Beyond The Mall — Iconoclast Interview With David Rovics
By Nathan Diebenow
Associate Editor
For over eight years, Rovics has
made his career as a radical troubadour, subverting the U.S. government through
story songs that reveal the untold truths about the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, the effects of depleted uranium on U.S. soldiers, conservative
Christians in the produce section of a Houston supermarket, life "beyond
the mall," and romantic moments in hot tubs.
Anything else would be unsatisfying to the 38-year-old from
His show, a benefit for the Waco Friends of Peace at the
Unitarian Universalist Church of Waco last Saturday
night, was no less unsatisfying. With his acoustic guitar and mike-less vocals,
he performed like a camp councillor ready to lead his
22 "campers" out of the dark forest and into base camp.
This stop was one of many on his spring 2005 tour through
The Lone Star Iconoclast’s Nathan Diebenow
listened to Rovics, who was accompanied by his friend
Nathalie Paravicini, after Saturday’s show as the
protest singer talked about songwriting after the 2004 presidential election,
the differences between rural and urban progressives, and the obstacles of
gaining radio airplay in the mad, mad, mad, mad Clear Channel world.
.........
ICONOCLAST: What goes through your mind knowing that you’re
this close to the president’s vacation home now after the election?
ROVICS: Well, I don’t really buy the whole
red-state/blue-state thing. I think the country is full of progressives from
all over the place including
There may be certain catch words or phrases that they react
negatively to, but basically, the idea that they just got done fighting a war
for oil that they didn’t understand or believe in and that civilians were the
main victims of their actions, then most of them won’t argue with that, most of
them understand that’s the case, and most of them are really upset about it.
ICONOCLAST: How do your songs play well to them? I mean, how
often do you play to veterans?
ROVICS: I play to a lot of veterans because so many of them
are coming back and are getting involved with the antiwar movement, Iraq
Veterans Against the War and other organizations. And
then others are just friends of people involved with the progressive movement.
They drag their friends along who just got back and say, "Hey, check this
guy out." Usually, if they have a friend who’s already sort of progressive,
then they may not be the most conservative of the veterans, but I play for a
lot of veterans who are in any case very receptive to what I’m saying and are
really happy that there are people saying these things that they’re thinking.
ICONOCLAST: They buy the albums and hang out after the show
with you?
ROVICS: Yeah. Tell me horror stories.
ICONOCLAST: Is that where you get your material?
ROVICS: A lot of it just comes from talking to people and
just reading what people write. Like in the case of the song The Face of
Victory. I wrote that before most folks started coming back, and that was
written from an e-mail list called DI special. And that is a place where a lot
of people who were in the field or back on break are just writing about their
experiences, and much of the writing is just informative stuff that you don’t
get from even the progressive news sources because these are people who have
been recently in places where there are no journalists, so it’s really just
fascinating.
ICONOCLAST: So they’re their own alternative media? They do
their own homework and tell their own stories?
ROVICS: They are! It’s kind of like a blog,
except it’s not so much the soldiers themselves doing the blogging.
It’s more a case of the soldiers submitting stuff which is then turned into a
bit of a blog by the people running the site.
ICONOCLAST: What’s the site called?
ROVICS: Militaryproject.org.
ICONOCLAST: Has the presidential election changed your
approach to activism? I mean, did you walk away thinking, "Maybe I should
find some issues that more conservatives agree with me on, so we could work on
them together for the common good of the country?"
ROVICS: Well, I was kind of waiting to see who was going to
win. Naturally, the person in the White House tends to influence the things I’m
writing about. Basically, from my vantage point, neither of the two would have
been any good. Kerry would have been the lesser evil, and I emphasize the word evil
more than the word lesser.
Usually, when there’s a Democrat in the White House, I think
many progressives get kind of confused and start thinking they have an ally in
the White House. I’m not sure when the last time we had an ally in the White
House was, but I’d say in the time I’ve been alive, all of the occupants in the
White House have been war criminals and people who are bent on impoverishing
the world in order to make the tiny elite that run the country richer. And
Kerry would have been one of those people most definitely.
When there’s someone like that in the White House, it’s kind
of like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which is basically what I think most
Democratic leadership are. So in that case, you have
to change your tactic in order to reach the people who are confused there and
in order to try and explain it to them.
ICONOCLAST: When you look at Howard Dean, you would
instantly put him in the same category?
