This Week with David Rovics

Now what?

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:10:00 +0000

Where is the antiwar movement we need?

As the US and Israel jointly pursue Armageddon, I wait for the calls from protest organizers looking for live performers to make their protests engaging, for the movement they're desperately hoping to build. But these calls never come. Not just since the end of February, but for many years now.

The occasional protests that do happen are carefully-managed, with no room for live music, which can be unpredictable at times. The bigger protests that happen in recent years are almost always the ones being promoted heavily on NPR and by social media algorithms. The bigger protests in recent years are never about US foreign policy.

It's always easy to know what needs to be done. The hard part is in the implementation. We need a big, radically inclusive social movement with a vision for the kind of internationalist, egalitarian society we want to build, and the movement needs to be rooted in a shared love of human culture -- music, poetry, puppetry, food -- so it's attractive and might stand a chance of growing even bigger.

This movement, naturally, needs to be opposed not only to terrible domestic policies like violently rounding up and deporting our neighbors and trying to form a dictatorship, but also opposed to a foreign policy based on threatening, sanctioning, and bombing other countries around the world -- particularly Iran, and by virtue of the client state relationship, any other country Israel occupies or attacks.

I know I'm not the only one noticing that while the ongoing ICE raids have inspired a lot of resistance, not only grassroots but also among all sorts of celebrities and politicians, this has hardly been the case with opposition to Israel's wars on its neighbors, or the current war on Iran.

This reality dramatically highlights the conundrum anyone is in who might hope the way out of this madness could come from the leadership of the Democratic Party. Listen to the Democratic Party politicians and DNC-affiliated press outlets talking about military tactics with war hawks, rather than asking what the hell the US is doing bombing schools, hospitals, water desalination plants, and oil refineries.

Our leaders for the movement we want won't come from that crowd.

But what of the other potential elements of society? People often wonder aloud in my presence about things like when the labor movement might step up to the plate, or the students, or Muslims, or "the left," or some other group like that. I often wonder about that, too, even to the point where I start to come up with answers to my own questions -- some of them gathered from decades of observation and participation.

In the hope that it's true that in order to try to answer the "now what?" question we must first understand the "what happened?" question, here are my broad generalizations that attempt to explain how we got here. That is, to explain a little about why antiwar sentiment does not seem currently to be represented by an antiwar movement, and to help answer the question of what happened to effective grassroots movement-building tactics.

There are various reasons why different groups or segments of society become sort of institutionally incapable of effective organizing. No small part of this process is related to constant, ongoing efforts on the part of various actors to misdirect and otherwise divide and conquer any real or potential threats to the status quo. (Look up "Cointelpro" for more information on that.)

I don't know where the leadership we need in terms of a big, well-organized, radically inclusive, visionary, culturally-rooted social movement is going to rise out of. Sometimes, as has often and accurately been said, the darkest hour is just before the dawn. But here are my thoughts on some of the places some people often seem to be looking towards for this kind of leadership, and why we're unlikely to find what we're looking for in those places.

The labor movement

In the 1930's in the US, the labor movement was where it was at. The movement was pervasive throughout society, influential in every possible way, and greatly dependent on art and music to communicate its message. Led by former members of the old Industrial Workers of the World who had joined the Communist Party, formally-organized unions and informally-organized movements connected to them were the order of the day, and led directly to the New Deal reforms of the era.

But the circumstances that arose around World War 2 and its aftermath proved to be too much even for this powerful, internationalist, often revolutionary movement. With the anti-communist, post-World War 2 backlash represented by McCarthyism and McCarthy's House Unamerican Activities Committee, the communists were purged from the leadership of the labor movement. With the rise of the US as the world's manufacturing base for much of the next generation, the labor movement's leadership was overwhelmingly won over by the many good union jobs provided by the military-industrial complex. With the passage of the Taft-Hartley law banning solidarity strikes, the labor movement was also extremely hampered.

It has never really recovered from the post-World War 2 purges. The US labor movement has never, since the 1930's, been at the forefront of any social movement. At worst, labor leadership has often been on the wrong side of many issues. In the 1960's, the antiwar protesters who got beaten up were often being beaten by members of especially patriotic labor unions, in fact.

In the late 1990's there was a resurgence in the labor movement connected to the global justice movement that was active in so many different countries then. 9/11 took the wind out of the sails of that movement, particularly in the US.

The boomers

People often look at things from a generational perspective. I'd say this orientation exists partially because it's real -- people are shaped by the times they grew up in and the events that took place during those times. Partially it's also wrapped up in the manufactured, corporate cult of youth that has existed for a very long time. It's a cult that is both very profitable in terms of marketing products and services, and also very useful in terms of keeping the population divided from each other by age and other categories.

Certainly one of the very most useful and impressive social movements that happened in the twentieth century was the antiwar movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's. This extremely culturally-rooted movement used music and other forms of art as a means of demilitarizing the hearts and minds of so much of their generation, and so much of society in general.

Everything the boomer generation was thought to stand for in the context of the antiwar movement has been ridiculed and vilified ever since that time, so threatened were the powers-that-be by this movement and how it operated so effectively. Efforts were made ever since to make sure we have negative associations with this movement, and all of its methods, all of which have been portrayed as unrealistic, utopian, and ineffective, despite all of the abundant evidence to the contrary.

Despite all of these efforts, it was this generation -- or significant elements from it -- which took the helm of the antiwar movement when the US invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq after 9/11.

Since the movement against those wars and its boomer leadership, efforts to vilify and ridicule the 1960's movement the boomers are still associated with increased exponentially with the rise of social media, and the algorithms the social media corporations use to effectively brainwash, divide, and conquer our society and so many others. The boomers are now too old to be leading anything, but the anti-boomer propaganda continues full tilt, lest anyone else be fool enough to try to engage in the kinds of organizing many boomers did so well -- helping to generate a tremendous antiwar movement using art, music, free festivals, free love, antiwar coffeehouses next to every military base with live music and free literature, among other tactics.

Generation X

Nobody actually talks about Generation X as a potential savior, but given that I'm a member of this generation... As with any other generation, it's inaccurate to characterize it politically in one way or the other, it's much too big and diverse for that, as they all are. But there are common lived experiences that can shape people and entire generations profoundly.

We are the first generation alive today to experience a nation in continual decline in terms of standard of living and hopes and expectations for the future. We are the last generation alive that didn't grow up on social media. Both of these could be hopeful things. We're also currently middle-aged, and largely very preoccupied with trying to pay the rent and raise children.

The youth

People younger than Generation X have grown up not only in a nation in decline, but in a country where our communications have been hegemonically hijacked by Big Tech and the ruling class interests it serves.

There has long been a cultural idea that "the youth" are the future, they're the generation to look to for leadership in any potential social movement that might develop, and they're also the generation that, as a result of growing up with all this technology, are the most astute about the whole tech-dominated situation we find ourselves in.

These assumptions have often proven false. For example, it wasn't the youth that led the antiwar movement circa 2003, it was the boomers.

As a result of growing up within the confines of the social media reality that has been shoved down all of our throats, I'm not sure why anyone imagines that the generation most directly devastated by this onslaught would be in a good position to lead the resistance against it. Rather, this generation has been probably more dramatically impacted by the worldview presented by a very divisive interpretation of identity politics than any other, because of the nature of the online reality established by Big Tech by the late 2000's.

The Left

To be clear about terms, when I say "the left" I'm talking about organized elements of society who are politically too radical to be part of the fold of the Democratic Party establishment. If you want to de-fund the police, close the US military bases around the world, welcome refugees, have reparations for slavery, seriously regulate the housing market and make housing a human right, if you are in a party or other organization that includes words like "socialist," "communist," or "anarchist" in the name.

In other countries these sorts of politics are sometimes actually represented by parties that have legislators in parliaments. In the US these sorts of values exist almost exclusively outside of electoral politics.

Being outside of electoral politics would not itself be a big limitation, in terms of forming a social movement focused on these values. But overwhelmingly, the organized left in the US, as well as the left represented by popular sentiments expressed on social media platforms, has long been hobbled by endless internal debates around issues of identity.

The pattern that has become well established in the social media age in particular is whenever a person or group rises to the fore in some way, they are cut down by the all-pervasive social media rumor mill for having the wrong identity, or the wrong orientation towards another identity. This way ties of common goals are broken, and the arguments never stop.

Whether we're talking about groups that may fall under the rubric of identity politics or groups that orient more towards socialism, the environment, opposition to militarism, etc., the left in the US today has also become institutionally incapable of organizing an event that isn't depressing (with the very occasional exception, of course).

Every protest now, small or large, for years, with rare exceptions, is bereft of live music, in a scene bereft of artistic representations of the people's will. On the stage is one speaker after another, overwhelmingly people who are going to lecture the assembled crowd about how things are, tell us things we already know, criticize us for not being active enough or numerous enough, and then we all go home.

Probably more than any other part of society, the US left has convinced itself that the intense dependence on art and music as tools for organizing and communicating that every previous significant social movement have embraced is not relevant for us today, somehow. The boomers, though largely now dead, are still vilified and ridiculed, as is anyone with an acoustic guitar, despite the acoustic guitar still being one of the most popular instruments for people in the US to play, of any generation.

Every element of organizing effective events that foster a sense of community, inspire people to action, and leave people feeling optimistic about this movement is missing, as if systematically.

The methodically horrific way these demonstrations almost always go is evidence of a left that has been captured and rendered flaccid.

Muslims

Here we are in a situation where, once again, the US is at war with a number of predominantly Muslim nations. To say that the US is at war with a Muslim nation is akin to saying the sun rose in the east this morning. In many countries in what we call the western world, such as in the UK or Australia, the resistance to US and Israeli policies is led by Muslims.

Those of us who were politically active prior to 9/11 will remember that in the year following the beginning of the Second Intifada -- between September, 2000, and September, 2001 -- Muslims and Arabs across the US were very politically engaged in supporting the Palestinian uprising and opposing Israel's expansionist, ethnonationalist, and racist policies. Events organized by Muslims during this period, from my direct recollection, almost always involved music and dance. I sang at innumerable events at this time, to take one of many such examples.

After 9/11 this all changed dramatically, as the security state went into high gear vilifying Muslims, putting them on no-fly lists, infiltrating mosques and other organizations, imprisoning solidarity activists on scurrilous charges, etc.

With Israel's more recent policy of genocide in Gaza and daily pogroms across the West Bank, many Muslims and Arabs in the US got politically engaged again, along with other people, and the policies of both Biden and Trump has been to criminalize their speech and, if they're not US citizens, to deport them.

With this kind of targeted repression, counting on a movement in the US to be led by elements of this country's relatively tiny Muslim minority seems unlikely.

Students

In very recent years, students have been at the forefront of resistance to Israeli and US policies. Student leaders have been deported when they have not been citizens, with these policies impacting huge numbers of people in very dramatic ways. But US citizens have also faced expulsion and other very dramatic consequences.

It is not at all surprising that the student movement in 2024, even at its height, was mainly to be found in the bigger universities with either a significant Muslim or Jewish student population. The movement was largely led by students so directly affected that they couldn't bear to look the other way.

That this was the case -- that this movement was not led by students who were just concerned about a war their country was very much involved in, but by Muslim and Jewish students -- was not at all surprising to me, given the stifling atmosphere that has now been present for many years on college campuses when it comes to anyone expressing an opinion on something that doesn't somehow align with their perceived identity.

By my observation college campuses were central to resistance movements up until the funding on campuses across the country became less and less accessible to student groups, which thus had a harder and harder time organizing events, and this all happened to coincide directly with the rise of social media, circa 2006. Up until 2006, this particular artist was playing shows on college campuses across the US constantly, often over a hundred of them in a given year.

Immigrants

Immigrants generally have faced the same kind of blanket repression in the US that Muslims and Arabs have faced, particularly since 9/11.

At other times in history, massive social movements in the US have been led by immigrants, or have had a disproportionately large immigrant element, such as the Industrial Workers of the World over a century ago. All of the immigrant-led movements, such as the IWW and later movements such as those in the 1960's -- La Raza Unida, the farmworkers union, the 2006 uprising that nobody remembers -- were all intensely musical, and effective.

Immigration was long favored by the leaders of industry, because it meant a ready source of cheap labor that they could use to prevent workers from organizing and demanding better pay and conditions. When this strategy failed badly with the rise of the IWW, lots of laws were passed that made immigration much harder, especially from the parts of Europe where the biggest trouble-makers were thought to be from.

While the campus protests in recent years may not rise to the level of participation we saw in the labor movement a century ago that inspired the anti-immigration legislation of the period, the response to the campus protests in terms of harshly punishing participants and passing laws to harshly restrict immigration from certain countries has been identical, and has effectively silenced a whole lot of people.

In conclusion

Who will take the lead in delivering the kind of movement so many of us are hoping for? You tell me. I have no idea. What I do know is most massive social movements that rise up and change everything were not predicted by the intelligentsias of their times.

Partial Victory in Campaign to Restore YouTube Channel

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 19:43:00 +0000

To briefly review:

Due to my alleged support for "violent criminal organizations," which seems to be defined as any group that opposes genocide and supports the rights of Palestinians, my YouTube account was demonetized in January, 2025. In November, 2025, all of my 50 albums were removed from YouTube Music, with no notification or explanation.

On January 9th, 2026, my channel received its first Strike. On prior occasions when songs that violated their policy on support for violent criminal organizations were taken down, I received Warnings. A Strike is worse -- 3 Strikes and your channel gets deleted.

At that point I deleted all versions of the 3 songs that had previously been flagged and removed, because only some of them had at that point been taken down. But a few days after my one-week suspension from being able to post or upload on YouTube ended, on January 19th, I received an email from YouTube that my entire channel violated their terms, and would now be permanently deleted. My appeal was then immediately rejected. There had never been a second Strike, they just went straight from the first Strike to channel deletion.

Review over. Here's what happened next.

Pro-Palestine activist/pundit Guy Christenson's channel was also deleted, along with his existence on TikTok and Instagram. Guy then posted a video on X about what had happened, which went viral, and resulted in YouTube restoring his account. Fellow pro-Palestine activist Sarah Wilkinson recommended to me that I make a video like he did, and try to emulate his success.

I put up my own short, captioned video last night, on February 19th, doing my best to copy how Guy does his videos. Lo and behold, it also went viral. Overnight it was reposted on X close to 3,000 times.

This morning I got two emails from YouTube, in quick succession. The first one, somewhat bizarrely, informed me that a song which was not one of the ones they had previously deleted was in violation of their violent criminal organization support policy, and would now be deleted. It also informed me that as a result of this song being up ("When Luigi Goes On Trial," by Ai Tsuno), my channel would now receive its second Strike, and would be inaccessible to me to post or upload to for 2 weeks.

At first it seemed strange to have a song deleted from a channel which had already been deleted, including that song and many hundreds of others. And a second Strike on a channel that had already been deleted.

Then came the next email, a few minutes later, informing me that YouTube had decided that my channel did not violate their policies, and would now be restored.

And sure enough, it is back. My children can once again watch my animated children's videos. History buffs can once again hear the hundreds of songs I've written about labor history and the history of social movements from around the world. And supporters of the Palestinian cause can once again hear my hundreds of songs that could easily be construed to violate the same policies the random songs they've targeted so far have violated.

Or can they? No, actually, they can't. Why is that? Because this victory is a very partial one. Those 50 albums that used to be up on the world's second-biggest music streaming platform, YouTube Music, are still not there. My existence as an artist on YouTube Music, and the thousands of followers I had as an artist there (what they call being a "Topic" in YouTube parlance) are still gone.

In short, I'm still being very much suppressed on YouTube. Without my albums being restored, this will mean thousands of people every month who used to get my songs recommended to them via YouTube's all-important song recommendation algorithms will no longer discover my music for the first time. It will mean I have an estimated 30% fewer listeners on YouTube overall, according to music industry people who try to estimate these things.

So, the battle is definitely not won, and much more pressure on YouTube is needed, for them to put my albums back up on YouTube Music, now that they have restored my channel, albeit with a second Strike that may soon lead once again to channel deletion.

Nevertheless, I think it would be very appropriate to take a wee bit of cheer from the fact that my channel was even temporarily restored, because when you look at the sequence and timing of events, this quite obviously happened due to popular pressure, not for any other reason. Thanks to all of you who canceled your YouTube Premium account, wrote YouTube a message, or reposted my video. Solidarity is the way to go.

The Benefit of the Doubt

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 01:54:00 +0000

The way so many of my fellow leftist intellectuals are rushing to throw Noam Chomsky under the bus lately makes me question my sanity. It also makes me wonder how many of them were subjected to harassment campaigns online until they wrote a statement critical of Chomsky. This can be a daunting experience, which some of us are immune to, having already been canceled.

Over the past month I've been really busy with a concert tour, and also dealing with having my YouTube channel being deleted for my alleged support for criminal organizations.

Unlike me, Chomsky isn't accused of supporting any criminal organizations, however. He's accused of maintaining cordial relations by email and now and then in person with Jeffrey Epstein. That is, he's accused of having associations with a criminal. Not just any criminal, but a very rich and powerful one who systematically and sexually exploited children -- so, among the most distasteful sorts of criminals available.

Various of Chomsky's former associates -- though certainly not all of them -- have been writing things along the lines of how much they love and admire Chomsky, his work, his brain, his writings, etc., but that now that they've learned just how much time he spent with Epstein and how many nice things he said to him (mainly in private emails between the two of them that were recently made public), they can be found on social media saying very professorial things like "fuck Chomsky."

I'm struck by what feels like some kind of innocence on the part of these professors. Are all of their associations made or broken based on moral considerations? Are there no other reasons they can imagine wanting to have cordial relations with someone, aside from moral ones? And then if their morality meter says they need to break their associations with someone, they react accordingly and break off relations with the immoral people?

I don't pretend to know what Chomsky's interest in maintaining cordial relations with Jeffrey Epstein was. Unlike many people, apparently, I also don't feel the need to jump to conclusions about this question.

These people seem to assume that the only possible reason why someone would want to be on good terms with a guy like Epstein is because they are attracted to the life this guy led, with all his wealth, power, women, and girls. Attracted in the sense that they want to live like him, and partake in his repulsive ways.

This assumption seems so incredibly unimaginative for people with such great minds, that it boggles mine profoundly. And apparently it's not just because I'm a dude, judging from the opinions of a sampling of my friends and comrades on this subject.

There are innumerable examples, including some I'm familiar with personally, when really awful people with a lot of money and/or in positions of power were persuaded to do something good with their money or with their influence once, or even more often than that.

In some of these instances, when a good thing happens involving a rich or powerful person, it's because someone had their ear.

Does this make it worthwhile to risk compromising one's own moral standing by associating with rich and powerful people who do things like run intelligence agencies, oil companies, family dictatorships, or who are involved with other activities that most thoughtful people would be profoundly uncomfortable with?

And even aside from any possible good that could come out of such an association by having the ear of someone like Epstein, are such associations of value for other reasons, like for anyone seeking to have a deeper understanding of how power in this sick world is actually exercised?

To me, the answer to either of these questions is an unequivocal "yes." I don't even really understand why this needs to be said, or to be explained. Nor do I understand why anyone would assume Chomsky's association with Epstein has to do with anything other than exactly these sorts of considerations.

I'm not sure of this, but I feel like there was a time when, at least in the absence of hard evidence, most people at all familiar with Chomsky and his life work would tend to give him the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming negative intentions. If those days ever existed, they're clearly over now.

On Being Targeted

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Wed, 11 Feb 2026 20:34:00 +0000

I've been a target for surveillance and suppression for at least 24 years. The question is, a target of whom?

I first learned I was on some kind of international watch list in 2002, thanks to a uniformed officer for Canadian immigration at the Montana-Alberta border who showed me what it said on his computer screen about me, before he told me I wouldn't be allowed into the country, and if I tried again at another border crossing, I'd be held there until the G8 meetings were over.

Contrary to some people's opinions, I'm actually not inclined towards assuming there's a conspiracy going on, generally. Until I was shown the "all points warning" about me on the officer's screen, I had figured that my many problems with trying to cross the Canadian border were related to generally increased levels of security on the border since the rise of the global justice movement in the late 1990's.

I knew that the increased security, and my problems with the border, were not just attributable to the increased security post-9/11, because it all started before then.

Around the turn of the 21st century there were so many overlapping events all happening at more or less the same time. The rise of the global justice movement, which seemed to be very threatening to the neoliberal capitalist status quo then, was happening in North America and around the world at basically the same time as other events that were also very threatening to various elements of the ruling elites, such as the election of Hugo Chavez to power in Venezuela, the beginning of the Second Intifada in the occupied Palestinian lands, and then the 9/11 attacks, all in fairly rapid succession.

Since that time it's been a quarter century. I've been touring, performing, and recording all that time, trying to maintain and maybe even build a career, while facing many obstacles along the way. Some of those obstacles have been related to the rise of Big Tech, and the enshittification of the platforms which have effectively taken over the internet. For example, when legal, free streaming became the dominant way most people got their music, untold numbers of musicians lost half their income, which for so many meant they effectively had to find another line of work. This happened to musicians regardless of their politics or lack thereof.

What's happened to me, however, can't just be attributed to those kinds of developments. On the other hand, almost everything that's happened to me -- aside from at that border crossing in 2002 -- could be attributed to a variety of possible factors.

There are all sorts of reasons why I might have trouble crossing a border, for example. I fit a certain kind of suspicious profile, whether I'm on a list or not. There are all kinds of reasons someone expressing opinions like mine about sensitive issues like whether Israel has a right to exist as an ethnonationalist state or not would have problems with things like censorship. Such opinions often violate the laws of many different countries these days, after all.

One of the things about being targeted for surveillance and suppression by evil forces is no one wants to inflate one's sense of self-importance, or most of us don't. If we can attribute our experiences to a less conspiratorial, more common sort of explanation, that often seems preferable.

