A troubadour for this generation

At a time when grand humanitarian gestures have become indistinguishable from the latest corporate publicity drive, US singer-songwriter David Rovics is a rare and precious find.

Here we have a committed artist who encourages his audience not only to care deeply about the world but to go out and change it themselves - a true anti-capitalist and travelling troubadour for the G8 generation.

I meet Rovics at the Brighton pub the Evening Star. He enthuses about the performers that he appeared alongside at the previous day's Glastonwick Beer Festival, including Carter USM's JimBob, ex-Adverts front man TV Smith and "keep it spiky" trainspotters Eastfield.

Rovics's own music falls into the acoustic tradition of Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs and Pete Seeger.
Shying away from the bastardised term "folk music," he cites Seattle protest singer Jim Page as a major inspiration.

But can music really change the world?

Rovics has a clear idea of its role. "By itself it's not going to, but it can have an impact on society," he says.

"I think it can do a lot. If we don't have independent media and independent artists, I don't know if change is really possible, but, obviously, all sorts of economic and social conditions have to be there for communications and art to have any impact."

Rovics's lyrics chronicle diverse struggles, often from a first-person viewpoint.

His empathy with the oppressed makes each situation seem vivid and immediate.

I wonder if this is an innate talent or whether it came with practice.

"It's been something I have been working on for a long time.

"I guess I've long identified myself as a human being rather than as a white middle-class male.
"But there have been different experiences in my life that have made it easier for me to identify with people that I am writing about.

"Once you write a song about things like the Palestinian struggle or what's happening in Mexico, you start meeting people who are from the places you are writing about.

"Then you become intimate with people from all kinds of situations and it becomes much more real that way.

"There was one particular experience that led me to start writing anything decent. That was the death of my close friend and housemate Eric Mark in San Francisco on May 1 1993.

"He was killed in a Latino neighbourhood full of refugees from Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador.

"They were fleeing war and poverty and came to California to experience racism and poverty.

"After Eric was killed, it was an eye-opening experience for me just to be around in that neighbourhood and see the faces of the refugees.

"The grief in their faces was something that I had become very familiar with and, suddenly, they didn't seem like other people to me.

"That made it a lot easier to identify with and write about people who are dealing, in one way or other, with similar situations all over the world.

"I guess the grief was so much that I couldn't keep up the barriers I had erected in my mind, about being a privileged white middle-class guy from the suburbs of New York, any more.

"They fell apart and I just felt like a human being for the first time in my life."

Rovics's song titles, listed by topic on his website, read like a catalogue of resistance from Afghanistan to World War II. Does he consciously set out to write about certain topics or does the inspiration just come to him?

"A bit of both. Sometimes, I'll ask myself: 'Well, who's writing songs in English about this particular subject?' and I think: 'Nobody,' so I decide to try it.

"Other times, I will come across a news story or else the Bush administration will do something that just shouts out: 'Yeah, this is a song.'

"Every day they do something that is worthy of a song. I joke that they're really making great efforts to unite the left.

"My most recent song was directly inspired by the Bush administration. They appointed Paul Wolfowitz to head the World Bank. That was so poetic, because, at least in the US, there's a real division between the global justice movement, around WTO, G8 and that kind of thing, and the anti-war movement.

"It seems outrageous because it is so obvious that these things are connected. How can you separate US economic policy from US military policy? They're all part of the same thing.

"Appointing the guy who was in charge of bombing Iraq to the financial institution that's supposed to help develop the Third World? If that doesn't make the connections between capitalism and imperialism obvious, then what will?"

Asked which one of his songs is most commonly requested, Rovics chooses The Saint Patrick Battalion, included on his latest CD For The Moment.

This movingly recounts the little-known tale of Irish deserters from the US army who joined the side of the Mexicans during the 1846-1848 Mexican-US war.

"It's just one of those stories that inspire people. They would like to see that kind of thing happen again.

"It's similar to the International Brigades in Spain. It really gives you hope for humanity. People can serve a cause that's not just theirs in a narrow sense, but in a broader sense. Serving the common good of humanity even if that means losing their own life. I think those kinds of stories are the most inspiring."

Mischievously perhaps, I enquire whether Rovics feels that he is opening people's minds or just preaching to the converted.

"I think that I am mostly preaching to the converted and that is a valuable thing to do.

"Another way of putting it is inspiring the troops.

"People need to have inspiration, as they often get burnt out and stop organising.

"A lot of backbiting goes on in the progressive movements and this can be really discouraging, even more than being attacked by the authorities.

"I think the backstabbing is really difficult for people to deal with.

"They need to be reminded that there is a higher cause that we're trying to serve here and it's not about arguing within the group. It's about winning the fight against the empire and building a new society.

"The music is also a way to reach out. It's hard because I don't get played on mainstream radio stations.

"I don't get into the living rooms of people who are not in the progressive movement, unless it's people turning their parents on to my music or introducing it to a conservative friend.

"Contrary to popular mythology, progressives tend to come from progressive families and their kids are progressives too. It's really quite a challenge to reach out beyond that.

"I feel that the best thing I can do is write songs that I hope are universal enough to speak to people who are not already part of the movement.

"Then it's really up to others to get the songs out to those people. There's only so much that I can do.

"In terms of getting the music out, I put it all up on the web for free download. That's something, but people still have to find my website."

Finally, in this year of historic protests, I ask Rovics what he thinks that we'll all be doing in 10 years time. He sounds a note of warning.

"I would say that we'll all be wondering why we weren't thinking about the environment, which is by far the most important world issue.

"We'll be riding bicycles a lot more. We'll be recycling the useless heaps of metal that we used to drive around in, back when gasoline was affordable.

"Things will be a lot different and maybe we'll be wondering what New Orleans was like before it was destroyed by the tsunami.

"I think that oil and climate change will be dominating our minds and our activities.

"They will probably be the most prominent issues that people will be focusing on in terms of their own lives, in terms of overthrowing capitalism and for pointing out how ineffectual the capitalist nations have been in dealing with the global environmental crisis.

"Hopefully, that will be truer in the US than anywhere else.

"The global environmental crisis is already such a horrible situation for people living in places where the deserts are encroaching or they can't grow anything because there's constant drought.

"There's no country more dependent than the US on automobiles and the whole oil economy - it has no mass transport to speak of.

"When oil suddenly mushrooms in price, that's going to have a massive effect on the US people.
"We'll be asking ourselves: 'Why didn't we, in 2005, get out onto the streets in our millions and demand from the capitalist world that fossil fuels be abolished for the survival of our species?

How could we possibly have been so ignorant of the fact that our species is imminently about to kill itself, as though we are shitting in our own nests like some kind of unbelievably primitive creature?'

"I only hope that people will rise to the occasion and create a mass movement with a real vision of how society could be structured in a way that is ecologically sustainable."

WEB LINK:
www.davidrovics.com