ROVICS: I don’t know about Howard Dean. I think there is a
definite, significant difference between Kerry and Dean. There’s a much, much
vaster difference between them and (Dennis) Kucinich. Kucinich is a real
authentic progressive. But it’s a big mistake to say anything is monolithic. I
think there are certain ways that our system works that are intrinsically bad.
The way Wall Street works and the value system of Wall Street — I think Wall
Street largely runs our government.
What’s important to Wall Street — and we’re talking about
the billionaires of both parties who run this country — what’s important to
Wall Street is making money for their stockholders and the corporations, and
this is a value system that is literally destroying the planet. It’s a system
that says if war is good for profits, it’s good, and if war is bad for profits,
it’s bad. If environmental destruction is good for profits, it’s good, and if
it’s bad for profits, then environmental destruction is bad.
Unfortunately, there are some things that are good for
profits that are good for all of us but most things, if they are making money
for big corporations, they are probably doing harm to
humanity. And that’s been the case with environmental and foreign policy.
ICONOCLAST: What I was sort of getting at with my last
question is that have you changed your writing style to reach common ground
with conservatives, for instance, like how Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners
magazine is focusing on poverty issues. The mainstream is just eating it up.
ROVICS: It’s always important to phrase things in a way that
reaches as many people as possible and appeals to the universal things. A lot
of times, regardless of who is in the White House, there are certain catch
phrases that hit people in a negative way. If you say we need welfare, the
people react negatively because the word welfare by both Democrats and
Republicans has been so maligned; but if you say we believe that in the richest
country in the world, there’s no need to have people living in the streets of
living in poverty, then most people agree. It’s really how you phrase things,
so I try to tell stories. I do have a fair number of more in-your-face anathemic type songs, but mostly I just try to tell stories
that illustrate what I’m trying to say and hopefully lead people to their own
conclusions — which hopefully are the ones I’m trying to lead them to.
Obviously, there are different points to make with different stories. But
essentially, that’s what most people are doing whatever form of communication
it is. Very little forms of communication are actually objective. We all have
some form of perspective, and regardless of whether we
are writing a song or doing a radio piece, we are setting a scene, and that is
probably going to lead people towards some conclusion or another. And probably,
we’re doing that on purpose whether or not we’re really obvious about it.
ICONOCLAST: Before you complete a song, what does it need to
satisfy you?
ROVICS: It has to have good melody. It has to have
well-written lyrics that go somewhere. Each line has to belong there; no line
should be there just in order to lead you to the next line; crafting it well,
and ending the listener up somewhere different from where they started. Something that brings them somewhere. If it’s a sad song, it
should make them cry; if it’s a happy song, it should make them laugh. And if
it doesn’t do that, it’s not a good song.
ICONOCLAST: How long will it take for a song about depleted
uranium to hit the top 40? Will you have to sell your soul to Marilyn Manson
and have him cover them in order for your songs to hit
the mainstream?
ROVICS: I’d love to see Marilyn Manson cover one of my
songs. I’d be happy to have him do that. But I think
basically one of the major differences between now and the 60s is that … some
of the similarities are that the massive majority of the population is clearly
against the war. Millions are pouring into the streets and protesting
periodically — they represent tens of millions who aren’t in the streets for
one reason or another. Any time you have millions of people in the streets,
they are never a focus group. They always represent a number of people. You
cannot get millions of people into the streets without that being the case. And
anybody suggesting that is not the case obviously has an agenda — probably a
very conservative one. But we have this going on, not exactly like, but there’s a lot of parallels. There’s this antiwar majority.
For many reasons, it’s not reflected in the way people vote because the system
is quite blatantly rigged by massive corporations. Obviously, a certain number
of people in the population are duped by Bush’s rhetoric; that’s only natural
when you have that much rhetoric and spend billions on creating it, and
networks like Fox are just mimicking it without questioning. Of course, you’re
going to have adherants to it, whether or not they
really understand it.
The difference is we have these networks that reach so many
people, and Clear Channel, which owns thousands of stations, and the indie stations of the 60s virtually don’t exist anymore. So
the big hit songs that got so much airplay like Blowing in the Wind, or
so many different songs that were so popular at the time have virtually no
chance of getting popular now.
If somebody like Dylan was starting out, or Phil Ochs, or Tom Paxton, or Buffy St. Marie, they would be — I
would guess — probably about as ignored as I am by the corporate media. I think
that’s the really big difference. There are so many people in so many different
genres all over the place — in folk, hip-hop, country — creating great
political music that are being ignored.