For someone like me, a US citizen with some kind of involvement with the left dating back to my early childhood, I naturally have been inclined to think about things like Cointelpro, the FBI's Counterintelligence Program. Partly because I knew about it, and partly because I'm a US citizen with a history of being involved with various social movements that have all been heavily targeted for suppression by US authorities here -- such as the global justice movement, the antiwar movement, the environmental movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement that was very prominent around the world during the slightly less than twelve months between Ariel Sharon's invasion of the Al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28th, 2000, and the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

But my ruminations in more recent times -- and also after reading a big chunk of Ilan Pappe's recent history of the Zionist lobby and its massive and longstanding program to dominate the global narrative around Israel, and looking at what we're learning about the vast network of surveillance and influence that Mossad seems to have established with the Jeffrey Epstein project -- leads me to wonder, what if there is one particular agency targeting me all this time, and what if it's not a US-based one, like I had always assumed? Whether or not this knowledge would make any difference is another matter. But what if it's Mossad that is targeting me?

As I process this question myself, I find it makes the most sense. Given my relatively low profile as an artist in the first place, with never more than 2 million songs streamed in a given year in my entire career, I have often wondered how much sense it could possibly make for me to have had so many problems in so many different countries. Are they all run by people who are really that concerned about me and my music? It feels unlikely. But if there's someone in Israel, or working for Israel, who decided a long time ago that I was deserving of being a target for surveillance and suppression, then it all seems at least slightly more logical.

The folks who run Israel have a long history of understanding the vital importance of artists in the resistance, which is why Israel has a long history of assassinating, imprisoning, and otherwise in less violent ways suppressing the careers of artists who speak out against the crimes of the Zionist state.

Assassinating your critics can draw a lot of attention, so most artists targeted for suppression don't get to meet the fates of people like Ghassan Kanafani, Wael Zuaiter, Kamal Nasser, Naji al-Ali, Refaat Alareer or Saleem Al-Naffar. There are many other ways to suppress an artist's career that don't turn them into martyrs.

My guess at the moment is I got on the radar of the Israelis when what was to be my second tour of Israel was canceled in the fall of 2000, just after the beginning of the Second Intifada, which had coincided with me writing a song called "Children of Jerusalem."

The song resulted in me having most of my gigs canceled in Israel, and being labeled a fascist and/or an antisemite by most of my would-be Jewish gig organizers there (despite my Jewish lineage). It then resulted in a flood of attention and praise from the Palestinian diaspora around the world, and many years afterwards of being featured as a performer at pro-Palestinian demonstrations around the world and being interviewed occasionally on platforms like Al-Jazeera.

I'll just go through notable things that happened in the years and decades since that time.

The first major thing that I remember was being turned away at the Canadian border in 2002. The border official had been instructed to turn me away without telling me why he was doing so. He was so uncomfortable with this order that he showed it to me. Then he turned me away, because he didn't want to lose his job, and he told me that that was the real reason he was turning me away.

In 2002, after the Israeli military's invasion and destruction of the Jenin refugee camp and resulting deaths of scores of Palestinians, I wrote the song, "Jenin." In the UK, Andy Kershaw began playing that song about once a month on his weekly, nation-wide world music program.

As a result of playing this song, Andy was called to an interview with the BBC Board of Governors, for the first time in his three decades at BBC. They questioned his journalistic neutrality and criticized his choices of guests. He lost his job at BBC not long after that, supposedly for unrelated reasons. I have met some of his former producers since then, who have all apologized for never playing me since he was fired, saying that they don't want to lose their jobs, too.

In 2002 I was gaining a much bigger audience in Germany as well, performing at an antiwar demonstration for a hundred thousand people in Berlin that spring. Soon after that, I began to be targeted by a group called the Antideutsch, the Anti-Germans, a bizarre but influential political tendency coming out of some of the more academic and convoluted corners of the German left that aligns themselves strictly with anything the self-proclaimed Jewish State of Israel does, up to and including crimes against humanity -- and that aligns themselves rigidly against anyone who is opposed to Israel's crimes.

The Antideutsch began leafleting at some of my gigs, and threatening with other ones to do physical violence at venues if gigs went ahead. This kind of thing has kept up in Germany ever since then. It hasn't stopped me from playing in Germany fairly regularly, but it has had a tremendous impact in terms of the functioning of the rumor mill, and how I have to swim through a morass of false allegations and misunderstandings in Germany everywhere I go since then, especially if anyone is online at all.

When I was barred from entering Canada for a full year, in 2006 or so, what I was mainly going to Canada to do was to receive an award from a Palestinian community center in Vancouver. There was also a work visa question around another gig, which I figured at the time was the real problem. The Palestinians at the community center thought otherwise. A year ban seems excessive either way.

When I received a phone call in Tokyo before boarding my flight to New Zealand in 2013 and I was told by New Zealand Immigration that I could not board the flight and was not welcome in New Zealand, I thought this time as well that maybe it was related to not having a work visa organized yet. But it turned out that there was no mention of that, only of things Immigration had been reading on my blog, that made me an undesirable element as far as visiting New Zealand went.

I was hooked up then by a criminal lawyer I knew with an immigration lawyer, who took my cause to the appropriate government ministers, and was told that my case would not be reconsidered, I was not welcome in New Zealand. The lawyer had never seen anything like this in all his decades of experience.

I have never made it back to New Zealand since then, but my strong suspicion about what got me on the radar there as far as being an unwanted character was that the year before, in 2012, I played at a benefit concert folks in New Zealand organized for the purposes of buying a printing press for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the PFLP, to use. The PFLP is not a proscribed organization under New Zealand law, but it sure is as far as Israel is concerned.

Soon after I was turned away from New Zealand, in the capital of Australia, Canberra, a worker in one department happened to be walking past the open door of a couple of people talking in the department that addresses things like war crimes. According to this man's story to me, in that room there were two people discussing me. He didn't stick around to hear more than that.

At the beginning of 2021, allegedly because I interviewed a controversial guest on my YouTube channel, a campaign began, that has never stopped since that time, to spread false rumors about me being antisemitic, pro-Nazi, transphobic, and other things. Systematic efforts have been made to get my gigs canceled. While these efforts are often unsuccessful, they always succeed in creating or maintaining the toxic atmosphere that follows me wherever I go, and wherever anyone says anything nice about me online.

For years I assumed that the people behind this incessant trolling and cancellation campaigning were adherents to the intolerant philosophy represented by groups like Rose City Antifa here in Portland, that believe in physically shutting down book talks they find offensive, and who believe that cancellation campaigning is a great way to "demand accountability" from those who have allegedly lost their antifascist way.

Being targeted from the left and the right seemed ridiculous, but also like par for the course. Cointelpro is a great, lengthy illustration of the kinds of divide-and-conquer techniques that have successfully been employed in the past, that have seen groups form on the left that are doing the work of the right, whether with witting agents or unwitting activists who have been successfully misdirected by the efforts of the agents. What was and is especially maddening about this particular kind of campaign is how well it fools so many people who are too innocent to understand what is going on here, who are ready to believe any nonsense they hear from someone who claims to be a victim of my bigotry.

But then came the fall of 2023, and the winter and spring following, when the cancellation campaigning and trolling was very explicitly coming from supporters of Israel. The volume was astronomically greater than any of the trolling that was supposedly coming from the Antifa end of the political spectrum. But what was shockingly identical was everything else -- the techniques of attacking anyone who speaks up in my defense; the quick resort to attacking me and others in ways that were sexist, homophobic, or racist, all the while supposedly being offended by my antisemitism; the use of macho language and certain kinds of macho vocabulary. It was all the same -- identical. Almost as if it were all or mostly, all along, the same people.

Things moved from trolling and algorithmic suppression online to vast troll farms unleashed on my Facebook page in early 2024, with 27,000 comments per month for a while, all hateful ones. My first album about the Gaza genocide, Notes from a Holocaust, mysteriously disappeared from the world's biggest music streaming platform, Spotify. On YouTube, various songs the censors disliked were being removed, and I was receiving warnings that I faced worse fates if I didn't shape up and stop supporting unnamed criminal organizations.

In early 2024 a group called UK Lawyers for Israel began writing venues in England and warning them that they were hosting an antisemite and could face a lawsuit if they didn't cancel the gig. Other anonymous people also wrote venues to tell them they should cancel gigs, on the same basis, but they presented themselves as people of the left. Same stuff as in the US, but happening in the UK. The same efforts were then made to get gigs canceled all over Scandinavia, where allegations around me became a subject for discussion at various venues and within various groups.

As if they were coordinating with these various efforts to get gigs canceled and suppress turnout to them, Facebook started disabling the use of the "Invite" feature on Events for me about 95% of the time I tried to use it. This almost-total disabling of the most useful feature on Facebook continues. Unlike with other times they do this to people, with me there has never been a notification that this is happening, or for how long it is to happen. It just happens, and never stops happening.

In January, 2025, my YouTube channel was demonetized. In November, 2025, the world's second-biggest music streaming platform outside of China, YouTube Music, removed me as an artist, and all of my albums, from their platform. In January, 2026, YouTube deleted my channel.

For an artist today, YouTube deleting your channel and YouTube Music deleting all your albums is akin to cutting your potential global audience in half, along with your streaming revenues, which in my case started declining well before the channel removal, because of YouTube's actions prior to that. The only thing that could be as bad as this is having my music deleted from Spotify, at which point my effective disappearance from most people's online reality will be pretty well complete.

Needless to say, the vast majority of the offenses I committed on YouTube that led to songs being removed prior to my channel being deleted revolved around Israel and Palestine, and my musical support for various forms of resistance to Israel's aggressions, with songs like "I Support Palestine Action" and "Song for the Houthi Army" being singled out by the censors.

Stay tuned, dear reader, for the next chapter in my disappearance.

Meanwhile on YouTube: Discographies Wiped and Channels Deleted

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 04:56:00 +0000

If there's anyone out there interested in civil liberties, now might be a good time to help me sue YouTube, for the sake of society at large.

The title uses the plural because I assume I'm not the only artist this is happening to, but I have yet to hear of others, aside from R. Kelly, who was actually convicted of running a criminal organization with lots of actual victims who testified in court. I know channel deletions have happened to a number of journalists, among many other people, who, like me, were not running or otherwise engaged with any criminal organizations. These removals are as outrageous as mine, but not quite the same thing.

What happens when an artist becomes possibly the first artist to have all of their albums wiped from YouTube Music and then the YouTube Channel they've had for twenty years deleted, all because their music allegedly was supportive of unnamed criminal organizations? As far as I can tell, basically nothing.

Lots of expressions of sympathy, lots of completely bizarre advice, lots of comments from people who clearly have no understanding of the nature of the digital world we all live in these days, and no interest whatsoever from the mainstream media from anywhere in the world.

There are, of course, many other very pressing things to cover, what with masked thugs killing people on the streets of US cities every day, Trump invading or threatening to invade everywhere, and so much more. But I'll just say here for whoever might be listening, the canary in this coal mine of artistic free expression just died, and I believe any people or organizations concerned with the erosion of civil liberties in the world should be very interested in what YouTube just did.

One of the more maddening aspects of the experience has been the realization that a tremendous number of people, especially people over the age of 40 or so, don't really seem to understand why having one's music wiped from YouTube Music or their YouTube Channel deleted is a big deal.

The suggestions people helpfully offer tend to confirm this. The most common one involves recommendations of other platforms that host videos.

The concerns people express also reflect this. The most common one is around the assumption that I must have lost a lot of content that I had stored there and nowhere else.

I wonder if when Orson Welles was blacklisted from working in Hollywood, people offered him the use of their sheds to store his film reels, as if being blacklisted were somehow a storage issue?

It's good to be positive and look for alternatives, but this stuff can get pretty weird.

I get the impression that most people over 40 aren't really aware that so much of what they see, read, watch, etc., is controlled by corporate algorithms.

What people once thought they understood about the various platforms has long ago stopped being true.

When you're scrolling on any of the major platforms, very much including YouTube, you're seeing what the corporate algorithms want you to see, that they think will keep your eyes glued to the screen. You are not seeing whatever your friends posted most recently. That stopped being the case over a decade ago on the platforms most of these folks are using, like Facebook.

These algorithms are such a curse to all of us in so many ways. They distort how we perceive reality and seem to be turning us all into assholes. They're also crucial to the lives and livelihoods of musicians and other content creators, whether we like it or hate it.

I'm not famous like Kneecap or Bob Vylan or Roger Waters, and my disappearance from the internet will not apparently garner the kind of media attention that attacks on them have generated. But after twenty years on YouTube, a certain handful of videos of me singing a certain handful of songs have managed to get hundreds of thousands of views.

Once a video gets views in that sort of number, it tends to get into the recommendation algorithms. This means when someone is into Irish rebel music and they're listening to the Clancy Brothers or the Irish Brigade, there's a good chance my song, "the St. Patrick Battalion," will eventually come up in YouTube's recommendation algorithm.

These algorithms are how so many people today discover new music, new videos, the next thing to watch or read or listen to on whatever platform or device.

And if you're looking for a video, not only are these algorithms going to determine most of what you're probably going to end up watching, but the place you're going to do that is likely going to be either YouTube or Tiktok. If you're looking for music, the platform you're most likely going to be doing that on is Spotify, or secondarily YouTube Music. If you're looking for an event of some kind, the first place many people are likely to search is on the Events tab on Facebook. If you need a ride and you're not sure where to find one, the first place you're likely to look is on the Uber app on your phone.

These corporations have all succeeded in becoming, functionally, monopolies. The music is on Spotify, the videos are on YouTube. These platforms are places where millions of people basically live. If music or videos listeners or viewers might like are not coming up, they don't exist.

So many people don't go to websites and intentionally do things like look for an artist that has never come up for them on the platforms they use, just like so many people don't bother looking beyond Amazon for a product they might be looking to buy.

Alternatives exist, but most people are watching videos on YouTube and listening to music on Spotify. Those are the platforms on which they are creating and sharing playlists. The platforms serve the online function of being like the collective living room, the place where people gather, just as Facebook and Instagram are so often the places people feel very dependent on for keeping up on what's happening with their friends, family, and even local, physical communities.

So, in case it's not abundantly obvious where this is all leading up to, having your YouTube Channel deleted is a form of disappearance, it is akin to blacklisting. What is all the more outrageous is the blanket nature of the action. It is not a complaint about a specific piece of art, but about the existence of the artist online.

Some of the impact is easily measured numerically. Many thousands of songs that would otherwise have come up as the next track for people exploring YouTube or YouTube Music each month will no longer come up. Many thousands of people each month who would have discovered my music for the first time will no longer do so. Not on YouTube, or YouTube Music (YouTube's music streaming platform).

I'm not allowed to start a new channel without thoroughly disguising my identity, but even if I could do that, it would not get my music back into the recommendation algorithms anytime soon.

Other people are still able to put up videos of me, but other people putting up videos of me doesn't help people see where my next show is.

One or the main ways many people find out if an artist they like is coming to their area is through a tab on YouTube that viewers can see, if the artist they're listening to has that going on, which the vast majority of serious working artists alive today. The existence of this tab, however, requires that the artist first has a channel.

Being that Facebook is also a monopoly in the same way YouTube is, it is notable that I am prevented from using the "invite" feature on Events. Being able to invite people to Events is the most useful thing anyone can do on Facebook, and this feature is permanently disabled for me, as far as I can tell. This is also a very real and very damaging form of blacklisting.

If an artist is blacklisted, but the media never paid attention to them in the first place, were they really blacklisted?

The thing that has been different about the internet, and even "walled garden" corporate platforms like YouTube or Spotify, is artists who had had no success with corporate radio airplay or appearing on TV shows or in movies could now put their stuff out there on platforms where the existence of their audience engaging with their content on these platforms could propel their art or music further, so more people could hear it, because of the dominance of recommendation algorithms.

Despite never getting corporate airplay or promotion or putting out fancy corporate-sponsored music videos, doing music that would just never be touched with a long pole by corporate labels in the first place, I had gotten to the point on YouTube, just as with Spotify, where my songs were altogether being streamed a million times in a given year.

While really famous artists are getting a million streams a day, no doubt, the disappearance of an artist like me, and the loss of those million streams to the public consciousness, should be very worrying to people other than me.

I don't want anyone to ask me what I'm going to do next. This is akin to asking the canary what should be done about the coal mine. I want to hear about what other people -- and organizations like the ACLU, the EFF, and others -- are going to do next.

Of Babies, Bathwater, and AI

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 15:57:00 +0000

A lot of people are saying a lot of things about AI to me, and in general. Here I make a bit of effort to distinguish the baby from the bathwater.

There's a lot going on in the world, some of which I write about quite a bit, including in the form of lots of songs. One of the things going on in the world that occupies my attention regularly aside from the actual events happening that I'm writing about is the method of communication I'm using much of the time in recent months to write about those events -- AI-driven music-generation platforms.

This is not the best time in history to engage in nuanced discussion of pretty much anything. It's an age where people with strong opinions put them out there in order to make money on creating viral ragebait. An age where it's easier than ever to leave a snarky comment most anywhere you want to, without having to bother with herculean and arcane maneuvers like stuffing an envelope and putting a stamp on it.

But it is clear that there are a lot of people thinking about what to think and how to feel about AI. I'm much more distracted with the possibility of World War 3 starting any minute now, but according to a lot of comments I get on the various platforms, while lots of people are enjoying my recent Ai Tsuno albums, people also express various concerns about AI in general, and using it to make music.

In support of the idea of nuanced thought, I thought I'd try to contribute to this discussion by looking at the various critiques of the technology that people often talk about, with some examination of each one. I'll explore the following common themes, which we could divide up between: AI slop, energy/water use, jobs, the Wall-E effect, theft, Big Tech is bad, the future of humanity.

You're making AI slop. Why are you doing this?

I've noticed that the people telling me I'm making AI slop are not actually the ones listening to the songs. They're referring to it as AI slop in principle, because AI is involved with the creation process.

The reason pretty much no one calls it slop who actually listens to it -- not to AI-assisted music in general, but specifically to the music I have made with Ai Tsuno -- is because it's clearly not slop, it's great music, with catchy hooks and melodies, inventive use of different sorts of styles, instruments, and cross-pollinations between various styles and instruments, and the production values are amazing. That is, the clarity of the sound, how good it all sounds through big speakers or small ones, and things like that.

In short, I'm doing it because it's not slop, it's real music, and really good music. The reason it's really good has a whole lot to do with my input -- it's a very collaborative process. There's lots of stuff we can certainly call AI slop out there, being produced by all kinds of people who aren't yet very good at what they're trying to do. You'll find exactly the same phenomenon among the realm of human musicians -- a lot of them are not very good.

AI requires all these data centers and they use a lot of energy and water.

This is true. Also, if you drive a car you burn gas. I have rarely if ever had someone tell me I should stop doing concert tours because of that.

When we're talking about energy use, this only makes sense if we're comparing it to something. The amount of savings in unnecessary use of energy and creation of pollution represented by the transition to digital streaming would probably be hard to overstate. The amount of plastic involved with the production of all those vinyl records and CDs, and plastic packaging they usually came with, along with shrink wrap, is staggering. The amount of energy involved with doing a run of 1,000 CDs is thousands of times greater than the amount of energy involved with creating an album's worth of songs on Suno and distributing the album on music streaming platforms.

If you're recording an album in a music studio with a bunch of musicians, and you factor in the carbon footprint involved with them getting from their homes to the studio and back every day for a couple of weeks, once again, the energy and water use involved makes using AI music-generation platforms look very ecological. The argument is probably one of the more bizarre ones I regularly encounter, because of the lack of the "compared to what" element in it.

Working with my AI band, putting in hours on a typical day for the past six months or so, I have produced more songs in top-quality recorded form than would otherwise be possible by any other means that I know of. I'm not creating mindless content here, but real art. If I burned a few gallons of gas in order to do that, I'm sorry they don't run their data centers on solar and wind like they all should and could, but I don't control that, unfortunately.

AI is going to take away everyone's jobs.

I think this is very true, and very disastrous, in so many different ways. It's also very true in the realm of music. Who is going to hire a chorus to record harmonies in a studio anymore? Or anything else like that. It's all going to become less and less common, and this is a very sad thing.

It's also going to happen regardless of whether some of us boycott new technologies that are not going anywhere. We can dream about the days before automation of all kinds, but it's overwhelmingly obvious to a lot of people that this genie is not going back into the bottle, any more than technologies like the internet, TV, radio, or the printing press is going to go away.

People using AI to do various things are not the ones deciding that this is now how the world is operating. Because we use this technology, we are not therefore then equally responsible for the job losses that will result. To think this way is to have no understanding of how society under the rule of the billionaires, society under capitalism, actually works. Capitalism needs to change, but it won't change depending on our lifestyle choices, like whether we use AI platforms, drive cars, or eat meat. The changes required are structural in nature.

If we use AI like this we'll all forget how to play instruments and become like the people in Wall-E.

I think this is exactly what is going to happen to a lot of people. Learning to play an instrument in the age of AI music generation will probably become more and more of an unusual thing to do. I hope to avoid that happening to me. I'm sad that it will probably happen to a lot of people, though, and sad that there will probably be fewer and fewer people making music with each other, just as there are already fewer and fewer people talking with each other, who aren't otherwise occupied with online activities, or getting therapy from their AI companions. There are so many down sides to this and other technologies, but some of us not using them won't make them go away.

All of these AI platforms were trained on pirated material, for which the authors or composers or performers have not been consulted or compensated.

This is very true. All of us content creators from throughout history have been robbed by Big Tech, and now we have these amazing tools to use, for which no one receives credit but the thieving corporations that trawled the internet for everything in it.

Like many other people, I hope humanity persists long enough for us to arrive at some way for everyone to at least be able to live comfortable lives, even though most of our jobs will have been replaced by AI that was created based on what they call piracy of intellectual property.

