His machine KILLS FASCISTS TOO......an ode to David Rovic

When Pete Seeger says about this guy “listen to him”, you know that you cannot take this guy or his songs lightly.

In any case, I read about Seeger’s comments long after I had started listening to Rovic’s songs and long after I had become aware that I was witnessing the kind of songs that perhaps people listened to from Woody Guthrie or Phil Ochs….relevant, in your face, lyrical and sung with an emotion that only a man who passionately feels for the issue can sing. Rovic is in the mold of the early, on-the-road musicians who first blended folk songs with social protest, who attempted to make sense of an increasingly insane world through music and words, of which Woody Guthrie is of course, the prime example, with that legendary label on his guitar “this machine kills fascists”….David Rovic easily fills the void left open after Phil Ochs’s suicide and Bob Dylan’s turning away from protest to more individualistic music in the late 60’s….he might not have the lyrical and poetic superiority of Dylan (wonder if anyone will ever have that) but he has the anger of Phil Ochs and the maturity of Pete Seeger. He has that knowledge of history that is so much in need these days and more importantly, he squeezes the anger out of history that few of us can.

The first two songs that I listened of him was “Fallujah” and “sing a song for Chavez”, the titles of course catching my attention…..the cold certainty and the anger of “Fallujah” and the fatalism of “…Chavez” (“sing a song for Chavez before the coup”) swept me off to the same feelings that I had felt when I had first listened to Ochs and to early Dylan. I had begun to despair that America had stopped producing its street rebels who had to do with so much positive changes that had occurred in the country in the last century (which of course is being eroded and dismantled in the last decade or so, a process which is seemingly irreversible). I had begun to think that music had sold out, sold its legacy of the voice of people for greenback. I had to comfort myself with occasional gems by Beastie Boys, Greenday, Eminem, Chumbawumba, Pearl Jam etc. There were songs, of course, which spoke of this seemingly useless, over-commercialized and inherently directionless life and our apparent inability to escape its clutches. These are relevant modern issues, of course, but they talk only about the surface effects. Few songs or musicians try to tackle the root, the foundation for our cynicism, of our epicurean despair….the phenomenon by which we seem to be in comfort yet have the feeling that we have sold out……

We, the post cold war generation and the first generation to feel the growing force of full scale globalization, seem to have developed the tendency and the habit of seeing ourselves as mere spectators on the world stage, our only real activity being conspicuous consumption and furthering of our career interests. We do keep abreast of the happenings but they are usually are relegated to scanning the headlines (the newspapers also seem to have picked up this habit; they give much fact and almost negligible analysis). We seem to have subconsciously told ourselves that the happenings around us are too chaotic and in anycase, there are people to take care of ‘all that stuff’. Books are the best source of knowledge but the books that seem to sell most these days are either escapist fantasies, urban angst, self-help books which give an ephemeral sense of empowerment at most to most or pure nonsense. Bombardment of images on the screens ensures a minimum time-span to all things, and the images and facts that do get through are soon pushed out by more immediate personal concerns.

David Rovic shatters this illusion and challenges our subconscious acceptance of the ‘just world hypothesis’ (where we feel that the world is inherently just) with songs like ‘the best democracy money can buy’, ‘the war is over’, ‘strike a blow against the empire’, ‘who would Jesus bomb?’. He gives out hope with songs like ‘resistance’ and the ‘unknown soldier’. His songs of anger and retribution: ‘Fallujah’ and ‘promised land’ and ‘boardroom’. He sings for heroic people who people forget easily ‘Hugh Thomson’, ‘song for Cindy Sheehan’ etc. Overall a collection of songs (and growing) that protests the status quo, that challenges people not to forget, not to forgive, not to forgive those folks who claim to take decisions on our behalf nor themselves if they remain silent.

His defiant songs show that street music is not dead, not yet and perhaps proves what history always shows us, that at times when they are required the most, heroes, ordinary men and women do come forward. Millions did, before the Iraq invasion. Heroes, all of them, because more than defying physical restrictions, they defied the mental ignorance that the establishment wishes to put them into. I don’t know whether they would come out again, perhaps when the US continues its imperial conquest against Iran or Syria but one thing is for sure, David will be there, singing, at the head of the column, egging them on to battle.

So do heroes, come about in history.

Get his songs at

http://www.soundclick.com/pro/default.cfm?BandID=111310