ICONOCLAST: Where do you guys meet?
ROVICS: I do gigs with different artists, and the places we
meet most often are at big protests. Like those organized in
ICONOCLAST: Give them a shout out!
ROVICS: Some of the great hip-hop bands — the Coup, Dead Prez, the Thought Breakers,
There are other fantastic acoustic musicians out there doing
this kind of stuff — Utah Phillips, Jim Paige from
Unless somebody like Bruce Springsteen or Steve Earle who
got famous early, (they aren’t going to get much airplay) — in the case of
Springsteen before Clear Channel dominated the world, or like Steve Earle — he
was famous for doing songs that weren’t particularly political, went to prison,
and got politicized, and came out, and he’s still a famous musician and does
some political stuff.
So there’s always exceptions, and this sort of thing can
happen, but basically, if you’ve come around sometime in the past 10 years, and
you’re doing political material, you’re probably gonna
be seriously marginalized.
ICONOCLAST: Are there any progressive death metal bands?
Your stuff is kind of graphic in that you talk about amputees, etc.
ROVICS: I’m not really into death metal, so I don’t know
what’s around as far as the death metal crowd goes. I tend to be more into the
stuff where the lyrics are easy to understand — hip-hop, folk, rock — the
certain kind of genres where you don’t have to read the lyric sheet to
understand what they’re saying.
ICONOCLAST: Good point. I was thinking more in terms of
Tenacious D. They love the "hair metal" and all that, but they do it
on acoustic guitars. They’re a comic duo.
ROVICS: Well, there are these bands that are sort of
acoustic sort of folk-punk kind of stuff like Against me and Defiance Ohio, and
I think those bands are picking up a pretty good following and doing really
great sort of political stuff of a more lifestyle kind of nature. Less analytical about big political stuff and more "this is
what it’s like to be a radical in our society" kind of stuff.
ICONOCLAST: Any chance you’d write about a small town weekly
newspaper that endorsed "the lesser of two evils" candidate for
ROVICS: You know I’d just heard about that today but since I
heard about that, that’s just a fantastic subject for a song, and I think that
one’s coming up.
ICONOCLAST: Were you on the road during the elections? Like
last fall?
ROVICS: Last October, I was touring on the west coast with
Daniel Ellsberg, Media Benjamin, and Norman Solomon on this kind of "get
out the vote" tour kind of thing, and they were all pushing hard for
people to vote for Kerry. And actually, just a few days before the election, I
just randomly happened to have a tour scheduled for
ICONOCLAST: You’ve been doing this for what, seven years?
ROVICS: Full time for about eight years, and before that, I
did a lot of music full time but not around the country.
ICONOCLAST: So you traveled quite extensively around the
ROVICS: It’s not so much
ICONOCLAST: So what’s the mood of progressives around the
country? Do you get the sense of their energy levels are growing since the
election?
ROVICS: Well, there’s always this sort of hardcore activist
minority that through good times and bad will keep on plugging away. But then
there’s everybody else, and I think in the case of the everybody else, you’re
talking about a sort of relatively quiet majority of progressives who either
aren’t conscious of that or just don’t get out in the streets or organize or
whatever, but they come out at different times, so before the protests on Feb
15, 2003 leading up to the war or the most recent chapter of the 15-year war on
Iraq that we’ve been waging, you saw people, perhaps naively pouring out into
the streets in their millions in this country and all over the world, thinking
that if they got out in the streets in large enough numbers they could stop the
war.
So for most of those people who are more the fickle sorts of
activist who got involved because they felt the situation was particularly
desperate, there was a real sense of optimism and that sense of optimism was
largely shattered by the beginning of the war. And then there was another
period where lots of people came out because they though Bush had to be
defeated, and they worked really hard, and after the election, there has definitely been a real palpable sense of discouragement
among a lot of people. But still, the same sort of activist core that basically
would be fighting regardless of whether there’s a Democrat or Republican in
office; regardless of whether there’s a war going on or not, overt or covert or
whatever; there’s always that core who would still be plugging away, but for
many other people, it sort of ebbs and flows. Right now, it’s in a bit of an
ebb, but I think that’s bound to change because there are so many pressures
that will lead to people pouring out into the streets, and those things are
inevitable — the draft, environmental catastrophes, the further impoverishment
of the majority of the people here, and the growing riches of the wealthy
elite, and all these kinds of forces will create opposition.