But until then, and after then, this technology now exists. The platforms that are "ethically trained" are amazing, too. The genie is out of the bottle. No matter how these platforms are going to be run, there's no way they are going to compensate for the loss of the music industry jobs involved with Suno being able to do the things it can do.

Society has to find solutions to these very deep, society-wide problems, in terms of how to adapt to the new world of AI. Those of us trying to avoid AI technology will in a few years be as anachronistic as the folks who didn't own a television by 1970 or so. They were happier, overall, I'm sure. More productive than many of their TV-owning neighbors, and probably less brainwashed. But their choice not to own a TV didn't change society any more than those of us avoiding AI today are changing society.

These Big Tech corporations are so unbelievably rich, and out to rule the world.

It's so true, and so alarming. But it is already and will become increasingly the case that avoiding AI technology is akin to trying to be a bicycle enthusiast in a country with no bike lanes and lots of highways, sports utility vehicles, and sprawling suburbs. Some people will manage to do everything on a bicycle under such circumstances, but very, very few.

This is, again, a systemic problem. Like other massively impactful technologies, AI is a double-edged sword. It can do many amazing things, including making music, but also lots of other, destructive things which we've all heard lots of news stories about. Other technologies that transformed society and were largely very destructive to it, also had uses that were impossible to avoid trying to engage with.

For example, if everyone is going to have a TV anyway, then those of us trying to communicate about important issues want to use that medium to reach people. Same with radio, the internet, the printing press, etc.

When Artificial General Intelligence arrives, maybe AI will destroy humanity.

A lot of very smart people think this is the case, or they give it a 10% chance of happening. That's very alarming to me, as it is for many others. I wish I could make it all go away, and make all the corporations pouring trillions into developing the technology disappear. But what I do as an individual with the technology will do very little to influence its development either way. We can use it or not use it, but AGI is either coming or its not, and it'll destroy humanity or it won't.

I hope people who care can find a way to have agency in this whole question, but we won't do that by making individual lifestyle choices about trying to avoid the use of chatbots, any more than we will prevent the clearcutting of the Amazon by becoming vegans. This kind of thinking was delivered to us by the capitalists themselves, because they know very well that that's not actually how the world works, under capitalism.

For the podcast version of this essay, I'll close with some songs I wrote with Ai Tsuno on the very subject this essay is about -- AI. I hope you enjoy them.

The Open Veins of Latin America, Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 23:36:00 +0000

Los Estados Unidos se creen -- the United States believes
el país elegido por Dios -- it's God's chosen country
para acabar con el mundo -- to end the world
en nombre de la Libertad -- in the name of freedom

So much has been happening so fast for so long that I hardly ever feel like I'm able to take time for much reflection anymore. This has been true for a long time, but it keeps getting more true.

Sometimes things happen, like last weekend, that induce some of that reflection. Events can bring a bunch of loose threads together like that, and veritably demand that I see if I can untangle this ball of yarn, and spin one.

It's very easy to romanticize pretty much the entirety of Latin America, and I do it every day.

I was twelve, and just starting to pay attention to global news through mostly very mainstream sources, but I was swept up in the excitement when the Sandinistas overthrew the US-backed dictator in Nicaragua. Throughout the 1980's, during my teens and early twenties, I read with horror about the atrocities being committed by the death squads in El Salvador and Guatemala, and read with admiration about the brave souls in guerrilla armies like the FMLN who were fighting for a society that had room for people who didn't own a coffee plantation.

Along the way, by my later twenties and early thirties especially, after the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico and with the rise of the global justice movement, I was meeting many more people from across Latin America in my travels. Among other things, I was discovering the music that is in important ways the Spanish-language equivalent of the tradition represented in the US by artists like Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, or Hazel Dickens, which is broadly referred to as Nueva Canción music throughout Latin America (except in Cuba, where it's more often known as Nueva Trova).

I have never become a Spanish-speaker, sadly, but I have had some wonderful translators, and long ago fell in love with the music of artists like Silvio Rodriguez and Victor Jara, with the aid of people from various parts of the Spanish-speaking world who introduced me to the music they loved so much.

In 2004 I first went to a World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where so many of those gigantic international gatherings have taken place over the decades, particularly in the early aughts. Hanging out in the Venezuela-Cuba Solidarity Tent was a wonderful, eye-opening experience, as I began to realize that there were probably at least as many people in Latin America who were trying to write, sing and play just like Silvio Rodriguez as there ever were people in the US who wanted to write like Bob Dylan. Many of them even wore the same kind of glasses as Silvio did.

Whenever I have left the English-speaking world and traveled in Latin America and many other countries as well, one of the most refreshing things that becomes immediately obvious is outside of the Anglosphere -- as it once was within the Anglosphere as well -- music and art are central to society, to community, and to social movements. Music and art is everywhere in Latin America, and it deeply permeates and sustains all of the social movements that have ever existed there, to my knowledge.

Among the hundred thousand people or so attending the World Social Forum, while they actively loved their musicians, they also loved their writers, poets, and intellectuals. Tens of thousands of people came to hear Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez when he spoke at the gathering, and gigantic numbers of people also came to hear the Uruguayan author, Eduardo Galeano, when he spoke there.

I had been following the great accomplishments of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela closely, long before going to Porto Alegre and hearing Chavez speak there. My first child was born in the largely Mexican city of Houston, and her mother grew up in Caracas, Venezuela. I had also long been a fan of Eduardo Galeano's writing, especially his very popular history book, the Open Veins of Latin America.

It had become my main mission in life to try to bring the kind of spirit I've witnessed in Latin America back to the Anglo cultures -- to reintroduce us to our music. Some form of the New Song/Nueva Canción movement there in the Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity Tent was what I always wanted to bring to the Anglosphere, or bring back to the Anglosphere, since we used to have this sort of movement, too, in a very big way, for a very long time.

Vicente Feliú never became quite as famous across the Spanish-speaking world as artists like Silvio Rodriguez, but, like Silvio, Vicente was a Cuban songwriter, and a founder of the Nueva Trova musical movement there in Cuba, and also a writer and player of beautiful, powerful songs.

I was overjoyed one day in 2015 to see on my Facebook page that I had a message from Silvio's friend and colleague, Feliú. It was the beginning of an intermittent correspondence that went on for four years.

This morning I was revisiting our correspondence, which Facebook so helpfully has preserved for me there in my message inbox.

Vicente had first gotten in touch with me to thank me for writing "Song for Ana Belen Montes," and to let me know that he was singing my song for Ana at various events in Cuba.

For those who don't know, Ana Belen Montes is a woman from Puerto Rico who rose to very high levels within the Department of Defense in Washington, DC, all the while spying for Cuba. After she was caught and sentenced to 25 years in prison, I wrote a song in appreciation for her efforts on behalf of that heavily-targeted country, and in appreciation for her opposition to US policies to terrorize the island.

Along the line during those years Vicente and I were corresponding, I shared an idea I had for a song we could write together.

I thought it would be cool to have a song with a Spanish-language chorus, but with verses in English, intended for a mostly English-speaking audience. What I was thinking that would especially work well with this kind of format would be a song against US plans to invade Venezuela, and in general about the long and horrific history of US efforts to try to control every aspect of life for people throughout the region.

Vicente got back to me with a chorus, which was essentially a quote from José Martí. Vicente said I was welcome to use however I wanted to, if I saw fit. Which I did, but not until two years later, when I circled back to the idea, and wrote the song I had had in mind, with his chorus. I called the song "In the Name of Freedom," and I recorded it on my 2021 album, May Day.

I wondered why I didn't hear back from Vicente, but it was also not at all unusual in the history of our correspondence for months to go by before he'd respond to a message, so I waited, and didn't dwell on it, because there was too much else happening that was dominating my attention, between touring, raising children, and being a news junky in a world that is getting more overwhelming to keep track of with each passing hour, for years.

I finally got around to doing an internet search for the man a couple months ago, to learn that he died in December, 2021. Probably he never got the message from me about the song having been written and recorded.

What got me thinking of Vicente all of a sudden again, and that song we wrote together in particular, was the US's invasion of Venezuela over the weekend.

Where I was when hearing this news was Arizona, where I was staying for the weekend in a motel in the town of Douglas, a short walk from the Mexican border, and the Mexican town of Agua Prieta.

The entirety of Arizona, along with so much of the rest of the western US, was stolen outright in a war of aggression against Mexico that the USA waged in the 1840's. The US-led or US-financed wars of aggression against Mexico, and most other countries in Latin America, were just getting started back then though, as the US empire continually expanded its imperial horizons.

For much of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Douglas, Arizona, along with Bisbee and other towns, was all part of the copper mining industry. It was mined in Bisbee and smelted in Douglas. For most of the time the mines and smelters operated, there was a system in place that gave preference to Anglo (white American) workers both in terms of pay and housing, and openly discriminated against Mexican and other so-called immigrant workers. (Mexicans, of course, being "immigrants" in the sense that "we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us.")

During the decades this apartheid labor system was in place, the US military was engaging in one adventure after another to take over other countries and profit through neocolonial relationships, systematically overthrowing democracies and putting in place dictatorships that would serve the interests of the corporations from the USA that had come to exploit their resources and their people, and generally leave behind deserts, lakes full of toxic waste, and unimaginable numbers of dead and maimed miners and other workers across the land of the open veins.

There have been many efforts to do away with the kind of rule that is based on exploitation of workers and the environment generally, with even more intense exploitation reserved for people of color and immigrants within the US, and for the people and lands of other countries.

In Arizona, the Industrial Workers of the World organized a multi-racial union that brought together the vast majority of the Anglo, Mexican, and other workers -- 85% of them -- in their efforts to break this apartheid labor system. They were driven at gunpoint out of the state back in 1917.

Across Latin America, social movements of all kinds have also tried to throw off the boot of the United States, to oppose US-backed dictatorships in efforts to introduce, or re-introduce, free elections to their countries. Across Latin America there have been movements aimed in one way or another at getting the Yankees to go home, and to stop trying to run the world. Movements to take back the oil, gas, copper, and other resources that were for so long controlled by foreign interests, who took the lion's share of the profits, aside from the kickbacks to the dictator who kept the public in a state of terror on their behalf.

Walking around Douglas and Agua Prieta, looking at the massive iron wall that stretches on forever to the east and west, dividing these two countries, these two largely Spanish-speaking communities effectively cut off from each other, seeing the obvious poverty everywhere, the dilapidated housing more often than not, while listening to journalists interview one politician after another, from one western country after another, all seeking to justify the bombing of Venezuela and abduction of the country's president, I was struck by the starkly similar tone of the journalism today compared with a century ago.

In 1917, when the union was being broken in Arizona, the wealthy men raking in the profits from their copper-mining operations and the politicians shilling for them all said the union had to be broken because mining the copper was essential for security.

Therefore rather than, say, ending the apartheid labor system, paying everyone a fair wage, and improving safety in the mines, the union had to be crushed. The union also had to be crushed because the union members were clearly sympathetic with the Bolsheviks, who had violently overthrown the Russian government, and therefore these workers and their union represented an imminent danger to the US government. An insurrection, even. Does any of this sound familiar?

Now they would call them friends of Putin, rather than Bolsheviks. "Communists" who don't want the US buying their elections. "Authoritarians" who might dare to try to control disinformation campaigns aimed at swaying public opinion in their countries.

Immigrants from these countries are once again being called "enemies within."

Relationships with China or Russia are automatically seen as somehow threatening to US security -- just as they ever were, despite the US being the only country in the world with hundreds of military bases scattered all around it. Despite the fact that the US has invaded both Russia and China -- never the other way around.

Like so many communities, this community I was walking around over the weekend on the US-Mexico border was a divided one.

As I was walking around it, the streets were completely bereft of the many people from all over Central America, Venezuela and elsewhere who were once claiming asylum, a couple years ago, back when the US was making at least a pretense of being interested in the concept of international law and human rights. But not long ago, Pastor Mark Adams and other people around there who I met were part of a big team of dedicated people who organized themselves to look after thousands of people who were coming through for so long, needing food, water, shelter, and transportation to somewhere they had relatives or other connections.

No sign of migrants, volunteers helping them, or anyone opposing any of that on the streets now. Hardly a US flag in sight, and no sign at all of anyone supporting Trump or opposing immigration. No Trump flags, no MAGA hats anywhere. But not long ago, two of the churches in Douglas were burned down, for the pastors being too radical, or just too gay.

Those kinds of divisions exist throughout Latin American societies as well. That's why it has long been relatively easy for the empire to use its money and power to get certain segments of various countries to run authoritarian states to control the populations on behalf of the US, over the course of a very violent couple of centuries of US hegemony.

And then we are told all over the airwaves, minute after minute, by smooth-talking Venezuelan and Cuban expatriates and by "analysts" of one kind or another from the US, that the reign of Chavez and Maduro has been totally disastrous for the Venezuelan people, and the reign of the Communist Party in Cuba has been similarly disastrous for the Cuban people.

Never mind the statistics -- never mind the millions lifted out of poverty in both countries, never mind the average Cuban lifespan, never mind the health care systems or the productive collective farms.

And never mind the US sanctions that sabotaged industries in both countries, dependent on parts from companies they could no longer trade with. Never mind the theft of billions of dollars of gold reserves from the Venezuelan Central Bank, or the imposition of what amount to naval blockades of both countries.

The economic problems they are having in Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, for that matter, are all supposed to be a result of corruption and mismanagement on the part of the leaders of these countries, despite all the blatantly obvious indications that it is the long-term project to undermine these societies by so many different means that has ultimately succeeded, to varying degrees, in causing serious problems for them.

And of course, now that a given nation's economy is in crisis and creating millions of refugees, somehow the US has the right to depose their leaders, overthrow their governments, install "business-friendly" dictatorships.

And Nicolás Maduro joins the ranks of other presidents of other countries deposed by force by the US and imprisoned, exiled, or assassinated. He joins the ranks not only of the oft-mentioned Noriega, but also of Aristide, Allende, Arbenz, Roldós, Torrijos, Mossadegh, Lumumba, Gaddafi, and the damning list goes on and on.

We are living in a mind control experiment, it seems, where the allegedly liberal and the allegedly conservative media, apparently throughout most of the western world, is intent on telling us that war is peace, slavery is freedom, and democracy is dictatorship.

But if you want to understand the world, it helps a lot to see it, rather than fearing it. If you want to understand people, it helps a lot to meet them, which can be hard to do if there's a massive metal wall between you.

And it most definitely helps to listen to Vicente Feliú and Silvio Rodriguez, and to read Eduardo Galeano.

In the meantime, we seem to be so far away from having the kind of social movement we so desperately need, if we're to have any hope of rising to this completely mad situation. It was a long weekend, it's been a long century, and it shows no sign of ending.

The Red and the Blue

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 20:39:00 +0000

Every time I hear someone talk about "red states" and "blue states" I feel like vomiting.

Partly because of the idea that the Republican Party could possibly get to have the color red, after the long history of red being the color of Reds -- international socialism -- rather than the color of supporters of capitalism or imperialism.

But mainly because the whole idea of a society being geographically divided on such a broad level in some way that corresponds with political perspective is completely asinine. It's an idea that has never applied to the US historically -- certainly not in my lifetime. There are many such divisions if you narrow down by neighborhood or zip code, but not by state.

Of course, in the most primitive sort of democracy, a winner-take-all electoral system that pretty much guarantees a bipolar power structure, there are going to be states that vote one way or the other way, as far as what the electoral map looks like. But the reality is each of the states has lots of different people mixed within it.

The "red" and "blue" color-coded thing began with broadcast media covering the presidential election in 2000, and it was adopted readily by social media users, where a simplistic, black and white, red and blue representation of anything and everything is the norm.

Over time the notion seems to get more and more entrenched. I hear more and more people talking about the idea of some parts of the country seceding, along such geographical/political lines.

What seems more and more clear as I navigate the physical world and the online world is most people in the US really don't get out much. Whether because they don't want to visit parts of the country they see as politically not aligned with them, or because they can't afford to travel extensively, most people in the US might travel for a few days to visit relatives somewhere a couple times a year, but most people don't do the kinds of road trips and concert tours that me and some other folks have done so much of.

Rather than seeing the country themselves, most of them are probably relying on the media and their social media feeds to inform them about what it's like in other parts of the country that they don't live in and have never really spent time in.

In my recent travels over the past few weeks, what was especially striking to me in both Texas and Georgia was the lack of any visible sign of support for President Trump anywhere. Not a single MAGA hat or Trump flag did I see, anywhere. Not even one. What was also very noticeable was the complete lack of any references to the Confederacy anywhere, and, perhaps more than anything else, the relative scarcity of US flags flying from people's front porches or along the highways in various places, where they used to be so numerous, large, and prominent.

When I last lived in Texas it was the years just after 9/11, and the hyper-patriotic reaction to that event was visible in every direction, at all times, in the form of gigantic US flags blowing in the wind above every car dealership and a whole lot of other places, such as hanging from overpasses everywhere. Coming back now, I can report to you that the flags are gone.

People assure me the Trump supporters and the Trump flags and MAGA hats are out there, in between the cities, in the rural areas. There's a big urban-rural divide, I was assured by various folks who I mentioned the lack of Trump paraphernalia to.

But I drove hundreds of miles through suburban and rural areas in between Austin and Dallas, in between Dallas and Houston, and in between Houston and Dallas, and saw literally nothing pro-Trump. US flags were not completely absent, but there were probably 1% of the number of flags there were twenty years ago, by my rough estimation.

I was, as usual, traveling with my collection of potentially offensive t-shirts. I like to wear t-shirts with flags of the countries the US has recently been attacking the most. So I have t-shirts with Palestinian flags along with one each for Iran, Mexico, and Cuba. The t-shirts evoked the usual looks of affection from certain people. At least one in ten Arab-looking people I pass in any given airport is likely to smile noticeably when they see the Palestine flag, especially. If anyone anywhere didn't like any of my t-shirts they made no indication.

In so many ways I'm unable to effectively promote gigs -- barred from using the "Invite" feature on Facebook Events, catalog of albums deleted from YouTube Music, creating a whole cascading effect of suppression in terms of where my gigs are listed and how likely people are to hear about any of them, and I could go on. But at each event there was a small collection of serious fans who had managed to hear about the gig, along with other folks that the organizers were much more responsible for having recruited to join the various little audiences.

In Austin it was an outdoor concert in support of the Middle East Children's Alliance, with lots of Palestinian flags around. In Dallas it was another Palestine fundraiser, taking place in a wonderful Pan-Africanist book store. In Houston, a backyard show around a fire. Several of those in attendance were programmers at the venerable community radio station in that city, which has the distinction of having had its transmitter burned down by the KKK not once, but twice, long ago.

The next weekend in Atlanta, a concert at Radio Free Georgia, preceded by dinner with such an impressive bunch of radicals. A long-time war correspondent who worked for CNN, one of the Emory professors who was attacked by the police while trying to protect students protesting the war on Gaza, the first station manager of WRFG, who was one of the organizers for the big civil rights marches on Washington at the beginning of the 1960's.

One old friend I spent a day wandering around Atlanta with spoke fondly of the 1970's, when the Allman Brothers were regularly putting on free concerts in the park.

People walking through the city to get to the park were liable to be walking through a neighborhood where there were elements of society unfriendly to long-hairs and other alternative sorts. At the beginning of the period when the free festivals were happening in Atlanta walking through these neighborhoods could be dangerous.

But then things changed, as the rednecks in those neighborhoods realized that not only was the music really good, but so was the cannabis, and half of those festival-goers were women. The free festivals won over hearts and minds in Atlanta just as they had done a few years earlier in San Francisco.

What was never very far from view in any of these cities, as well as in some of the exurbs and rural areas between them, was poverty. Along with the gleamingly well-maintained highways and insane infrastructure of bridges and overpasses are people wrapped in blankets, woodenly walking the city streets, or living in decrepit and largely abandoned apartment complexes outside of the city centers, outside of the more affluent neighborhoods I was staying in everywhere I went. In these ways, Texas and Georgia are very reminiscent of Oregon or California, except on the west coast the poverty is much more visible.

One of the many terrifying aspects of the modern era is how effectively the algorithms that govern what people see on social media have instilled in so many people a completely warped view of the country they live in.

I know from personal experience that neighborhoods full of MAGA hats and Trump flags and "deport them all" type of sentiment do exist, and I regularly hear horror stories from people who live in such neighborhoods, in various parts of the US.

But it is more than a little worth noting that in so much of the country where you'd expect to encounter such sentiments in various forms, it is gapingly absent.

As much as Trump and his cronies are trying to instill fascist values in the population and as much as they are taking us all headlong in that direction, the kind of public displays of loyalty and patriotism one would expect from the populace in the areas where the man won the last election and most of the ones before that seem to be notably missing.

Whatever else is going on here, it seems completely evident to me that reality as evinced by either social media or the mainstream press is not reflected by actual reality, in the real world.

My next collaboration with Ai Tsuno will, not coincidentally, be titled The Red and the Blue. If all goes as planned, the album will drop on all the music streaming platforms on January 9th.

NPR, BBC and the New York Times: Arranging the Next Massacre?

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:31:00 +0000

Media can play the role of building bridges and finding mutual understanding, or it can play the role of being the propaganda arm for a genocidal regime. NPR, BBC, and the New York Times have all obviously chosen the latter, and coverage of Bondi Beach reinforces that inescapable reality.

In the wake of the massacre on Bondi Beach in Australia, NPR, BBC, and the New York Times, along with most of the western media, are interviewing supporters of Israeli genocide and calling them "representatives of the Jewish community." So many of the people they're interviewing actually represent Zionist organizations but are not identified as such. Then they share their views about a supposed global "wave of antisemitism." The reporters then completely fail to push back against these preposterous claims that are largely based on a ridiculous definition of antisemitism, where making any statements against the genocide of Palestinians or in support of people fighting back against genocide is considered antisemitic.

