable for being entirely distributed in mp3 format over the internet and having no commercial release, although it was included in a later ‘best of’ album.
In 2003 Rovics signed up to Ever Reviled Records and produced a studio album, Return. Later that year, he released Behind The Barricades: The Best Of David Rovics in association with AK Press, including titles from his earlier self-releases which met with minimal commercial success. He has since released the Songs for Mahmud album as a self-release in association with Ever Reviled Records. Despite being the sole performer in most of his work, he usually describes himself only as a songwriter.
Although Rovics' work has never met with great commercial success, it has been critically-acclaimed in the press and continues to be popular with a small yet widespread base of fans with similar political interests, as well as supporters of internet file sharing. Due to his outspoken political views, Rovics has been accused by extreme right-wingers and fundamentalists as anti-Christian and anti-American but he has been embraced by various left wing, anti-war, environmentalist, social justice groups and youth groups. While it is fair to say that his work is only enduringly popular with a limited fan base, this has nonetheless occurred with little promotion.
See also
External link
Official website. Additional information, huge collection of free mp3s, sheet music and links.