ICONOCLAST: Do you think this election was kind of like the
election in 1964, but instead of Goldwater going down, it was Kerry, which
means that you’re going to see a big pot brewing, and the progressives are kind
of getting more congealed and more organized? Do you think there’s going to be
more of a long-term effect coming out of this election because of who lost?
ROVICS: Maybe. I don’t know how much it’ll be coming out of
this election as much as coming out of the kinds of things that either of the
candidates would have been doing right now. Regardless of whether it was Bush
or Kerry in the White House, I think there is going to be a military draft.
Either one would have kept troops in
ICONOCLAST: Willie Nelson and Neil Young use biodiesel in their buses. What’s your preferred mode of
transportation?
ROVICS: Airplanes and rental cars. I am not at all
ecological; the amount of energy I’m using to tour is outrageous and
unsustainable. I don’t fool myself at all about that, and I admire people who
get biodiesel tour vans and do things to save energy
or not use energy at all. Tour by bicycle — it’s a great idea. But I think that
the kind of change we need in this country and this world is systemic change,
and I think it is important to emphasize that this change is that people can
set an example of how you can live off the grid, how you can live off solar
energy, and not burn fuel and not waste anything. And it’s really important to
set that example, that you can grow food organically, and it would be better
and healthier and productive.
All that is great, but until the government is able to
change enough that it can change the way our economy works and the way the
money is spent, like on highways ... We need trains instead of highways. We
need massive infrastructural investment into things like trains and solar
energy and converting our dwellings and workplaces to sustainable energy. This
kind of money and this kind of impetus absolutely must come from the
establishment, which means that we are going to have to be the establishment.
But I don’t think we are going to be able to replace the resources that the
federal and state governments have with personal volunteer initiatives. Those
initiatives are a challenge and must be taken, but I don’t think we should fool
ourselves into thinking that as long as the government is spending $25 billion
a year on building more highways and virtually nothing on the railways, which
are just continuing to fall apart — until we can change those kinds of
dynamics, we’re not going to be able to change things.
There’s a decision that I’ve made, and I’m not saying it’s
necessarily the right one, but I am doing more good by doing more shows than by
trying to conserve fuel and do less shows. So I have taken the conscious
decision that I am being more productive by burning more jet fuel in this case,
and I don’t take that decision lightly, but I think that if I am doing any good
to change things systemically by doing what I’m doing — and I don’t know
whether that’s the case I’m just hoping it is — then it’s worth the jet fuel.
But I am striving in my own little way for a world where we don’t burn jet
fuel. It’s definitely contradictory, and I am definitely conscious of it.
ICONOCLAST: So we’re agreed that the master’s tools can burn
down the master’s house?
ROVICS: I think it is absolutely true that the master’s
tools can burn down the master’s house. I don’t think it’s universally true of
all the tools, but I think in the case of the communication and transportation
infrastructures that exist, we need to use them because it’s all we’ve got. But
for what I do, for what you do, we’re dealing with a world where the newspapers
come out on paper or on computers that are destroying the
ICONOCLAST: What’s the most important thing for someone who
goes to a David Rovics show to know and do after the
show?
ROVICS: Hopefully, that the situation on this planet that
we’re in, which is one of just imminent death, is not abstract. It’s real, and
we need to feel that and understand that in a visceral enough way that we have
no option if we’re going to survive emotionally but to dedicate our lives to
trying to change the situation. That’s what I’m trying to impart to people in
different ways. By trying to humanize people who have been dehumanized and by
trying to bring to life realities whether they’re about our foreign policy or
the ecological situation or whatever, and try to bring these realities to life
so that they are real for people and not just statistics. Try to impart some
kind of understanding, like what it means to clearcut
a forest or massacre the residents of a town in
If you have people’s attention for a few minutes to sing a
song to them, then you have the potential of hopefully bringing them to a
different emotional space than they were in when the song started.
DAVID ROVICS performed last Saturday night at the
— Staff Photo By Nathan Diebenow
ST. PATRICK’S BATTALION is a song protest singer David Rovics wrote inspired by a real battalion of North American
Irish and other Roman Catholic soldiers who fought with the Mexican army
against the
— Staff Photo By Nathan Diebenow
MORE CAHONES THAN PBS, David Rovics
performed in
— Staff Photo By
Nathan Diebenow