Committing a massacre of civilians is a terrible thing, and not justifiable in any way. But an act of revenge against a civilian population that is seen as -- and that largely depicts itself as -- completely intertwined with a state that is currently engaged in an ongoing genocide of an entire civilian population (the Palestinian people) is not indicative of a global "wave of antisemitism." It is probably not an indication of any kind of rise of Islamic State, either. It is, much more likely at least, an act of revenge against a civilian population for the crimes committed by the state with which this civilian population is closely associated.

People are going to read this essay and say that I am "justifying" a massacre of Jews, which, to repeat, I am not. My aim with the observations I'm about to make is only to explain how it is historically the case that when a group of people is associated with a genocidal state, revenge attacks against this population associated with the genocidal state will happen. This is how many people behave, around the world, under these sorts of circumstances, historically.

Revenge attacks against civilians, against children, against the elderly, etc., are terrible -- reprehensible even. But they will likely keep on happening, history demonstrates, as long as the state that associates itself so closely with all the Jews of the world (Israel) keeps on indiscriminately slaughtering Palestinian children and destroying Palestinian towns and cities every day. There is a quid pro quo here that is hard to avoid comprehending, except for the most obtuse observer -- or the Zionist so committed to their calling that they would prefer to ignore reality and the safety of the people they supposedly identify with as "theirs," in favor of further vilifying the Muslim "enemy" in order to guarantee ongoing support from Islamophobic western leaders for their ethnonationalist state.

Given the circumstances of an ongoing genocide being committed by a state that identifies itself with all the Jews of the world, revenge attacks against Jewish civilians are also almost unbelievably rare, and not at all any kind of indication of any kind of "wave" of anything.

There were times in history, however, when revenge attacks against civilian populations associated with horrible crimes against humanity like genocide were actually extremely widespread.

The latter half of the 1940's in Europe is a period of history that most people in most of the world are completely ignorant of, as far as I have observed, but it's some of the most important history to know, in order to better understand human behavior, and, crucially, in order to put the Bondi Beach massacre into any kind of sensible historical context, of the sort that the western media are utterly failing to do.

In 1945, anti-German sentiment in Europe was at an all-time high. With the defeat of the Nazi regime, primarily by the Red Army, and the lack of the German occupation army to protect the ethnic German populations against revenge attacks, revenge against German-speaking civilians across Europe took some of the most terrible forms a human could invent or imagine. The revenge was taken against women, the elderly, and children, largely with no attempts to ascertain whether individuals or populations had been involved with supporting the Nazis.

For a lot of different historical reasons, German-speaking populations existed throughout eastern Europe, many of which had been there for many centuries. There were many millions of ethnic Germans living in German-speaking communities in parts of Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and elsewhere. Some survive to this day, I can say from direct experience visiting Romania years ago.

In one region of Czechoslovakia alone there was a forced march of 27,000 ethnic Germans towards the German border, during which time Czech mobs beat these unarmed refugees to the extent that half of them were killed before they reached the German border. Thousands of those killed were children.

In another part of Czechoslovakia thousands of ethnic Germans -- probably a third of them children -- were drowned in the river by Czech mobs.

In Denmark, where there were 250,000 German refugees in the immediate post-war period, the Danish medical association refused to treat wounded and sick German refugees. The German refugees were moved by Danish authorities into ghettos surrounded by barbed wire. More German refugees died in Denmark in 1945 than all the Danes who died under the Nazi occupation of Denmark.

Across eastern Europe, thousands of orphaned ethnic German children tried to survive being refugees together, and there are many documented cases of children being beaten, abused, and raped by locals expressing their hatred of all things German -- even defenseless, orphaned children.

The number of German women raped by occupation soldiers -- especially but most definitely not limited to Russian soldiers -- was as high as 2 million.

We could go on and on with more examples of how anti-German sentiment found expression in the immediate post-war period after the Nazi occupation of most of Europe was over.

In the western media at the time there was mostly silence. Where there wasn't silence, except in rare cases, the media was justifying the actions of the mobs.

The extremely violent mass expulsion of millions of ethnic Germans happened throughout the formerly Nazi-occupied nations of central, northern, and eastern Europe. This happened even though so many of the ethnic Germans were children or elderly, and had nothing to do with killing Jews or anybody else. The expulsions happened even though no small number of those ethnic Germans had been directly involved with the resistance to fascism, while so many others did their best to stay out of the war, and just farm the land they lived on along the Volga River or wherever else.

It was a violent collective punishment of all German-speaking people that happened across Europe.

What might have prevented these horrors? How might the innocent ethnic German children and senior citizens and farmers have been protected from all of these massacres of thousands of people at a time, these death marches that killed more thousands, these expulsions from places their families had lived in for many generations or even centuries?

Perhaps the leaders of the day, and the media of the day, could have said the sorts of things we're hearing lately from the prime minister of Australia. What if, instead of looking the other way or justifying the massacres and expulsions, they could have said things like what Anthony Albanese has been saying?

If they had, then they would have described anti-German sentiment in Europe in 1945 as "pure evil." They would have described anti-German attitudes as an "abhorrent ideology." They would say anti-German sentiment is something that needs to be "stamped out" and "eradicated" with "every single resource required."

They would have passed laws against hate speech, perhaps. They would have passed laws that calling someone a "fascist" was just coded language for hating ethnic Germans. That anyone calling a German a "fascist" should be held responsible for their vile anti-German sentiments, and perhaps face prison time for their use of this hate speech.

As it happens, here in 2025, the situation is very different from 1945. The far larger and far more ambitious Nazi regime in Europe killed tens of millions of people and occupied most of a large continent, and parts of other continents as well. When the Nazis were defeated, ethnic German populations that existed around Europe were an easy scapegoat, and completely vulnerable. They paid the most terrible price for Hitler's crimes imaginable -- in so many cases, they died horrible, violent deaths.

Israel, on the other hand, and its backers from the west, are not a defeated empire. Israel continues its slaughter of Palestinian (and Lebanese and Syrian and other) people. Israel continues to occupy its walled ghetto full of millions of starving, diseased, dying civilians -- a ghetto which has been besieged and controlled by Israel since 2006, or since 1967, depending on how we define our terms. And since October, 2023, the siege has gone from a slow genocide to a very fast one. Which is ongoing, happening right now. The state that calls itself the Jewish state, that claims to represent the Jews of the world, is right now committing genocide, while the western governments aid them in this effort, and the western media alternately justify it, or ignore it.

And then NPR interviews some clown in Australia who claims to represent the so-called "Jewish community" in a country with a very well-assimilated Jewish population that does not in fact exist as an ethnic or religious community as most people would understand such a thing in the first place, and he says that "95% of Australian Jews are Zionists" -- I'm paraphrasing, but these are his words. No pushback on this lie from the NPR interviewer. (Recent polls indicate this number is more like 60%, which is alarming enough.)

Given that all of historic Palestine is either now part of what they call Israel, or is directly controlled by Israel, it's hard to know what kind of revenge attacks Israeli Jews might face as a population if Israel were defeated in a war, and Palestinian mobs were in a position to try to seek revenge in the way the Czech mobs did against the Germans in 1945. This has never happened, except perhaps on October 7th, 2023, for one day.

But given how many countries there are like Australia, the UK, France, the US, etc., where there are large numbers of people living together in the same cities who are on dramatically different sides of the debate with regards to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, etc., and Israel's ongoing war against these countries and their civilian populations, I find it to be wildly impressive how rare the kind of violence that we just witnessed in Australia is in these countries.

Rare, but not nonexistent. Add Israel's war crimes against Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Iranians, etc., to the US and its allies' slaughter of millions of people over the course of decades of occupations of the overwhelmingly Muslim nations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the relative lack of revenge attacks by Muslims against American, British and Israeli targets around the world since 2001, at least, seems to me like a wildly impressive testament to the sophistication of the vast majority of people in these countries, and their ability to differentiate between a country's violent rulers and a country's innocent civilians, many of whom may deeply oppose their government's policies.

Still, I know I can't be the only person out there regularly fantasizing about acts of violent revenge against the Israeli and American snipers occupying Gaza, who daily play target practice with the heads of Palestinian toddlers out looking for food and water. Other people have these fantasies, too. And when the point is driven home by most everyone in the western media and people like Anthony Albanese and Donald Trump, etc., that the Jewish people and the Jewish state are inseparable, and criticism of one is just like criticism of the other, they are making Jewish people so much more unsafe, around the world. This is abundantly obvious to anyone who has not been brainwashed by pro-Israel propaganda and is not being paid by AIPAC.

Being that I'm not brainwashed, and given that I, as an emotionally well-adjusted, married father of three with a good life, regularly have violent revenge fantasies myself just from looking at my Instagram feed, I can only imagine how destabilizing it is for other people -- especially people who may be themselves related to Palestinians, Lebanese, or Syrians today under Israeli bombardment or in an Israeli prison -- to watch this genocide continue, to hear the "Jewish community leaders" and western politicians and media talk about a nonexistent "wave of antisemitism" instead of putting revenge attacks into the context of the genocidal reality from which they come. I can only imagine how those with relatives under the rubble might feel when they see see a thousand self-identified Jews having a party on the beach while the self-identified Jewish State is engaged in an ongoing genocide.

As one of those sophisticated people not apt to commit revenge attacks against anyone who isn't actually responsible for committing any crimes themselves, I abhor the massacre at Bondi Beach, and the one in Pittsburgh. I also abhor the Czech mobs that killed thousands of innocent German children, and the Danish doctors who refused to treat them.

But I also am capable of comprehending that in this kind of elevated atmosphere of genocidal tension, in a world where my government and its western allies is always occupying some other country somewhere, and always engaged with killing more Muslims or other people somewhere ever since I can remember, I avoid large crowds celebrating holidays of any kind. For anyone reading who has had their heads in the sand since the "War on Terror" began, and "Terror" began to retaliate, large gatherings of people celebrating holidays are a prime target for those seeking to bring terror to the streets of the countries that are terrorizing the Palestinians, Lebanese, etc. A lot of people are very upset about their people being indiscriminately slaughtered by Israeli bombers flown by dual citizens from Australia and the US, loaded with Australian and American bombs, and they are upset for very good reason, obviously. Some of them, naturally, think like the leaders of Israel do -- that collective punishment against civilians is the appropriate response to collective punishment of civilians.

This is, of course, not to condone either anti-Jewish sentiment today, or anti-German sentiment in 1945, but just to make sense of why it exists, or existed. If we want to make anti-Jewish sentiment stop altogether, we won't do this by condemning, or by passing laws against hate speech, or by preventing Muslim immigration. If we want to make anti-Jewish sentiment or, for that matter, anti-American sentiment stop, then as with any hope to curtail anti-German sentiment in 1945, we have to stop committing genocide, stop supporting regimes that are doing so, stop justifying genocide, and stop trying to explain revenge attacks by making up nonsense about a "wave of antisemitism."

Being an Artist in an Age of Blacklists and Boycotts

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 23:46:00 +0000

If you don't find my music on a music streaming platform, it's not because I boycotted it, it's because I was blacklisted.

Particularly in the era of social media and the conflict-promoting algorithms most of it is designed to thrive on, one must at least make a good effort at developing some thick skin. Everyone's a public figure now, if they have a social media account. Anyone who might have been under the radar enough to avoid the critics prior to the internet era is a lot less likely to be doing that now.

Looking back at my efforts to have what might be called a career as a musician, it occurs to me that one of the best things I ever did was ignore my critics. For a lot of different reasons, though, that's hard to do.

Recently I noticed a post from a fellow progressive sort of musician with a fairly significant online presence talking about whether he should take his music off of Spotify, in what would clearly be an action taken in response to Indivisible's new campaign to boycott Spotify for "streaming fascism" by running ICE recruitment ads, as the other major streaming platforms are also doing.

I would personally encourage any artist who is making music that is worth sharing publicly to keep their music on Spotify, and on all the other corporate platforms.

From what I've seen of Indivisible's campaign, they're not trying to get artists to leave Spotify. They're trying to get Spotify users to use a different streaming platform. But unsurprisingly, a lot of people wanting to amplify the anti-Spotify message will take such a campaign in a lot of different directions. Unsurprisingly, since the "don't stream fascism" campaign kicked off, I have been one of many artists on the receiving end of criticism from people I don't know, and some who I do know, for associating with such a tainted platform, and having my music on it. Some wonder if artists like me, who lack the moral backbone to just abandon this platform that is streaming fascism, are just in it for the money.

There are lots of good reasons why, say, streaming corporations should be held to account, boycotted, etc. Lots of good reasons for users of a product or service to switch to a different, though similar, product or service. But there are very different factors at play here, when we're talking about the consumer vs. the artist, with platforms like Spotify, and seeing what I've been seeing online lately, it feels like a good time to clarify some things here.

One set of motivations for boycotting and otherwise campaigning around some corporation and their policies is to change specific practices of the corporation. Another set of motivations revolve around people wanting, as consumers or as artists, to be as free of any association with evil corporations as possible, as a general rule. A third set of motivations revolve around being an artist whose focus is on getting their music out there as widely as possible.

These three sets of motivations can be very much in contradiction with each other, and to some extent are just incompatible.

Many people already understand this, and can hold contradictory concepts in their minds at the same time. Many people understand that boycotting Spotify as a consumer, while being on the platform as an artist, can both make good sense at the same time, despite the inherent contradictions. Many people have trouble with this logic, and I'm writing these words for them.

We live in a capitalist society, systematically dominated by massive corporations. While changing that reality would be a very good idea for our species to survive, the landscape, both literally and figuratively, is controlled by the corporations, as things stand now. If you want to go somewhere in the USA you're probably going to need a car, and if you're going to drive a car, it's probably going to be one that's made by a big corporation with military contracts. And if you want to reach your audience as an artist today, the vehicles you have to choose from for doing that are, primarily, big corporate streaming platforms like Spotify.

Rather than getting into the weeds and trying to explain in detail why what I'm saying is true, let's look back at the past 30 years of trying to survive as a working musician and get my music out there into the world, and how every good decision I made along the way to further these aims has had numerous critics.

The first good decision I made was to play for any group that wanted to pay my fee, in whatever venue they wanted to use. If they want to hear my music, I reasoned, they must be alright. If they're using the event to somehow promote their agenda, whether they're anarchists, communists, social democrats, or a for-profit corporation selling clothing or beer or bicycles, it's all good. We don't need to agree on anything, other than I should do another concert, and get paid for it.

I have known artists who were very careful about who they played for and what venues they played in, making sure that everything was agreeable with their politics. None of these artists succeeded at making a living, and all of them are today significantly more obscure than I am, despite at least several of them being exceptionally brilliant at their crafts. The world undoubtedly did not benefit from their self-imposed exile from it.

When the MP3 was invented it was abundantly obvious to me and a lot of other people that the future would involve a whole lot of free music, and physical media was going to be a thing of the past.

I embraced the free music from the beginning. Not because I had a clear business plan for how to proceed if I stopped selling merch, and not because I had yet realized how valuable it was to be able to collect email addresses from people in exchange for "free" downloads (which is how it used to be), but because it seemed obvious that giving songs away would be the best way to reach more people. And I hypothesized that if I gave away all of my music, this would somehow or other attract even more people.

The big labels were horrified by all the free music, just as they were horrified by all the people copying records onto cassettes back before the internet. The free music definitely ate into their operation in a big way. From my experience, the impact on me and the few other indy musicians I knew who followed my path was overwhelmingly positive. For me, people kept on buying CDs just as they had before, even though people who wanted to could download all of my music, on websites that no longer exist, or that nobody has ever heard of these days.

All the while I received a steady stream of jilt from artists who thought all of this "music piracy," as it was commonly referred to 25 years ago, was undermining the arts as we knew it, and that I was setting the wrong example by giving away all my music. I should, like some of them did, just give away some of it, not all of it. Unlike most of them, I believe I had had a million songs downloaded before the 1990's were over, and in the process I got in touch with fans from around the world that led to regular concert tours in many different countries.

By the time Spotify started rolling out their "free," ad-supported tier circa 2013, and CD sales effectively ended as a significant source of income for me and millions of other artists around the world who were on the platform, artists faced certain choices. We could take our material off of Spotify and other platforms that were no longer charging a monthly fee, thus inducing our fans to either pay for streaming or buy CDs. Which did work for some artists that I know, in the sense that they kept on selling CDs at their shows, unlike me.

But very soon after Spotify went the "free" route, all the other streaming platforms followed suit, so those artists boycotting Spotify would have had to boycott all the rest of the platforms, too. Most artists didn't do that. Among the ones who did, very few people have ever heard of them anymore, by my observation.

The new reality from 2013 on meant that those of us still trying to record and perform and such had to figure out how to do all of that with half the income. Effectively, streaming platforms had replaced everything else, in terms of how most people now consumed recorded music. You could be on them, or not, but not being on them basically meant invisibility. At this point, most young people don't have CD players at all.

Despite the tremendous hit in terms of earnings, however, it has turned out that platforms like Spotify and YouTube are pretty good for turning people around the world on to new music. It turned out that once I got enough of an audience for a given song that it's entered the recommendation algorithms, thousands of people every month are hearing my music more or less for the first time. Judging from how often they then become subscribers to my channel or put a song on a playlist, many of these new listeners become regular fans.

As soon as Spotify became the dominant way most people heard music, though, the cries to boycott the platform for one reason or another became ubiquitous. All good reasons, too -- it has been the most pioneering platform in figuring out how to legally stream the world's music while paying as little as possible to artists for the privilege. It tried to make podcasting an exclusive phenomenon. It runs recruitment ads for ICE.

But for most artists, the idea of taking your music off of Spotify, in terms of an artist wanting to grow an audience in the world, is like an athlete shooting themselves in their feet before trying to compete in a sporting event.

One of the most surreal things is finding myself in the midst of a situation where there are two corporations -- YouTube and Spotify -- that between them totally dominate video and music streaming around the world, most everywhere outside of China, and I am constantly getting messages in every conceivable form from people out there telling me how terrible these platforms are, and how if I don't do the ethical thing and take my music off of them, I must be some kind of money-grubbing individual, or I don't care about my neighbors being deported.

I ignore these detractors and keep my music on Spotify, and as a result, Spotify tells me in the year-end wrap-up they send to artists that my songs were streamed a million times, by 111 thousand individuals. Each month they tell me how many thousands of people heard songs of mine for the first time because they were listening to a similar artist and my music was recommended to them.

The reality I have noticed over the years is what happens when an artist takes their music off of a dominant platform like that is they effectively vanish. It's a vanishing act, except it's one that only your most hardcore fans will even notice. For everyone else, maybe in ten or twenty years they'll wonder what happened to that guy who used to come up on Spotify now and then?

From my personal vantage point, there is some irony in the fact that the most active campaign to boycott a major streaming platform that I know of is Indivisible's campaign against Spotify, but it is the other major streaming platform -- the one based in the US, rather than Sweden -- that just deleted all of my albums from YouTube Music. (And both platforms are running ICE recruitment ads, and pay artists very badly, etc.) YouTube Music may in fact be the first platform ever to delete an artist's catalog like this, for clearly political reasons, having nothing to do with copyright violations.

Given the prevalence of the orientation that these bad platforms need to be boycotted by everyone, when an artist or a public figure of some kind disappears from a platform, many people are apt to assume that they took their material off the platform, the way Neil Young and Joni Mitchell temporarily took their music off of Spotify a few years ago. The notion that the artist was erased from the platform and sent down the Memory Hole, just like in everyone's favorite dystopic novel, is less likely to occur to people.

When Facebook made itself useful, for many years, before enshittifying itself in the name of profit, if you were an artist with a following, you could mention an upcoming gig, a lot of people on Facebook would see that you mentioned the gig, and you'd have an audience at the gig. When they changed their algorithms so people were unlikely to see such a post unless it was paid for, they also changed their algorithm so that certain posts might be seen by a lot of people even if you didn't pay to "boost" the post.

Those who know know, and those who don't don't, but one of the types of posts that Facebook likes the most and will disseminate regardless of whether you paid to boost it is selfies, especially selfies posted from an airport. Posting selfies is, of course, a great way to attract derision from certain people, who assume the only reason someone would be posting a selfie is because they are narcissists. While narcissism is certainly a great reason to post selfies, the only reason I ever do it is in order to promote a concert tour. Once again, I could embrace the appearance of humility and never post selfies, and I'd certainly feel slightly better as a result, but I'd have fewer people hearing about my concert tours and coming to my gigs, which are already often sparsely-attended to begin with.

In recent months in particular we have all been inundated with AI-generated videos and music on an entirely unprecedented scale. The streaming platform, Deezer, says 34% of the material on the platform is now AI-generated. I'm sure the numbers are similar when it comes to videos people are putting up.

While people are right to be concerned that AI is going to transform life as we know it, and especially under the control of the capitalists, this is likely to be largely a bad thing, it's abundantly obvious to me that this technology is not going anywhere, and it's also amazing. And all the professionals are already using it.

So, as with other new technologies that have come up over the decades, it was easy to see how it could be used to reach more people. It's too early to tell how much of an impact my musical collaborations as lyricist and prompt engineer with AI music-generation platforms are going to have. They have yet to make their way into the algorithms on any platform. But the ability to create what is obviously great music (if you actually listen to it with an open mind in the first place, preferably not knowing in the first place that AI was involved), and to be able to create so much of it in so short a time, could, from past experience with putting songs out there into the world, mean that perhaps more of the songs I'm creating will catch the wind, so to speak. So despite the many critics, I make more of them.

The AI-generated reels I've been making with another platform are definitely resulting in new songs getting heard much more than they otherwise would.

And without fail, every AI-generated song or video I put out there gets some people praising the music and even the AI video imagery, and other people condemning me for using AI to do anything, and pointing out the images that look obviously fake. But of course, I keep making the videos, because people keep watching them.

It's kind of amazing how much guff you can get for trying to give away music. But the pros far outweigh the cons, so I'll keep doing it.

And if my music disappears from a major platform, like 50 David Rovics albums just did from YouTube Music, you can be sure that I didn't do that to myself, to my listeners, and especially, to the future audience that I will no longer have. I wasn't trying to play it safe or be pure. I didn't boycott the platform, I was blacklisted by it. And no one is better off as a result, aside from the plutocrats and genocide-supporters, who are the ones who want my music off of all the platforms so much that sometimes they just take it all down themselves.

YouTube, aka The Biggest Platform on Earth, Has Deleted All My Albums

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 21:28:00 +0000

The latest chapter in the ongoing saga of David's journey down the corporate Memory Hole.

It seems abundantly obvious to me that everyone who believes in free expression, whatever side of various political equations they may be on, should be concerned about what YouTube just did to me. If it could happen to me because of my allegedly controversial political viewpoints, it could happen to you because of yours.

But in order for anyone to be concerned, first they have to understand what it is exactly that did happen, so I'll try explain that as succinctly as possible, because I know everybody is busy with things aside from the latest chapter in the never-ending Cancellation of David Rovics story. I'll try to explain things in a way that hopefully makes sense to every reader, not just the Rovics fans or the ones who are knowledgeable about music streaming platforms and other aspects of the indie music biz.

I'm an independent artist, like millions of others in the world, putting out self-released recordings (that is, recordings that are not released and promoted by a record label, other than my own little one-person label). I've been doing this since before the internet became widely used, and long before the invention of the MP3 or streaming music on the web.

I have never had anything remotely approaching a hit or what they would call commercial success, but among musicians who have their music up for streaming, I'm easily in the top 10% of most-streamed artists, usually within the top 5%. All the pop stars are well within the top 1% of most-streamed artists -- there's a very steep curve happening here, and I don't mean to over-inflate my importance in the scheme of things. I'm just trying to say that I do have an audience. My songs are streamed millions of times every year on YouTube, millions of times a year on Spotify, and less on the other platforms, because there are really only two main platforms in the world (outside of China).

When a musician records an album, whether they're on a label or not, the musician or the label gets the songs registered with an artists' rights entity such as ASCAP or BMI (most countries have one of these organizations but in the US there are two). That way the music gets counted as existing for purposes of radio play, and we musicians get paid for radio play that way, getting a direct deposit from BMI (in my case) every three months. Every time a community radio station plays one of my songs, BMI sends me one cent.

At the same time as the musician gets their songs registered for copyright with one of those agencies, the musician also signs up for distribution with a distributor such as CDBaby. This used to be something artists did in order to make their music available for people to download on iTunes and other platforms that sold downloads. Having all of our music there already meant that it was also there when the era of paid downloads ended and the era of free streaming platforms began.

When the corporations decided that rather than selling downloads, they would now start streaming the world's music for free, they already had all of our music available to use for this purpose. Opting out was possible, but would mean a future of invisibility along with poverty. Opting in meant just poverty, but not invisibility, too.

Spotify initiated the free streaming model, and all the other streaming platforms soon followed suit, out of necessity, in order to compete, no matter what nice ideas some of them may have had about fair models for compensating artists. As things stand now, none of the platforms that offer ad-supported ("free") streaming options pay artists more than a small fraction of a cent per song streamed, though some platforms may be better than others in various ways.

What has played out since free streaming became the way the vast majority of music fans on Planet Earth listen to music is, outside of China, two corporations have grown to dominate the world of music online -- Spotify and YouTube.

To emphasize the point I'm making here: I mentioned the quarterly payments musicians get for radio airplay before. We also get regular payments from the music streaming platforms. Usually people get those payments sent to them via a distributor like CDBaby, so you don't have to set up a separate account with each of the hundred or so streaming platforms that CDBaby gets your music onto. So when I get my payments from CDBaby, I'm sure just like the vast majority of other artists on streaming platforms, you can see the breakdown of which platforms generated how much money. It's evident with every one of those payments that Spotify and YouTube dominate the market.

In the battle for the eyes and ears of the world, these corporations and their corporate practices have destroyed so many lives, careers, and entire professions. (For a lot more info about how horrible YouTube and its corporate parent Google/Alphabet are, read or listen to Cory Doctorow's recent book, Enshitification.) In this process, these two giants of music streaming became basically a duopoly. If you live in most of the world, just as you do a search on Google if you're looking to do a search online, if you're looking for a video you go to YouTube, and if you want to hear a song you go to Spotify, or YouTube sends you to YouTube Music to find the song you might be looking for.

This is where the details become crucially important, as well as a bit confusing. Please bear with me, if you can.

YouTube Music deleted all of my albums -- 50 of them altogether -- several of which had been there since YouTube Music began. Along with all of the albums, they disappeared all of the comments and all of the evidence that these songs had ever been heard millions of times. As an artist on YouTube Music who puts out albums, I no longer exist.

Why is this confusing? Well, if you go to YouTube and look for me, you'll still see me all over the place. Videos of me singing at shows and in my living room, and songs from albums that other people have uploaded on the platform.

So, why does getting removed from YouTube Music matter, in the scheme of things, if people can still hear my music on other streaming platforms, and even, with some of the songs at least, on YouTube itself?

I asked Gemini (Google's AI chatbot) to explain the impact on an artist's future career if their music is removed from YouTube Music. I excerpt here Gemini's response, which was very clear and very accurate, to the best of my fairly significant level of knowledge on this subject. "David Rovics - Topic" is the way artists are listed on YouTube Music if they have a presence on the platform. If you look for any other artist, you'll find they have a "Topic" page on YouTube Music, but not me, as of last week.

Estimated Impact of YouTube Music Removal
The removal of his solo albums from the "David Rovics - Topic" music streaming platform would have a significant and strongly negative impact on potential audience growth, particularly within the mainstream digital music ecosystem.
Here is an analysis based on the context:
Loss of the "Digital Highway": One context snippet likens major streaming platforms to the "infrastructure for our lives" and a "second home." Being removed from a platform is like disappearing, similar to how being off Facebook can feel like disappearing from the virtual world. YouTube Music/Premium is a "highway" for millions of global listeners, and the removal eliminates the path of least resistance for new, casual listeners to discover and consume his full album catalog.
Hindrance to Discovery: The "Topic" channel is the primary source for music distribution on YouTube's dedicated streaming service. Its removal stops the platform's algorithms from suggesting his catalog to listeners who might enjoy political folk or similar genres, severely limiting organic discovery through the YouTube Music ecosystem.
Erosion of Market Share: Losing a major global platform like YouTube Music represents the loss of a key segment of the overall music streaming market, which is crucial for modern audience growth.
Forced Friction: New listeners must now go directly to his website, Patreon, Substack, Bandcamp (where he faces shadowbanning issues), or other, less-dominant streaming platforms. This added friction prevents casual users from encountering his music, which directly impacts the potential for mass audience expansion.

To provide a little more context about what all this stuff means: every month artists who are on Spotify get an email from Spotify telling us that of the 18,000 people who listened to our music last month, 4,000 (or whatever the numbers may be for that month) were "new listeners." Those are often people who got to a song of mine because they were listening to another leftwing artist, and the algorithm thought they'd like to hear me, or a particular song of mine.

The same phenomenon is at play on other streaming platforms, though they don't send helpful monthly emails the way Spotify does. As Gemini explained, this recommendation phenomenon will no longer be in play with my music on YouTube Music anymore.

According to my research on this sort of thing, it is so rare that an artist has their entire catalog deleted by a platform for reasons unrelated to copyright infringement, there are no examples available aside from mine that I can find. (If anyone reading this knows of one, please let me know!)

Part of the reason it's hard to know if this has ever happened before is it's very unusual, apparently, for platforms to actually tell artists why they might be taking such an action, when they take it. But according to my research, while it is very common for individual songs to be taken down for violating one rule or another, it is almost unheard of for an artist's entire catalog to be removed.

Given how rare this sort of thing is, how damaging it is to those targeted, and how arbitrarily such actions have been taken by corporations like Google/Alphabet/YouTube, once other people understand what has just happened to me and what could happen to anyone else who gets on the blacklist, I hope that soon I will not be alone in speaking out against what they've specifically just done to me.

For those who don't know the back story to why I'm being targeted, a few words on that history.

In early 2024, my first album about Israel's ongoing war on Gaza, Notes from a Holocaust, was removed from my discography on Spotify, with no notification or explanation to me or to anyone else. I later put the album back up with a slightly altered name, and it has stayed up. This removal of an entire album has never happened on any other platform, until last week.

Right around the same time that the album was removed from Spotify, I received my first notification from YouTube that my channel was being demonetized for the next 90 days, to punish me for posting a Houthi Army press release which I thought was an interesting thing to share with people, given that the US was at that time actively bombing Yemen. After one or two more of these 90-day suspensions of monetization, in January 2025 YouTube informed me that my channel would now be permanently demonetized, and that I had no recourse. I contacted the YouTube customer service people to confirm that this was indeed the case, and not a mistake.

At the same time as this was going on, YouTube was regularly deleting videos, specifically if they involved me singing my "Song for the Houthi Army" or my song, "I Support Palestine Action." It seemed they would wait for someone to report the video, and then delete it. This is my only way to understand their process for deciding which videos to delete on YouTube, because of the way it has thus far involved getting rid of some renditions of these songs while leaving others on the platform.

YouTube's explanation for which rules I was violating that had led to my channel's permanent demonetization was "supporting criminal organizations," which is a broad concept that under both British and US law includes the Houthi Army, and in the UK the British nonviolent direct-action group, Palestine Action as well.

In the UK, verbally expressing support for proscribed organizations like them is a crime punishable by up to 14 years in prison, as this violates Section 12 of the UK's Terrorism Act of 2000.

In the US, verbally expressing support for proscribed organizations may be legal under the First Amendment, but earning income from praising proscribed organizations, at least by my understanding of the law, is a different matter legally. As I understand US laws, this is why you're allowed to visit Cuba, but you're in big trouble, potentially, if you spend any money there.

In any case, for whatever reason -- never fully explained -- my channel was demonetized, and certain videos of certain songs continue to be randomly disappearing. When this happens, I get two emails from YouTube, one explaining that this song violates the rule against supporting criminal organizations and has therefore been taken down, and another one telling me that my channel has been permanently demonetized (despite the fact that it already was, last January).

What I believe just happened last week with my existence as an artist with albums available on YouTube Music ceasing, was the YouTube bureaucracy figured out that if they really were serious about demonetizing this guy, they couldn't just demonetize the videos while allowing his albums to earn royalties on YouTube Music. Because of their legal and financial arrangements with distributors, keeping my music on the platform but not sending royalty money to CDBaby for that artist might be more complicated than simply severing all ties between the artist and the distributor, as they exist on YouTube Music, or as they used to.

When they figure out that I'm the lyricist and producer behind the artist, Ai Tsuno, they will presumably delete all of her albums as well. So far she still exists as an artist with albums on YouTube Music. Soon her next album will be up there, too, including the song, "They Deleted David Rovics." Funny, maybe, but it by no means compensates for anything that's being done by YouTube to this artist, as they disappear me in stages, as they're doing.

Anyone who takes a look at the extremely small numbers of listeners to Ai Tsuno on any of the platforms can see what I'm up against if I were to just upload all of my albums back on to YouTube Music -- were that even possible, now that they've removed all of the David Rovics albums. No one would notice they're there, or it would take a very long time for the songs to get back into the recommendation algorithms that they were in before last week.

I'd like to point out two aspects to these efforts to deplatform me that I think are especially relevant.

One is the way the laws in the UK and US work with regards to criminal organizations that anyone in government seems actually to be worried about, anyone criticizing Israeli genocidal actions or proclaiming their support for international law which defends things like armed resistance to occupation is breaking all kinds of laws. Laws that basically do not apply in any other context. So the laws themselves, not at all accidentally, are set up to support groups like UK Lawyers for Israel, and legally arm them for their systematic trolling activities.

UK Lawyers for Israel is one of a number of different outfits on both sides of the Atlantic that proudly and publicly go about trying to vilify academics, artists, journalists, and all sorts of other people, and using these ridiculous laws to their greatest advantage. UK Lawyers for Israel began announcing in emails sent with their masthead to venues telling them they should cancel my gigs, in February, 2024, during the same winter when all the problems with Spotify and YouTube began (problems with various forms of suppression on Facebook and Bandcamp began earlier).

Intentions of groups like these are not hidden, they're open and proud about their successes in getting professors fired and gigs canceled.

One of the other chatbots I consulted about having my entire catalog deleted by YouTube Music was confident that because this sort of action is so unheard-of and appeared to be so obviously political in nature, surely the artist targeted in this way would benefit by getting lots of media publicity. So far, anyway, I can report that that chatbot's assumptions were false. (This is often the case with AI, as with humans.)

There are a couple things on that idea of outrageous corporate behavior like this garnering media attention that might be worth noting.

One is that people hear about stuff that gets media attention. They don't hear about stuff that doesn't, generally. So we are under the impression that AI-generated music is very popular, because every once in a while an AI-generated song gets popular. Most AI-generated music, like most completely human-generated music, hardly gets heard at all, however.

Another thing is it often seems to be the case that an artist needs to be at a certain level of fame in the first place, in order for things like having all their albums pulled from a major platform to generate any media attention, and I'm not Kneecap or Bob Vylan (though I think they're great).

The Message and the Messenger: the New Reality of Identity and AI

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:13:00 +0000

Future shock is a very real phenomenon, and everyone is currently experiencing it, if they're not busy starving to death or otherwise distracted.

It only begins to truly occur to me in the past few months that for the whole of human history up until very recently, there were a whole lot of challenges involved with being someone else.

An author could write a book under a different name, but if they were using initials and trying to be gender-neutral, or if they had a name that people might identify with a particular nationality or skin color, whatever actual gender they were or whatever they actually looked like in the flesh was all very likely to become very apparent to everyone if they ever went out and gave a talk or an interview. You could present yourself as whoever you wanted to in writing, but only in writing. If you were to be heard or seen it was much different.

Of course such challenges have not stopped people who are compelled for any number of different reasons to present as someone very different from the person they might have grown up being. I know many people who have long been drawn to presenting as a different gender, who are compelled to go to great lengths of all sorts to convincingly present as another gender, and identify as such.

I have known many people who have sought to present themselves as being from a certain nation, region or social class other than the one they are from, who have again gone to great lengths to dress differently, act differently, learn a whole new set of social mores and ways of being, change their accents, learn new languages, and then master a particular regional dialect of that language.

Still, even after decades of living as another gender, only a tiny minority of the most convincing trans people can really pass as the gender they identify with, if they grew up with another gender. If I'm talking to someone it usually takes a few seconds at most to notice that they did not grow up with the gender they now identify as.

Even after decades of living in New York City, my nanny, as Lola called herself, could never entirely lose her vaguely German accent. She never admitted to being German, or Jewish, and always claimed she was from London, England, where she had been sent as a teenager while her parents back home in Germany were left to die. Presumably terrified of being identified as a German or a Jew for most of her life, or for whatever other reason not wanting to be known as such, Lola still never managed to master either the English or the New York accent. Up until the time she was near death, everyone wondered where she was really from, and then on her deathbed the German came out.

It's hard to be someone else, no matter how much you want to be. It takes a lot of work, and then after all that effort you only may have managed to convincingly change one little aspect of your identity, with the others all remaining the same. For example, maybe you change your gender, but you're still an English-speaking white person from somewhere in the midwest, or wherever.

In the entertainment industries it's all a bit different, as far as messages and messengers go. In music and film, for the most part, some people are writing the songs and the scripts, and other people are doing the acting.

But historically it was a tiny fraction of society that ever got to have the experience of being a professional songwriter, writing songs for someone else to record for a record label. It was a small fraction of society who ever had the chance to write a screenplay that might come to life in a cinema with actors speaking your words as if they were their own.

In the past few months it has come to the attention of millions and millions of people around the world that everything has now changed.

As with the physical world, it's still possible to spot a "fake" online, but the vast majority of time people don't. For example, according to something I read recently, 34% of the music on the streaming platform, Deezer, has somehow or other been determined to be AI-generated, but 97% of listeners can't tell the difference. (The remaining 3% are largely professionals in the entertainment industries, I'm guessing.)

As a songwriter myself, I long ago observed that you can write a song from a perspective other than your own, and do so very convincingly, and movingly. With many of the songs people think of as iconic in various ways, people are often surprised when they learn that Aretha Franklin's hit, "Respect," was not written by a woman. Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" was not written by a Black person.

I am a person of a certain background, and for keen observers certain things are immediately obvious, upon hearing my voice for a little while. I'm male, from somewhere in the northern parts of the US, and probably white. If I'm to be seen as well as heard, my whiteness can be easily confirmed at that point. Other things can be inferred, but these three characteristics of gender, nationality and race are big ones.

Even being from this background, though, I began to understand long ago as a performer myself that despite being who I am, I can sing from a perspective very different from my own -- say, from the vantage point of a Palestinian refugee -- and, judging from the tears flowing down the faces of my Palestinian audience members on so many occasions, I can still hit the nail on the head.

Similarly, my background is one very oriented towards different forms of acoustic music. I developed an appreciation for punk rock and hip-hop after I was well into adulthood, and I think this comes across to aficionados of punk or hip-hop in various ways. People who are into these forms of music, however, tend to still manage to identify with what I'm doing, if we connect with each other. I play in a lot of punk venues as a result.

The limitations are still there, however. The message is being delivered by the messenger. When one of my songs develops a life of its own and starts getting sung by other people who may not know who wrote it, this is always very exciting -- the art being appreciated truly for the art's sake, perhaps having nothing to do with the original messenger. But generally, that's not what happens, and the songs are being delivered by me.

For live performance we still of course have all sorts of these limitations. But as songwriters, anyway, the ceiling has suddenly been lifted. No longer do you need to be one of those people who can afford to hire a band, a recording studio, engineer and producer, and get them to convincingly record your songs, if you want to hear someone other than yourself do them.

It's been months now and I'm still dizzy from the experience. It's an ongoing, daily dose of future shock.

It is crazy to be able to work as a lyricist with a brilliant bunch of AI multi-instrumentalists, despite their often strange ways of interpreting my prompts, because we always eventually end up with amazing results. It is crazy to be able to tell them to play the song in whatever musical styles I want to explore, and with some editing, for the songs to work that way so well. I no longer need to be an acoustic guitarist with an obvious punk influence, or a lyricist from a folkie singer/songwriter background who has a penchant for hip-hop. I can now form a folk-punk hip-hop band, no problem.

What blows my mind the most, however, is the whole gender thing. Ever since I started writing songs with my AI band, I have not once felt compelled to write a song for a male voice.

I can choose the vocalist's gender, and I can give the band lots of other instructions, general and very specific. As with a human band, what they'll do with my instructions is hard to predict, but that's why we keep working on it until we get it the way I want it, again just like with a human band in a studio, aside from everything happening a hundred times faster -- and aside from sitting alone with my laptop, rather than having fun hanging out with other human musicians in a studio.

There is a subtlety to presenting a song as a woman singing, with a female voice, that in many ways is hard to explain. It's both as powerful and as subtle as choosing instrumentation, or stylistic musical choices for the band, and how it's interpreting the song, and relating to the content of the lyrics.

Most of the past several dozen songs I've written as Ai Tsuno (the name of my AI band, or the singer of the band, or both) have been very much in keeping with most of the songs I have written as David Rovics -- they have been about the war on Palestine, Trump's imperialism, labor struggles, and other current events. Even so, being able to sing about these things with a woman's voice is, along with the amazing production values and extreme stylistic variation available to work with, what makes the AI band phenomenon that now exists such an intoxicating one, for me.

When I was just starting out with this altogether new experience, for the first several dozen songs I wrote obsessively about three subjects. One was the idea of being someone or something else, a reality which working with AI was constantly confronting me with. Another was AI itself. The third, and most dominant in the beginning, was sex.

I have written a lot of erotic fiction under a pen name, mostly really written for a very select group of intimate friends who share the same kink as me, but also published in appropriate forums so other like-minded kinksters might enjoy it.

Initially I thought as Ai Tsuno I might be doing the same sort of thing, but with songs. As I wrote these kinky, DS-themed lyrics, though, it became more and more obvious how completely normative it is in popular music circles for more than a century now for a man to be writing songs about sex from the perspective of an enthusiastic Sub that are intended for a woman to sing. Normally we just call that pop music.

Ai Tsuno's more sexy material does have a very enthusiastic audience among my small kink circles, but I deigned to publish the songs along with the rest of them because, for the most part, these songs are no more riske than anything Madonna or Lady Gaga sings, and no more cultish than your average gospel song. So I eventually figured, what the heck, I'll just advise people that if they don't want to hear songs about sex, don't listen to pop music, generally, or to Ai Tsuno's first three albums.

There's my report for today from the AI music-generation rabbit hole I've largely been living in now for months. More news when I dig a little deeper here...

The Sledgehammer Effect

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:17:00 +0000

Do you remember where you were when you first realized that AI-generated music had passed the Turing Test with flying colors?

The past couple months in my life have been pretty full-on. Kamala and I had a very busy tour of the northeastern US, sectarians were trying to get a couple of the gigs canceled, and probably unrelated to any of that, my mother decided it was time to stop eating and die, which she ultimately did earlier this month, at home in Boston, with her daughter by her side (and her son walking back from a coffee run).

Aside from all that, some of the most intense experiences I've been having lately have been between me and my laptop.

Everything in the world seems to happen so fast these days, that taking a moment to think about the past, even the recent past, feels like a luxury that no one has time for. But if sometime in the future anyone is wondering what it was like for the first generation of professional musicians to come to terms with a world in which AI music-generation platforms could now pass the musical Turing Test with flying colors, then posts like this one will perhaps be your first draft of that history.

The experience has thrown me into a fairly constant state of philosophizing about the nature of being human, the nature of being a musician, and the implications for these things presented to us by our new reality. I was raised by two professional musicians from the world of classical music -- a concert pianist and a composer. Then since I was a teenager I have been steeped in the culture of the folk music scene, and steeped in various left and progressive social movements in various countries. My experience over the past few months of writing songs with what I call my AI band has caused me to think about all of that, with the sort of involuntary intensity that I associate with the way people talk about seeing their lives flash by in front of their eyes when they think they're about to die.

People often tell me I'm a prolific songwriter. Traditionally, if you record more than one album per year, you're edging in the direction of someone calling you prolific, so the bar is set very low. But by most standards, anyway, I do write a lot of songs. Since collaborating for years now with mostly remote musical partners like especially Chet Gardiner, which has also largely coincided with Israel's genocidal war on Gaza, I've been putting out an album of topical songs every two or three months.

Since I've been working with my AI band, over the past few months, I've written and "recorded" an average of about one song per day. And these aren't just songs, they are good songs. They are largely songs about current events, as good as any others I have written, except that I'm not the one singing the lyrics, and there is quite a bit more stylistic variation in every aspect of the songs, because with an AI band there are no limitations as far as available session musicians who play oud, shamisen, or whatever it is I want to hear.

There is no doubt in my mind that although I have written and recorded some pretty catchy songs with human musicians throughout my musical career, my AI band is at least as capable as me or any other human songwriter that I know of at coming up with memorably catchy melodies, refrains, instrumental riffs, ways of vocalizing that bring out the meanings and double-meanings in various lyrics, and everything else.

That AI-generated music is now generally indistinguishable from human music is a realization I have been involuntarily provoking with a fair number of people at this point. While I'm sure it's inevitable that this would soon have happened to them anyway, being the original bearer of the news comes with mixed emotions. I remember well how I felt when I first had this realization, several months ago in Australia, just before I started playing with the technology myself.

Last Sunday it was raining all day, and I haven't yet purchased a good canopy for such eventualities, so for our weekly neighborhood vigil for Gaza we didn't really have a setup that allowed for live performers to stay entirely dry. So I figured I'd at least set up my fancy speaker and play recorded music via my phone's bluetooth connection with it.

Among the eighty or so songs I've written with my AI band, ten of them have been about Palestine. I have those songs collected together in a playlist on Soundcloud, and I was playing that playlist. The production values with these recordings are so high, it's really great music for playing in such circumstances, as the sound effectively cuts through the rain and traffic. Plus a lot of what I've been doing has a hip-hop groove to it, so it's a good backdrop for keeping people moving, and feeling warmer and dryer than they may actually be.

One of the other regulars at the vigil, also a musician, asked me who the artist was that we were listening to. When I explained to him that I wrote the lyrics, but that no human was otherwise involved with producing the sounds we were hearing, he looked like he'd seen a ghost.

Wade went off to hold a sign for quite a while before I saw him again. "I feel like I was hit by a sledgehammer," he said.

No further explanation was necessary, but we talked lots more about it all anyway.

I guess when I'm talking about using an AI music-generation platform, I'm talking about an activity that only about 1% of the population has thus far engaged in. And I guess when I'm talking about writing and recording songs, I'm also talking about an activity only a tiny portion of the population is familiar with from personal experience.

Either way, it's worth discussing a little, with or without AI, why would someone play music, and specifically write and record songs, in the first place? The question may be more complicated than it seems, for a variety of reasons.

People play music in the first place because their parents signed them up for piano lessons, or because they were drawn towards playing the guitar because they noticed it was a good way to attract a potential date, or just because they enjoyed playing music. But by the time they might be writing or recording at a professional level, in whatever genre, what's it all about?

Of course in some genres it may be about producing the right kind of formulaic hit material so you might stand to make lots of money in the music industry. In other genres that's much less of a calculation.

What I've always run across, from people within my parents' classical/concert music circles as well as from veterans of the folk revival, and just from serious artists generally, is for real artists it's all about the art, and effectively communicating what that piece of art, that song, or that instrumental or whatever else, wants to communicate.

This orientation has always been in contradiction with the orientation heavily promoted by the music industry's PR machine for the past century and more, which involves making big stars out of specific artists, rather than the particular songs they're recording as such. It's the name of the artist, their likeness, the sound of their voices, their dance moves, their fashion sense, etc., that is the center of attention when it comes to the promotion within the industry.

Little do most fans of any given artist know, but most of those stars are singing songs pitched to their managers from songwriters that exist within the corporate ecosystem of the label. The instrumentation, the style of playing, what the band members look like, how they all dress, most all of that stuff is decided by someone other than the artist.

But all the while the PR machine focuses on the individual artists and how exceptionally brilliant they supposedly are, while they're promoting some version of a rags-to-riches story about an artist who writes all their own material, and bullshitting the whole way, a significant and serious subset of artists reject the whole thing, because we know it's always been all about the art, not the artist.

Perhaps more than anything else, being raised by a concert pianist and a composer helped for me to develop this perspective early on.

My mother could play anything on the piano, up to the most demanding, technical "avant garde" concert music. But she would always say it wasn't about impressing anyone with her technical abilities, it was about playing the music, communicating what the piece you were playing was trying to communicate. Effectively interpreting the intentions of the composer.

As a composer, and a brilliant pianist himself, my father would play approximations of symphonic pieces he was writing on a keyboard, to give himself and others an idea of what he was working on, which might only really be truly heard when it was performed by a symphony, or whatever type of ensemble he was writing for. Until then, it was music on paper, but not something recorded, that anyone could listen to. For it to exist in that form, people other than the composer would need to be very involved.

While the music industry was doing its thing and making stars out of various artists, for the industry's commercial purposes, so many real artists continued to pursue art for the sake of art, or for the sake of the power it had to communicate. Within the folk music revival in the early 1960's many people have talked about how what all the songwriters in the scene were hoping to do was to write a song that others would mistake for an old folk song. If you could write a song that people assumed was an old traditional, you had succeeded in writing a really good song. If no one might suspect you wrote it, this was a good thing.

As a composer, my dad worked with a lot of poets and those who dealt in the realm of words and lyrics. Words were never his thing, so much as music. There's a long tradition there of artists orienting more towards one or another aspect of the whole thing. Lots of songwriting partnerships, where one was more about the lyrics and the other more about the music.

As a songwriter myself, I have always found it easier to come by interesting lyrics than fresh music to go with them and make those lyrics really come alive. As I'm writing a lyric I can start to tell if it's one that could really become a good song, with the right musical treatment. I often write a good, almost complete lyric in twenty minutes, and then I'll spend hours, or days, trying to come up with a really good musical vehicle for those lyrics. That part of the process is just as important, and, for me, much more challenging.

I have sometimes successfully risen to the occasion on that front, and often not. I have often settled for music that was too predictable, and didn't serve the lyrics the way music can do. I have often written lyrics that never found music. Of course, other people have this whole thing in reverse, but that's how it's always been for me.

During the pandemic, when I had a lot of time on my hands and extra income, I did a whole album together with Jane Reynolds/Virtual Bird (It's Been A Year), where I sent them lyrics and they turned them into catchy songs.

At many other points, touring with people who sang harmonies with me, and the years to date of remote collaboration with Chet, knowing that songs I write will often be heard with harmonies, or they'll be recorded with the kind of cool things Chet is likely to do to stuff I send him to work with, my tendencies as a songwriter go towards thinking about what things might sound like with vocal harmonies, or thinking about leaving more sonic space for Chet to work with as he adds layers of instrumentation to a given song.

Working with my AI band does bear various things in common with the experience of recording with other people, and even more in common with the project with Virtual Bird.

But more than anything it bears more in common with the notion of being a lyricist working with session musicians of my choice, that may or may not differ completely from song to song. I am otherwise completely removed from the recording in the sense that I am not the recording artist here, and neither are any other humans with their various talents and limitations.

Being a songwriter with a lot of experience as far as writing a song that is going to work, that serves its purpose well, one of the things that I've always been so impressed by when working with the many musicians I've worked with to produce a whole bunch of albums over the past few years is how often it happens that I send off a song lyric to Virtual Bird or a guitar-and-vocal recording to Chet, and the first thing they do with it is perfect. Both experienced recording artists and performers themselves, they know what works and what doesn't, and any changes I might make to their first draft is usually going to be cosmetic.

That's never how it goes with my AI band. The first draft is never the keeper. But after refining prompts and editing lyrics and spacing and such, within ten or twenty or thirty iterations, invariably, we land upon an interpretation of the lyric that just nails it.

And all of those thirty iterations happen in the space of ten or twenty minutes. And it only takes that long because it takes me a little listening to determine what needs to be adjusted next.

But it's not the outrageous speed in going from lyric to brilliantly-recorded song that is the most intoxicating thing about working with the AI band. It's the potential to be anyone, playing anything. As with being a composer, I can write for whoever I want to, whatever instruments. One song may be acoustic hip-hop with oud, the next newgrass chanson skiffle. And after singing as a male for my entire life, I find writing for a female voice is something I haven't grown the least bit bored with yet.

I'm quite certain that it is also because I can now write for a female voice who can deliver lyrics in much more popular musical idioms than the ones I generally play myself that some of the songs have already gotten picked up and shared more widely than I suspect they would have otherwise, most notably "No Contract No Coffee" among striking Starbucks workers.

Whether or to what extent that happens with other songs is of course unknown, but whether they are good songs, well-written and well-recorded, with catchy refrains, etc., in my humble opinion, there's no doubt.

Because some AI-generated music has gotten very popular, and this has made big news stories, some people assume if we're playing with AI music generating platforms, we're headed towards wealth and fame. This has certainly not been the case for most musicians using AI music-generation platforms, since most pro-level musicians already do that, and the future is obviously going to be more full of AI slop than anyone can imagine.

Looking not at Ai Tsuno on the dominant streaming platform, Spotify, but at David Rovics, if you click on different albums in the discography and see which tracks have received any plays over the past month (which is what those numbers represent), you'll see that the vast majority of my songs are in the single or double digits. Looking at all of these tiny numbers, if you start wondering where those overall monthly listener numbers are coming from (currently around 18,000), you'll see that it is just a handful of songs that each get a couple thousand streams. Just those few songs that made it into the algorithms and the playlists and get circulated on the platform. The rest, such as most of what I've recorded over the past decade, is largely invisible.

Ai Tsuno will probably be similarly invisible, like most good music is and has always been, since there was a music industry. But if a given song, recorded by humans or AI, may serve the cause for which it was written, then it's probably good that it exists.

Suno, Spotify, and the Hearts and Minds

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 17:42:00 +0000

Is that the name of a band?

I've been sharing a lot of music on the usual corporate social media platforms lately, and though most people who open an email and click play don't comment, those who are commenting are doing so more than usual, and it's all over the map.

It's all very complicated, and to a huge degree, I feel like we're mostly talking past each other. There are a lot of different things that can be very contradictory, and very true, all at the same time. Understanding this is key to making any sense of the world around us. (Marx and Lao Tzu both thought so, too, among others.)

According to my recent internet queries, about half of the adult population of the US has used a modern AI chatbot like ChatGPT. Among those who have used one, most now use them regularly. The other half of the population has never used one.

Among musicians and certain music enthusiasts, the AI technology of great interest are the musical equivalents of ChatGPT, such as Suno. Among musicians, depending on how you measure these things, a majority are making use of AI music-generation platforms these days. But among the general population, only around 1% have used such platforms.

The vast majority of people who listen to music do so via a music streaming platform. Spotify is the most popular of them, in the US and most other countries. Among young people, the vast majority uses Spotify on a weekly basis. Or they end up on the platform, the way older people end up clicking on a Facebook Event link even if they otherwise may have nothing to do with Facebook.

Spotify led the way in lowering payouts to artists so they could offer their services for free (with ads), and in so doing they destroyed the livelihoods of millions of musicians who had been largely dependent on CD and download sales. Then, in becoming the dominant streaming platform globally, Spotify became one of the more significant sources of income for many musicians who survived this transition.

For most people who are looking for work or still employed, using AI platforms is now part of the gig, it's required that you be proficient in these things.

While monopolistic corporations like Spotify and data-scraping AI platforms like ChatGPT and Suno are upending most professions dramatically, very much including all of those related to music, and while these platforms have all sorts of other negative things associated with them such as energy use in the case of AI, and Spotify running ICE recruitment ads (along with most other major US media platforms), AI as well as Spotify have also made themselves essential to the work and the social lives of an absolutely massive portion of global society.

This is true, even while the dust has by no means settled with regards to the lawsuits and campaigns involved with artists and authors and others trying to have a say in how or if our work is used to train these Large Language Models and music-generation platforms. The lawsuits and boycotts continue, and it also continues to be the case that AI is transforming most industries drastically, and in the process making itself completely essential for anyone trying to remain employed.

It's also amazing technology.

OK, now I'll try to make all of these somewhat disparate thoughts work together somehow. I'll start with a story.

I had long been lamenting the lack of live music at protests these days. While traveling in Australia several months ago my singing partner and I sang at some protests, but we attended others that had no music at all in the program, a phenomenon we've grown sadly accustomed to.

But then I noticed, there in Australia, an odd phenomenon developing. It's one that I then would see replicated elsewhere, particularly at Palestine solidarity events, such as a couple months ago in Milwaukee.

Maybe you've been to protests like this and you've run across what I'm talking about. That is, bands that sound as formulaically Nashville as they can get, with extremely high production values, sounding like a song that just came out of the hottest recording studio with the tightest band of session musicians doing exactly as they're told, and where the singer is singing stuff about the suffering of Palestinians, in a way that just seems a bit completely bizarre.

What the hell is going on here, I wondered. The response from one of the wonderful folks going around Australia and blasting music and speeches everywhere with a Palestine flag as a cape was he was using Suno to make these songs. My guess is he put the lyrics in there and gave Suno a one-word command like "country-western."

Sometime after returning home from that tour and having time for random activities again, I got a Suno account and started playing with it.

Playing with it for just a little while, it was obvious both that this would be the end of whatever was left of the music industry as it once existed, and that this technology was mind-blowingly amazing.

These are obviously two very contradictory truths. The music industry was already a shell of its former self due to the rise of free streaming platforms that hardly pay royalties, compared to how it used to be with terrestrial radio, CD sales, and even downloads. But this technology would be it.

As with the way these technologies are upending the rest of every other profession, it's never been clearer that technological progress, such as it is, can't be allowed to just destabilize everything like this all the time, with people expected somehow to manage to find work and pay rent under these circumstances. Can it?

I don't know what the answer to this vitally important question might be, but what's obvious is the tech is here, it's being widely used and more so by the day, it's objectively profoundly amazing, and the idea of not using it is like sticking to wax cylinders now that everyone else is using 78s.

In some ways it's not at all surprising that the first time I was exposed to this technology was at a Palestine solidarity event.

Back in the early days of the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO film unit was trying to make English-language videos that might get out there in the US and Europe and other parts of the world where public opinion regarding developments in the Middle East might make a difference.

There were (and are) many musicians singing in Arabic that everyone in the region loved, but the PLO film unit was trying to reach the English speakers, so they had a Palestinian woman singing a song in English, which I have noticed half a century later is a song still circulating in English-language Palestine solidarity circles.

Today at Palestine solidarity rallies run by Arabic-speakers, you'll commonly hear Arabic-language songs about the Palestinian struggle, sung by popular artists from the region.

You'll also increasingly hear the kinds of songs I was hearing in Australia and Milwaukee, written by people who are using technology to try to bridge the gap between their Arab selves and the wider English-speaking world. Are they all fans of country-western music? I don't know. I suspect they realize this is a popular form of music in the US and Australia, which it is, and they want to communicate using a popular art form with people who speak English.

The high production values of the songs recorded with these platforms works brilliantly in the protest setting, with a clarity of sound that cuts through, in the way that not long ago only an expensive studio recording with professional engineers and session musicians might approach.

As what we might call a "real" artist, the kind of music I have been able to elicit from Suno far exceeds what I have heard at these protests, I will humbly submit. The best prompt engineers for creating music are naturally going to be the "real" musicians, just as the best prompt engineers for creating visual art are going to be "real" artists, and the best prompt engineers for vibe-coding apps are going to be the "real" programmers, etc.

Say you're writing powerful lyrics and setting them to great music that sounds really great, too. Should you not release these songs, because your band was AI? Just because you can write and record a great song every day with this technology, does that mean the songs aren't as good anymore? Do these songs serve the people, in the way songs can do, any less than other songs might?

With Spotify the argument goes the same way. Spotify achieved its dominant position through paying artists very little and still losing money at it for many years, wiping out so much of the competition in the process, and making the surviving competition lower their payouts and offer ad-supported versions of their product in order to compete.

But now that Spotify plays the role of the virtual living room for hundreds of millions of regular users, should artists stop using it? If we take our material off of the platform, will that do anything aside from cause us to lose a lot of fans and money?

All the arguments against Spotify that I'm familiar with are correct, and I make them often myself. We can make the same kinds of arguments against General Motors, but that doesn't mean Ford is all that much better. We need a different system altogether, in so many ways, very much including for Spotify and ChatGPT, but we're way past the stage of effectively being able to boycott such dominant platforms. Or at least, if an artist does so, all that happens is they lose audience and lose money. Almost all the ones that leave for one reason or another end up soon returning because of these reasons.

What I want is to win the hearts and minds of the people out there who speak my language. English is a big language, but a lot of people out there aren't into the styles of music I usually play. With AI music generation platforms I can make some very powerful music with a much broader array of stylistic variation than I would normally be capable of without much greater effort, and the involvement of many other musicians.

I want to win those hearts and minds on the platforms that are available to me. Spotify is the biggest of them, and the one whose algorithms most effectively introduce my music to new listeners, at the rate of thousands every month. For whatever reason(s), on the US-based platforms my music gets much less traction than on this Stockholm-based streaming giant.

It's not surprising that with all that's going on, people have lots of opinions to share about AI and about Spotify, both. As someone who is actively promoting music I've written with an AI band, and doing so on Spotify, among other places, I've regularly been hearing from people who are critical of me having my music on Spotify, and people who think it's awful that I'm using AI for any purpose.

For all the good reasons to criticize Spotify and AI platforms, the idea of criticizing people for using them seems a lot like criticizing people for driving their electric car on a highway. I have literally been involved with protesting the building of highways in various parts of the world. But once they're there, the idea of avoiding them in the effort of getting from point A to point B becomes a bit ridiculous. Even more so when your job depends on you driving that car on that highway, to deliver your next pizza or whatever you're doing to make ends meet.

Lots of people listening to my recent musical efforts that I'm calling the artist Ai Tsuno have been full of praise. But especially among those who don't listen out of principle, there's a lot of criticism.

It reminds me of the criticism of Milli Vanilli for being caught lip-syncing, or Taylor Swift claiming she wrote all her own songs. There are expectations people have of artists, who then try to maintain those illusions, in line with industry practice. And then the ire of the public generally doesn't go to the PR people who tell the artists how to dress, how to act, and what to say, but to the artists whose fabricated bio gets exposed in one way or another.

According to polls I've seen, most musicians are using AI, and most musicians are cagey about admitting to it publicly. It's easy to see why, for a variety of reasons.

I'll just keep erring on the side of using whatever tools are at my disposal for making great music, in the interest of reaching the most people with the kinds of songs that I think could make a difference, especially if heard widely. I'll put those songs on whichever platforms might get them out there, and that definitely includes Spotify.

I hope those people who are horrified by the billionaires and their corporate practices will continue to be horrified, and demand a world where everyone can prosper, one way or another. We all need to organize a movement capable of addressing such profound questions.

But for the time being, there are fascists taking over a bunch of different countries like this one, and they are participating in genocides in places like Gaza. If we keep burning fossil fuels it'll soon spell the end of life on Earth. I'll personally be using whatever tools are available to use to communicate about those things, and maybe some other time worry about harassing artists for using AI and putting their AI music on Spotify.

Here's my AI playlist for the next Palestine solidarity rally that has a bluetooth speaker.

davidrovics · Ai Tsuno for Palestine

The Joy of Tsuno

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Sun, 09 Nov 2025 16:03:00 +0000

David and Ai come out of the closet. And into your ears...?

I'd like to talk with you about Artificial Intelligence. I know from talking with many of my friends, fans and acquaintances that there is both vast skepticism and vast ignorance out there about what AI is, what it can do, and where the future is going.

The skepticism -- or even outright opposition -- is thoroughly understandable, for lots of reasons, and I share it. We're talking about technology being developed by billionaires who probably don't have humanity's best interests at heart. Technology that many, many experts in the field are afraid is going to soon become so advanced that humans can't control it anymore. And technology that is already replacing massive numbers of jobs in just about every conceivable field, and will be doing that at an exponentially increasing rate in the near future.

The question of how humans are to survive in a future where most of what we currently get paid to do will be replaced by AI and robots is a very important question, obviously. The question of how we continue to have human scientists, academics, lawyers, doctors, artists, drivers, warehouse workers, factory workers, or any number of other professions in a world where most everything can be done as well or better, and much faster, by a computer or a robot, is obviously very important. It's way beyond compensating whoever it was that created the content from which AI got educated. We're not talking just about the future of researchers, writers, or musicians, but of humanity as a whole.

Important questions that need answers, and the answers can be found in things like having a government that is working on behalf of the people, and engaged with direct and extensive regulation of the tech companies, and the institution of some kind of Universal Basic Income. There are many other good answers to the question of how artists, intellectuals and people with jobs of all other sorts survive in a society that no longer needs us nearly as much as it used to. And I'll now leave those questions for another time.

If you want to have some idea of how amazing AI music-generation technology is right now, I would like to invite you to listen to Ai Tsuno. Ai Tsuno is the name I chose for my collaborative musical efforts with Suno, which is one of a number of different AI music generation platforms in popular use today.

I know so many people who really seem to be suffering from some form of future shock with all this stuff, and they avoid ever listening to, looking at, or reading anything they know to be AI-generated content. While I completely agree with anyone who says that the internet is massively polluted these days with ever-more abundant and ever-more realistic AI slop of every conceivable description, to just dismiss AI technology because of this is to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

First of all, don't take my word for it. If you haven't heard Ai Tsuno's latest album, Army of Robots, or the one before that, Where the Algorithms Rule, take a few minutes to go to the music streaming platform of your choice and listen to a couple songs. Then come back to me here.

If you're like most of the people who actually bothers to check it out, you're now in a slight state of shock at how good it sounds, how human the voice sounds, how she seems to really understand what she's singing about, how she reacts vocally to different words that mean different things, really communicating. You've probably noticed how inventive each song is in terms of instrumentation, melodies and harmonies, and of course how incredibly high the production values are for everything you're hearing.

To be clear, what you're hearing is, to no small degree, the power of this technology, and it would be wrong to under-emphasize that. However, what you're hearing is as good as it is because I wrote the lyrics, and I'm the musician with vast experience writing and recording songs under my belt who is working with Suno to come up with the music for each track.

If it were not me doing this, or some other competent, experienced recording artist, it would suck, and it would sound like AI slop. Every one of these songs involves many, and often many dozen, inadequate efforts at coming up with good music for my lyrics. At first the phrasing might be stilted, or emphasizing the wrong bits in weird ways that sounds easily identifiable as AI slop. But when I keep refining the prompts and editing the lyrics in various ways, ultimately, every time, Suno eventually arrives at an amazing arrangement for the song.

I have recorded a lot of records with a lot of great musicians in a lot of studios. It would be impossible to over-emphasize the importance of this fact, in terms of what I'm able to get out of Suno, compared to someone who lacks this kind of background. I've heard what so many other people do with Suno who don't have this kind of background, and although the production values are always amazing, it's also generally easy to identify as AI slop. But hearing these tracks I keep hearing along the way in life, the potential was undeniable, and I had to try it.

Working with Suno is, in fact, very much like working with human studio musicians.

I made that thought it's own paragraph, to let it sink in a bit. We have these notions about originality, we humans, and artists more than most. We like to think there's something special about being human, that can't be done just as well or better, in every possible way, by AI. But it's not true, and that's easy to demonstrate.

All you have to do is a blind taste test kind of thing. If you want to humble a French wine connoisseur, give them some wine from California and see if they can tell where it's from. Try doing the same with sharing an AI-generated piece of music with someone, and you'll get the same reaction. They can't tell the difference, they only think they can. It's all gotten way too good for that. The days when you could easily tell the difference are over. (Same with what they used to call "deep fake videos.")

What does it mean to be human? What makes us unique or different from computers? What is it that these Large Language Models are trained on and how do they make use of all that training?

Full disclosure: I haven't tried using Suno to write lyrics. I have played with various LLM's to get them to write lyrics, however, and I've been completely unimpressed with what they come up with. It seems clear that if they're working with the body of the tens of millions of songs that have been recorded in the world that are available to listen to, it's no surprise they shouldn't be very good at writing lyrics, since most human recording artists are working with badly-written lyrics to begin with, by my estimation at least.

But along with the available millions of badly-written songs Suno has to work with, it also has millions of songs to work with that involve great session musicians playing great music, of every kind. So much of the time they are playing according to one formula or another, that fits into one genre or another. Most of it is not at all inventive or interesting, and sounds like the music industry equivalent of mass-produced bubble gum, as far as creative input goes.

Which is also what you can easily get from session musicians or from Suno today. But if you're working with great session musicians, or if you're working with Suno, you can give them instructions -- prompts -- that make all the difference. That's why when you listen to Ai Tsuno's recent albums you may think this stuff sounds so fresh and interesting. That's because the platform is amazing and has the whole of human musical output to refine itself with, but it's also because I'm telling it to play things like "newgrass chanson hip-hop with a dark, modal sound." Ever heard a newgrass chanson hip-hop band? Me neither. But Ai Tsuno does that style really well, along with klezmer cabaret skiffle with satirical but sexy vibes, and a lot of other styles no one's ever heard of.

We humans, we artists, we workers, whoever we are -- we don't get to choose a lot of things. Speaking specifically to my fellow musicians, we didn't decide a century ago that most of our jobs playing in taverns should go away and be replaced by radios. But when that happened, we all damn well did whatever we could to get on those radio programs. We didn't decide that Spotify should start up its free tier and sabotage our livelihoods, causing millions of us to stop playing music for a living, unable to make ends meet anymore because of the death of CD sales and downloads. But we damn well have done our best to get our music on those Spotify playlists, and get what revenue and what attention we can get on the platform that is now the way most people listen to music.

And we didn't decide that these new platforms should use all of our music and everyone else's in order to train their models and make them so amazing, as they are now. But now that this has been done, and the genie is out of the bottle, I will bet anyone any amount of money that the genie is not going back in the bottle, and this technology is only going to continue to improve, to the extent that that's even possible.

These are our new tools. As with all the other transformative technologies, its potential for having all kinds of devastating impacts on humanity and the future of human culture is clear. But it's not going to go away just because many of us might not want to use the technology or listen to music created with it.

Along with the devastating aspects, the prospects with this technology to create so much more music that can be employed in the interests of popular education, movement-building, and the promotion of crucially important ideas and histories, and to create such catchy and beautiful tunes so quickly with such high production values, is amazing.

I will certainly not stop writing lyrics that I will come up with music for myself, and record myself, in my voice, with other human musicians. Even in the months since I've been obsessively writing with Suno, some of my best songs, with the most interesting music overall, have not involved Suno at all. But I think it's only right to have the humility, as a human songwriter, to admit the reality that Suno can come up with cool music to my lyrics at least as well as I can, generally, Suno can do this in a fraction of the time it would take for me to do it, and then this process happens at the same time as Suno also leaves you with a very high-quality recording of the song you just wrote together.

I do not have the nut cracked as far as how to get this music out there. The name an artist has built for themselves is largely our currency, you could say. The songs I record with my voice are the ones that get into Spotify's algorithms when I release a new David Rovics album. Ai Tsuno still has a global listenership that is barely in the double digits.

Although I'm the lyricist for everything Ai Tsuno sings, I felt that having an alter ego with a different name made sense, since I'm only responsible for the music as the prompt engineer and producer.

But it also seems worth noting, especially for anyone out there who doesn't know much about how the music industry works, that most pop stars or other recording artists you might be familiar with do not write any of their own songs. Other people do, like the many professional songwriters in places like Nashville who just write songs, and may not perform themselves much at all. They write songs for the stars to sing -- that's what they do. This has been how the music industry has functioned since it started, over a century ago, with the rise of records and radio, up to the present day.

When you listen to the songs through the ages that have become hits, you may notice that there's a catchy guitar riff or bass riff or something the harmony singers are doing in the chorus that ends up defining the really cool and catchy sound of a given song. Those session musicians who may have come up with the guitar riff or harmony line may get credit in the liner notes that few people read, but otherwise, the fact that what may make the song so good may have had little to do with the actual songwriter who wrote the lyrics or the one who came up with the chords and melody, but with some other factor like the inventive things the studio musicians did during the recording of the album, will generally become a footnote in terms of the legacy of a hit song. But in reality, as any honest recording artist knows, it is often just those sorts of things that make a song come alive.

And as a human musician with a lot of experience as a human musician, I have to say up front right here that for better or for worse, some of the best session musicians I've ever worked with have been human, and others have not. I encourage you to judge for yourselves and listen.

Anne Chamberlain, 1938-2025

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 02:29:00 +0000

My mother, Anne Chamberlain, died on the morning of November 7th, at the age of 87.

The most awkward part of the process of her dying has been people reaching out to me with empathy, and sharing their very touching experiences with the deaths of their parents, talking about how much they loved their mothers and how close they were with them. People tend to make assumptions that other people experience life more or less as they do, naturally. But the world isn't like that.

I may have little of that sort of mushy stuff to share, but I do feel compelled to touch on a number of different themes related to Anne, her life, my relationship with her, and her death.

Anne was the second of four daughters of John Seymour Chamberlain and Margaret Golson. (If Margaret had a middle name, I never knew what it was.) Anne was born on February 22nd, 1938, on the island of Manhattan, where she would make sure both of her children would be born later.

Anne was a sort of anti-elitist elitist the whole time I knew her, which was a while. "Anti-elitist elitist" is a phrase I coined to describe her, many decades ago. As an anti-elitist elitist, she never had much interest in her own family history. This was probably because her father was deeply interested in his family history, and his eldest two daughters had an especially bad time growing up under his abusive parenting. His parenting improved in time for the next two girls that came along, and he was a warm and loving grandfather for many grandchildren later.

Seymour, as Anne's father was known, was so proud of the Seymour line of his ancestry that he gave all four of his daughters the same middle name -- Seymour. The Seymour line dates back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. They were founding members of the English aristocracy, back when it spoke French.

Anne's father's grandfather, or maybe great grandfather, was Jacob Chamberlain, from Seneca Falls, New York. Jacob was a founder of the abolitionist Free Soil Party in 1848, and a founder of the abolitionist Republican Party in 1854.

Anne's mother, Margaret, was a descendant of Irish refugees who went to Alabama, which was where Margaret grew up. She went to university in Louisiana, and then traveled to far-off New York City to pursue a career in music. Instead of the music career, she married a businessman and raised four children, all of whom also went to college and became accomplished musicians themselves.

Despite being from a family of musicians, with more musicians in every direction of the family tree you look at, from an early age Anne developed the notion that the great musician in the family was going to be her, and her alone.

She did go on to become a world-class concert pianist, spending the vast majority of her adult life teaching piano students. Like so many great musicians, she never seriously pursued making a living as a performer, though she often talked about the idea, and often seemed to be suggesting that if she hadn't made the decision to have kids, she would have pursued that avenue. When she talked about this dream of music teachers to be full-time performers, she would always assure me that she had no regrets about having had kids.

Back in the days when people bought records, classical music made up 1% of the music market. (Similar, incidentally, to how much of the music market folk music takes up.) Within that 1% of the market, the kind of music my dad wrote and my mom was most passionate about playing, what they called Avant Garde music back in the 1960's -- also known as 12-tonal, atonal, or just "concert music" -- made up a small fraction of those who listened to classical music.

Most listeners of classical music didn't and don't like this stuff. The idea of making a living playing it was always a fantasy to begin with -- no one does that. Even if you get a much-coveted job playing for a symphony orchestra somewhere in the world, there aren't any that only play that kind of music, or they'd largely be playing for the crickets. Back in the 1960's, the main orchestras in the world that played my dad's music were in eastern Europe, where everything was heavily subsidized, of course.

Being part of a tiny little group of highly-accomplished performers of a type of music hardly anyone listened to never stopped Anne from believing in her greatness, the greatness of classical music, the plebian nature of all other forms of music, or of the ineptitude of most other musicians in the world. She referred to them as people who "played music" or "played the piano," rather than people who were musicians.

Growing up in the woodsy suburbs of Wilton, Connecticut, where Anne and her music professor husband Howard moved to from Manhattan around 1970, my bedroom and my sister's bedroom were on either side of the bedroom that our parents shared with a Steinway grand piano. On most mornings, Howard would go to his makeshift studio in the basement of the house, and their bedroom would become Anne's studio.

Sometime around dawn she'd begin to play music. Although her main bread and butter was teaching private students, she always had some kind of upcoming performance to practice for. These hours of most mornings were an involuntary and very impressive sort of master class in how to practice impossibly complicated passages and learn to play them perfectly every time.

Then came the students, many of whom were naturally coming for their lessons after school was over, which was also when school was over for my sister and I, too.

My stomach churns to even think about what it was like to listen to Anne work with those students day after day, year after year.

For a short while, she was teaching students at the private hippie elementary school I was lucky enough to attend, but she was soon disinvited from teaching kids there, because of her teaching style, which did not correspond at all to the methodology prevalent at that wonderful institution.

Anne's teaching style was nothing like the caring, encouraging style of the teachers at the Learning Community. Anne's methodology, such as it was, involved a near-constant stream of dismissive comments and insults. She had one or two extremely dedicated students who were exceptionally good players, and they got off with far fewer insults, and even the occasional compliment. The rest of her students were treated as if they were undeserving of her attention. If they played a passage in a way Anne didn't like, she'd repeat the way they played it, in exaggerated form, mocking their lack of musicality.

How many children Anne alienated from music, I'll never know, but I imagine their ranks far exceed the number of kids who had positive experiences studying with her. Yes, if they stuck with it, they probably got good at playing the piano, and at sightreading. But at what emotional cost?

On a bad day, her parenting style was a lot like her teaching style. On a good day, she kept her more pathological inclinations in check. But as a general rule, what Anne did when she was awake and in the company of other people, if she wasn't playing music, was talk. She talked, and others listened. If you didn't respond occasionally and try to interject some kind of comment, she'd accuse you of not paying attention. If you did make a comment, she'd accuse you of interrupting her.

This way, no matter what you said or didn't say, you could always be doing something wrong. If you interjected with a comment that was merely agreeing with something she said, she could still manage -- almost every time -- to turn your agreement with her into something to argue with you about.

The biggest problem with people who are virtually unable to ever stop talking is, by definition, they're terrible listeners. If anyone ever manages to say anything in their presence, the obsessive talker then finds a way to turn whatever they said into something that happened to them in their lives that they can then hold court about. The other biggest problem is the incessant talkers generally have very little to talk about, in relation to their need to keep talking. They run out of things to talk about and start repeating their stories, over and over again.

I assume I'm not the only one who knows a lot of people like this. A great concentration of people like this can be found in New York City, especially among Jewish women of my mother's generation, and Jewish women of the next generation before hers as well.

Anne wasn't Jewish, but that's not the point. You don't have to be Jewish to act like that, it's just that in my world most of the people who do act like that are Jewish, and female, and elderly. I'm sure there were historical reasons why this kind of behavior became so commonplace, and maybe it had positive applications back in the shtetl that are hard to understand in the modern era.

By the same token, the stoic, reserved, introspective men like my father, and his father, have been another archetype I've grown up with, and probably emulated to a huge extent as well. It represents just as much of a stereotype of a certain kind of New York Jewish man as my mother, or my father's mother, represented another stereotype. I'm sure if I were more familiar with other subcultures I might make similar sweeping statements about them, too, but I'll save those for someone who knows what they're talking about. I only know certain little corners of certain subcultures at all well, such as certain elements of New York society from whence my parents came.

The impact, of course, of being raised by someone who talks incessantly like a broken record and has no real capacity to engage in a meaningful way with her children or with most anyone else who doesn't just want to be talked at, is devastating. I wouldn't change my past if I could, and I've always felt that my reaction to this kind of parenting, which involved escaping into the solace of my internal world, probably helped turn me into who I am today, which is hopefully a good thing. But it's like being raised by a bulldozer, and the recovery has been long and slow.

I have always been grateful for the presence of my father growing up. Although it was always clear that Anne was in charge of everything, Howard always treated his children not only with affection, which Anne was also full of, but also with a keen sense of the fragility of these little beings, his children, and he always treated us with dignity and respect, with none of the scolding that Anne felt the need to deliver so often. She would say that he was leaving all of that important work to her, since, as was obvious to her, someone had to do it.

Anne had been my earliest and biggest introduction to progressive politics, though it wasn't until I was probably over 50 that I really began to take in what a profound influence she had on me as far as the development of my worldview went.

Howard's interest in Taoism, Buddhism, group therapy, dream analysis, and all sorts of New Age stuff like that presented me with good tools for trying to work through having been raised by a bulldozer. Psychedelic drugs helped a lot, too. My daily cannabis habit has always been a coping mechanism, to try to maintain an even keel, of the sort that my mother could never have.

Although Anne spent much of my childhood dismissing what she called "popular music" as some kind of primitive and uninteresting slop, in relation to real, classical music, and although she frequently expressed her special contempt for people who picked up an instrument and just improvised on it, when her son stopped playing classical music and developed an interest in various crass forms of popular music, Anne was supportive.

Anne always strove to be supportive of her kids in the ways she could. When the public elementary school didn't seem to be good for her kids, she sought out a wonderful hippie private school for us. The first time I went into a real music studio to work with real musicians and record an album, Anne paid for the whole thing. When it became clear that public school was not the place we wanted to send our kids in Portland, Anne volunteered to help pay for us to send our kids to a Waldorf school. I could easily go on with more similar examples.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned from growing up was that I never wanted to treat people the way my mother or my grandmother or other people I knew like that treated people. When I walk into a store or a restaurant, I don't want people to be glad when that terrible customer finally leaves. And when I have children, I thought, I want to listen to them.

The best book I eventually read about raising kids was titled Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves by Naomi Aldort. One of the most interesting things about reading that book was how familiar so many of the examples of bad parenting were to me, from my childhood with Anne. I have striven never to be dismissive or insulting towards my kids or anyone else, since becoming a parent myself. I wish I could say I have entirely succeeded in this endeavor, but the programming learned from childhood has ways of manifesting itself again and again.

When I was 18 or so, my parents got divorced. For years I had been encouraging my father to get away from what I increasingly viewed as an abusive relationship, because it was obvious to me that no one deserved to be treated like this. I guess my hope was that he'd leave her, and take the kids with him. I hadn't really thought that part through, in retrospect. When he finally did leave her, it wasn't really under his own steam, but due to circumstances he hadn't planned on -- an affair exposed.

My hope for my dad to get into a good relationship happened, and he lived happily ever after (now aged 89, and no longer reading essays like this one, but still playing the piano beautifully).

Anne spent the rest of her life after her divorce living alone, in a perpetual state of loneliness, as far as I could tell. She continued to teach, participate in various social events and committees, play organ at church, and for probably 15 different summers she rented her house and spent the summer traveling. She went to Israel, Romania, Greece, France, and many other countries, including 10 summers spent in Ha Noi, Vietnam, working with classical musicians there.

But although she seemed to clearly have a desire to have a partner in life, and talked about this in one way or another often when I visited her (along with her continual feelings of betrayal and resentment towards her ex-husband), she never hooked up with one, to my knowledge. She had some friends who she would see now and then, but over time it became clear that mostly she talked about these friends, and didn't really see them much at all. They were more like friends in her mind, people she liked to think of as her friends, but not people she actually spent time with much at all.

Over the decades, her tendencies towards being the center of the universe only worsened. A number of her old friends, who I've known since childhood, confided in me about how Anne was getting even more crotchety and difficult, to the point where they couldn't stand visiting her more than once a year or so.

The tracks on the broken record included certain repeated themes. One was about how she never planned on having a divorce, and how much her ex-husband sucked for having an affair. One was how much electric instruments of all kinds suck, and how society is going down because it's no longer commonplace for people to own real pianos. One was about how only some people were real musicians and everyone else just played music. One was about how saving the planet is the responsibility of all of us to cut down our consumption, which was a vehicle for her to complain about most other people for not doing that. Another was about how if she is going to die, she doesn't want to be resuscitated.

All of these subjects were obsessions for her, that she talked about every day, to anyone who would listen. They involved repeating the same stories from her life that involved some kind of realization or discovery about these subjects. They often began with "stop me if you've heard this before," which was a pointless gesture -- the story was going to be repeated no matter what you said at that point.

Her death was one of her obsessions. She began to talk with my sister Bonnie and I about this eventuality many decades ago, on a very regular basis. She didn't want to be a vegetable, or to lose control of her body or mind, understandably enough. And for whatever reason never professionally diagnosed, she had to talk about it every day.

As Anne got older, her hearing began to decline. This, of course, is a common human experience as we age. It's also very common for people at first to think these damn young people just don't know how to enunciate anymore, before they eventually come to realize that it is in fact their ears that are the main problem here. Anne never got there, despite eventually very severe hearing loss. Right up until the end, she insisted that anyone she couldn't understand was suffering from bad diction, including her own children. Hopefully other people could hopefully have been entertained by how ridiculous her behavior had become, but for me it was just one trigger after another.

She had glaucoma in one eye, a bad knee, and few teeth remaining in her head. She had been feeling like it was time to die, just because of these sorts of health conditions. Then on October 10th, on the way to New Bedford, Massachusetts, riding with Bonnie and a car full of other folks to hear Kamala and I do a concert there, Anne had a mini-stroke of some kind, where she was speaking in tongues for twenty minutes or so. She then decided she didn't want to go to doctors to figure out what had happened or get diagnosed or treated, she just wanted to call it quits.

Anne invited Kamala and I to have dinner with her in her granny flat beneath my sister's home in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. This dinner, she told us, would be her last, and it was. That was October 13th, I think. The three of us had a tasty quiche kind of thing with lots of kale that Anne had made. Afterwards we all had some vanilla ice cream, which was Anne's last dessert.

Anne had long ago talked about Scott Nearing, and how he died by stopping eating. Since then she read another book about VSED -- Voluntary Stopping Eating and Drinking.

My sister got the word out to family and friends of Anne's, some of whom Anne hadn't seen in decades. Over the next couple weeks, Anne's surviving younger sisters came from New Jersey and California, Reiko and my kids all flew in from Oregon, and various friends and relatives from Connecticut and elsewhere came to pay respects.

If Anne had been planning to do the whole VSED thing, she altered her plan a bit, happy to have all these visitors. Finally, perhaps for the first time in forty years, she had people around her at all times, all of them apparently happy to sit quietly and listen to her talk.

Given how thirsty all this talking made her, she moderated the VSED program to the extent that although she was spitting out most of the water she was sipping on to keep her mouth lubricated, she was drinking enough of it that she lived much longer than people typically do when they actually stop drinking water as well as eating food.

When she first decided to stop eating, I commented to her that if there was anything I wanted to talk about with her, I should do it now. She was very intentional about making space for her and I to be alone, to facilitate that, which was very nice. But I also knew that I had given up on trying to talk about her behavior towards me or other people a long time ago. Not for lack of effort, but because it was obvious a long time ago that she was completely unable to see what she was doing. She might be horrified to see someone else treat others the way she did, but her blind spot around these things included herself, in her entirety.

During the time her grandchildren were visiting, her last opportunity to have a chance to hear what her grandchildren's voices sound like was once again squandered by ignoring them, while talking about how beautiful they are, to the adults who were old enough to know how to shut up and listen to her.

In the course of everything else, while I was being continually triggered by this maddening behavior, there were many touching moments.

Anne was reminiscing about aspects of her daily life in JP that she said she enjoyed so much, that she would miss. I'm not sure how much she really enjoyed these things, and how much she was working on developing some kind of daily routine to try to not be too miserable, as she lived alone in Boston. But she talked about how much she loved her daily trips to Cafe Ula nearby, to sip a latte and read a book, and her walks through the park around the corner where the Tibetan Redwoods are growing, and her trips to hear student recitals at the New England Conservatory a short T ride away.

So once she was no longer able to walk, Bonnie borrowed a wheelchair from somewhere, and we took Anne to have her official last sip of a latte at Cafe Ula, and to have her last walk through the park, and her last concert at Jordan Hall. Last Tuesday, we wheeled her to the place where she could vote in an election, for the last time.

One of the things Anne talked about that she had never mentioned before related to a relationship she was in with a much older married man when she was in her twenties. In lieu of being able to tell this long-dead lover of hers that she still loved him, Anne felt moved to contact his children, now in their eighties, like her, to tell them that she still loved their father. They were so gracious in their response to her, telling her that he still loved her, too. This was both so touching, and so mind-boggling, at the same time, knowing that this was a woman who to no small degree defined herself as a jilted divorcee, whose husband was stolen by a younger woman with whom he had had an affair. To learn that she had once been the younger woman having the affair with the married man was downright depressing. Not that she had an affair with a married man, but that even after having this experience herself, she had no capacity to understand why her own husband had done the same thing she had once done.

I have spent more than two years now watching a livestreamed genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinians, especially in Gaza. I have been watching people starve to death. I have seen how long a fragile old person's body, or a fragile child's body, can survive without food. I have seen picture after picture of what they look like just before death. There's obviously a giant difference between voluntarily not eating and an enforced famine, but those starving Palestinians were what kept on going through my mind as I watched Anne's body become more emaciated day by day.

Anne's death came on the 26th day after she stopped eating. And incidentally, the 38th day of the longest government shutdown in US history.

Once she became too weak to speak, there was a peace that fell on her apartment. Rather than a place where a bunch of people took shifts looking after Anne and listening to her talk, Anne's apartment became a gathering place for friends and family to hang out, while she died. Her apartment was now a space where other voices could be heard, and many good conversations then took place there.

The occasion of Anne's death, sort of pre-planned as it was, was a wonderful time to see people I hadn't seen in a long time, and to spend more time with folks like my sister and her family, who I so often just see for a night or two and then I'm off somewhere else, on a tour. This time, I was also on a tour, but I never took the return flight home to Portland.

Anne brought a lot of beautiful music into the world. Somehow or other she raised a couple of great kids. She supported all the good causes, along with some of the hopeless ones. Like most of us, maybe even the vast majority of us, she worked hard and she did her best.

I knew that when she was alive, which is why I didn't want to hurt her by pointing out the ways she did harm to her children, and to so many of her fragile young students, while she was alive.

But at least now that she is no longer with us, I think all of those people, wherever they are, deserve to know that whatever insulting or dismissive comment Anne made to them, it was not deserved. No one should be treated like that, just because they wanted to learn how to play the piano, or their parents wanted them to.

In what seems like a very intriguing twist of fate, just about one hour after Anne's passing, a Chihuahua was wandering around on the street in front of the house. She looked lost and cold. John picked her up and brought her inside. The dog had no collar or other identification, so someone called the animal shelter to see if there might be a chip in the animal. The address of the shelter, it turned out, was 26 Mahler.

Mahler was the composer of the last piece of music Anne played, several days before she died, before she was too weak to see or sit up. It was day 26 of her fast when she died. The Chihuahua seemed like some kind of parting gift. Who knows.

Escape from Vermont

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 21:28:00 +0000

Is there a chronically-online identitarian cult lurking in the Green Mountains? Let's investigate.

I am so outraged at the Steering Committee of Jewish Voice for Peace Vermont that I have to either hit someone or write an essay, so after a long and hard consideration of the available options, I have decided to do the latter.

Portlandia is thoroughly entrenched in Vermont. No surprise there. Like Oregon, Vermont is overwhelmingly white. White people left to their own devices tend towards the formation of identitarian cults, as evidenced by places like the Pacific Northwest, Minnesota, and Vermont, to take three very prominent examples of places that are full of this sort of thing.

The cults start on the internet, generally, and then have a way of spreading into certain parts of the US -- especially parts that are isolated from the realities of major urban areas, and lack diversity. These conditions seem to make a lot of white people more susceptible to the online trolls and algorithms which seem to supersede their capacity for critical thought.

Given these sorts of dynamics in especially online sectors of US society, it's no wonder that an entity like a JVP steering committee would be especially vulnerable to them, since JVP, like the overwhelming majority of US Jews, is overwhelmingly white.

Whether any of my hypothesizing here is accurate or not doesn't matter. I'm just thinking aloud about what drives people to engage in cancellation campaigning and other related toxic endeavors. Why are so many people on what remains of the US left so ready to act like absolute caricatures that could have easily appeared in one of the more outrageous episodes of Portlandia, or in a Fox News hit piece?

Before I share with you the written version of the Vermont Steering Committee's cancellation efforts, a little more context seems appropriate.

They accuse me of making transphobic comments without specifying what any of them supposedly were. They accuse me of defending Nazis. Their evidence for these accusations is a hyperlink to a blog post of mine where I talk about the circular firing squad that they are participating in. They don't even provide us with out-of-context quotes that supposedly illustrate my transphobia or defense of Nazis.

These are the most outrageous sorts of accusations anyone can make against someone like me, and these sorts of outlandish accusations made by the steering committee of an organization call for a response by the accused.

The reality, for anyone who has attended a random selection of my shows in any of the countries I've toured in over the past many years, is obvious and fairly visible. At most any of my shows, my audiences are unmistakably disproportionately trans and Jewish, sometimes both at the same time. At least 10% of any given audience I play for in places like the US or England or Denmark is likely to be trans, and the trans audience members are often some of my biggest fans, who sing along the most to songs like "I'm A Better Anarchist Than You." By the same token, in any region with a significant Jewish population, and even in countries with a very small Jewish population, my audiences are likely to be vastly disproportionately Jewish, often much more than 10%, and in the New York or London regions, often much more than that.

Why is such a disproportionate percentage of my audience trans and Jewish? Why is everyone who comes to any of my shows anywhere always against fascism, and often very deeply opposed to it?

Here are the answers:

The trans community everywhere, from my vast experience, is overwhelmingly leftwing. This, and the fact that I have written songs supporting trans people that many trans people cherish, is why a disproportionate percentage of my audience is trans.

A disproportionate percentage of my audience is Jewish because the left is disproportionately Jewish, and I'm a leftwing person of Jewish lineage singing songs against fascism, today and historically. Also lots of Jews are especially motivated by opposition to Israeli fascism, and I sing about that a lot.

My audience is, by the same token, overwhelmingly antifascist and even anticapitalist, and definitely anti-imperialist, because I am, and that's what my body of a thousand or so songs are all about.

The Steering Committee of Vermont JVP obviously wouldn't know about any of this, and apparently they don't need to, before embarking on a cancellation campaign against a Jewish antifascist musician with a large trans following for being a transphobic Nazi sympathizer.

Sounds crazy? That's because it is. The internet does this sort of thing to people, it's not their fault for being this way. There are active trolls out there working for the FBI/Antifa spreading all kinds of angry lies about me, along with lots of Zionist trolls doing the same thing, though generally far less effectively than the backstabbers of the FBI/Antifa dumpster-burning and backstabbing brigades. When people in a sleepy little town in Vermont suddenly get inundated with bile from Portlandia or Washington, DC or Tel Aviv or wherever it's coming from, they naturally feel like they're being ganged up on by a bunch of people with very strong opinions about me, whether real or manufactured, because that's exactly what they're experiencing.

From my again vast experience with this sort of thing, when people get attacked online like that, and themselves threatened with cancellation of all kinds, as I'm sure would have been the case with various actors in this instance, there is the option of telling the trolls to fuck off, unequivocally, which I've noticed actually often makes them go away, or at least change their tactics. But there is a strong tendency to buckle under this pressure and agree with everything the trolls say, hoping they'll then leave you alone.

And then there are those who are already in what the hosts of the podcast, Fucking Canceled call "the nexus," who already are adherents to the puritanical cult of cancellation-campaigning and safety and security culture and vetting everyone for their potential past misdeeds whenever the opportunity arises. And the trolls make sure it arises!

Whatever turned JVP's Vermont steering committee into a profoundly dysfunctional identitarian cult of cancellation-campaigning, I can only wonder (which is partially what I'm doing here with this missive).

But here's what the steering committee wrote, and what a steering committee member shared with JVP's public discussion list.

Jewish Voice for Peace Vermont-New Hampshire stands unequivocally with the Trans community. For those who do not know, members of JVP VT-NH had organized a benefit concert for Middle East Children’s Alliance featuring folk artist, David Rovics. When the concert was planned, organizers were unaware of Rovics’ extensive history of making transphobic statements. To learn more, please visit https://davidrovics.substack.com/p/the-social-engineering-of-the-circular (TW: transphobia and defense of nazis).

We apologize to everyone harmed by our partnership with him. Now that we know about his transphobia, the steering committee no longer endorses the concert and recommends cancellation. If the concert happens, the steering committee would like an announcement stating the concert is not endorsed by JVP VT/NH to be read before the performance. We will not be the first to cancel one of his shows for this exact reason, so there is precedent for such action.

Because the concert is so soon, October 25, it is highly unlikely we can book another artist, but we are open to planning a new concert in the future with stronger vetting practices.

The concert was a benefit for the Middle East Children's Alliance (MECA). If you choose not to go to the show (or if it gets canceled) donations to MECA are strongly encouraged.

But wait, it gets better.

After the steering committee circulated this missive, my old friend who had initially undertaken to organize a gig for me during this ongoing visit to the northeastern US was intent on organizing the gig anyway, without the sponsorship of JVP.

That's when someone initiated an effort to pressure the venue to cancel the event, and pull the rug out from under the organizer.

This is exactly the same thing the group, UK Lawyers for Israel, has done to try to shut down my gigs in England. Pressure venues to shut down gigs and not host antisemitic performers. Though the Vermont steering committee doesn't call this Jew an antisemite -- just pro-Nazi. With no explanation. At least UK Lawyers for Israel provide an explanation, in the form of the titles to all of the songs on my first album about the Gaza genocide -- the one which Israel continues to carry out, as the JVP steering committee tries to get a benefit for Gaza canceled.

The organizer saved the event from being canceled, in a sense, but not in a sense that made any sense at all to me.

To speak in the language that identitarians love to use, I am a victim of abusers. Cancellation campaigning, trolling, spreading false rumors and lies, these are all forms of bullying, which is a form of abuse. They are also McCarthyite forms of abuse, intended to rob a person of both their reputations and their livelihoods. The behavior is despicable, abhorrent, and a prime example of why the left is shrinking so rapidly for so long in this country.

The abusers then present themselves as victims, or allies of victims. But I am not any of the things they baselessly claim I am. I am a victim of their McCarthyite abuse.

As an abuse victim well aware that I am an abuse victim, and seething with appropriate levels of rage as a result of being a victim of the JVP Vermont steering committee's abusive behavior, I was flabbergasted when my old friend, the original organizer of the gig, explained to me in an email that the reason why the venue hadn't canceled on him was because he was promising there would be dialogue between me and my accusers.

I am a big supporter of dialogue. Ironically, it is my support for dialogue that is the origin of the false allegations about me being a Nazi sympathizer. In the eyes of Rose City Antifa, the accelerationist wackos of IGD ("It's Going Down"), and apparently also the JVP Vermont steering committee's puritanical end of the left, I made the terrible error of talking to a couple of people they all consider to be members of the right or antisemites, and I did so publicly, on my YouTube channel. The interviews are still there, you're welcome to watch them, but you won't find any of the accusations against me substantiated if you do. You will, however, find dialogue of a sort that might make some people uncomfortable -- and of a sort that I and most sane people I know agree is vitally important to be having right now.

But dialogue with people who have actively been trying to get my gig canceled? Dialogue with people who are only having this dialogue because they failed to get the gig canceled? Dialogue with my abusers, who have just finished punching me in the face, and then punching me in the gut afterwards? No. I'm not Gandhi. That kind of dialogue is for someone else. The only dialogue I'm interested in with people who make such accusations against me is the kind involving apologizing to me, and explaining to me why their behavior was abhorrent. When I discovered that my friend's plan was to sort of ambush me with this phony effort at dialogue with my abusers, it was I who canceled the gig. No thanks.

If you do watch the interviews I've done with people Antifa/IGD thinks should never be "platformed," then you'll start to see the massive conundrum I'm in, as a victim of the abusive behavior of the cancellation-happy organizations or networks characterized by Antifa, IGD, and the Vermont JVP steering committee.

That is, how many hours of my interviews with other people do you need to put yourself through before determining that all of the accusations against me are baseless? And how many of my hundreds of essays do you need to read to figure out the same (including the one they link to)? How many of the darling of Rose City Antifa's Shane Burley's unreadable and possibly AI-generated tracts about me do you need to read before you realize that he's a cancel culture lunatic guru and not worth paying any attention to?

Figuring out why the accusations are nutty is a full-time job, and no one has time for that. That's what makes cancellation-campaigning such an effective tactic. The truth doesn't matter. The tactic is all that matters. The tactic itself creates a dark cloud around its victims, whether the people engaging in it are freelance leftwing cult members, FBI provocateurs, or working in a Mossad troll farm somewhere.

For whatever it's worth, by my observation, the extent of the insanity of the kinds of accusations floating around about me and so many of my friends who have experienced exactly the same sort of thing over the past decade especially would not be possible without the aid of active online cults, troll farms, and especially social media algorithms that drive conflict into our feeds and suppress any efforts at reasonable discourse.

If there's any hope for our society, it will begin when we all collectively abandon all of the corporate platforms. I wish I could afford to be the first to do it, but I can't. Quite possibly they'll cancel me first anyway, for the same sorts of baseless reasons as JVP's Vermont steering committee has sought to do. I've already been permanently demonetized by YouTube and had albums removed from Spotify, so they are indeed in great company, and indeed aren't the first to try to cancel me, as they accurately state.

On another note, if you know my mother, Anne, and have anything you want to say to her before she dies, likely in the very near future, feel free to pass a message for her on to me.

Portland, Oregon: Myths and Realities in 2025

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 22:41:00 +0000

My adopted home town of Portland, Oregon is once again in the international headlines, and this calls for a little primer.

I'm going to cover a lot of ground in this piece, and I suspect there may be some folks reading it who have no idea who I am, so by way of establishing a little bit of credibility to start with, for those people: I'm a professional touring musician, I've been involved in that way and in other capacities with the labor, environmental, antiwar and Palestine solidarity movements for many decades, both across the US and internationally. I've lived in Portland since my eldest daughter was one, 18 years ago. My fan base is largely young, American, and leftwing, disproportionately including a lot of the sorts of folks who are currently protesting in front of the ICE building, the folks who were protesting in very similar circumstances for much of 2020 and 2021 at the Justice center, and the folks who have tended to be part of what was for a long time commonly known of as the Black Bloc.

Intro over.

Are you alright?

Since the Israeli military started slaughtering every child, woman and man in Gaza in October, 2023, I've been very distracted with news coming out of that part of the world. I do also pay a lot of attention to what's happening in the US, but I rarely get any news through partisan sources like Fox or MSNBC, who mostly editorialize idiotically. I'm much more interested in reporters on the ground reporting, and doing the interpreting of it all by means other than the liberal or conservative punditry channels.

So although I was aware Trump was sending hundreds more ICE officers to Portland and was talking about sending in soldiers as well (which is now apparently happening), for me this was a news story that I was hearing alongside stories of the latest massacre of starving children in Gaza City, the prospect of a war starting between Russia and NATO, and the worsening housing crisis up and down the west coast and so many other places.

For many people, though, Trump's latest pronouncements involving sending troops to Portland to protect ICE, along with angry protests and police brutality in front of the ICE building, have completely dominated their news cycle, as well as their social media.

My social media is still largely a Gaza solidarity echo chamber. But looking at the hash tags and such, I see what many people are probably seeing much more of, and the many "are you alright?" messages I've received from people from all over the world over the past couple days make much more sense.

Looking at the memes about Portland people are sharing from various perspectives, like social media posts generally, they're almost always extremely simplistic and inaccurate, wherever on the political spectrum they're coming from.

From the right I see a lot of characterizations of Portland as a dangerous, dysfunctional place. From the liberals I see lots of stuff about how Portland and the whole region is paradise on Earth.

The major social media platforms all use algorithms that promote sensationalistic content, regardless of its accuracy. Content that provokes an emotional reaction. So we are of course seeing lots of footage of the incidents of police violence in front of the ICE building, and not the hundreds of thousands of people peacefully sleeping in quiet, tree-lined neighborhoods in much of the rest of the city.

Whether it's the media or social media, there is so much incentive to show those same scenes of violence over and over again, along with the "Portland paradise" ones -- with commentary, of course. The reality is not especially reflected in this kind of coverage, however.

War zone vs. paradise

By the standards of the EU, China, or Japan, every major city in the USA is a war zone. More people were killed by gun violence in Portland last year than in the entire nation of Germany.

But beyond the violence is the poverty. The poverty is what makes every major city on the west coast look like a refugee camp, but one without basic amenities.

The poverty is often very relative. It's increasingly very easy to be too poor to afford housing in this city. My own family's rent has tripled since we moved into this apartment building 18 years ago. We are far from alone in that. Those lacking in the kind of increased resources we have managed to come up with to stay housed in this city are living on the streets all around us.

I'm actually not sure how those people making the "Portland paradise" videos even managed to find such panoramic scenes of beauty to film around the waterfront area without getting lots of tents and people lying on the sidewalks in the picture.

Across the US since 2020 the rents have increased by 30%, I believe is the statistic. Portland has easily kept up with that trend, and rents have gone from high to unaffordable, for so many. The disruption in the social fabric of the city has been easy to observe, with family after family leaving our neighborhood (inner Southeast) and moving to the exurbs and beyond, while others increasingly move into the vehicles and tents that line our streets.

The housing crisis and accompanying social disruption in Portland and across Oregon, Washington, California and beyond lies squarely on the shoulders of the Democratic Party leadership -- these are basically one-party states, and have long been thus. The opportunity to regulate the housing market has been there the whole time, the examples of how this can be done are staring us in the face in various other countries that do housing so much better than we do, but everything just continues to deteriorate, with all the campaign promises made by Democratic Party leaders year after year continually broken, lofty goals never met.

So, although large parts of the city do resemble a refugee camp, very much including much of downtown, it probably doesn't resemble a war zone, at least by Texas standards. To the extent that it does, this has very little to do with Antifa, and a whole lot to do with the housing crisis, and the inability of every level of government to end it.

In any case, if you focus your attention exclusively within a two-block radius of the ICE building, it certainly looks like a scene where someone could get killed any minute now, just like the Justice center did in 2020, where people were, in fact, both maimed and killed -- before, during, and after Trump administration #1 sent federal goons to Portland back then.

The Antifa equation

As much as I'm seeing the paradise vs. war zone memes, I'm seeing the familiar virtuous protester vs. criminal rioter memes all over the place.

As is so strongly encouraged by the medium of social media, the memes are usually very simplistic, with many people going with the idea that "antifa" just means "antifascism," and downplaying the elements of violence or property destruction as rightwing propaganda. Other equally simplistic imagery seeks to portray anyone involved with protesting ICE as violent agents of chaos and destruction.

At various times and places, such as in Portland twenty years ago, protests would often involve art and music and other efforts to represent in inviting ways what people stood for. This tendency has all but disappeared in the modern era now, and when we're talking about what is happening now at the ICE building and what was going on five years ago at the Justice center, we're talking largely about a few dozen masked, black-clad young folks chanting slogans and shouting obscenities at the police, as well as in some cases mocking and trying hard to goad the police into attacking them.

Even having any kind of sustained presence of a few dozen people shouting at the police requires a huge amount of media and social media coverage. In 2020 what I discovered here in Portland was at least half of the folks involved with the protests were protest tourists, coming to the city because it was the place to go if you wanted to be in the center of the action, as portrayed by the blanket media/social media coverage what they called the racial justice movement was getting then. Many had not been in town more than a couple of months.

The way the more liberal ends of the media were portraying protests in 2020, if some windows got smashed and some dumpsters got burned, that was just par for the course. They'd call that a "mostly peaceful" protest back then.

Once upon a time, the element among those inclined to be protesting in the streets in these particular sorts of ways did not represent a majority view among protesters, and could often be reasoned with to adopt different tactics that we all agreed upon. With the age of social media this changed, and what became known as "diversity of tactics" became a pretty dominant idea. Diversity of tactics means if someone wants to throw rocks at the police or burn dumpsters while other people are trying to do nonviolent civil disobedience, that's OK, it's diversity, so it's good. Who's against diversity?

With this idea becoming prevalent and being backed up by groups like Rose City Antifa here in Portland, protest movements that crop up tend to get stifled pretty quickly by this atmosphere, where you never know if some yahoo thinks that the event you're organizing needs a smashed window and a burning dumpster to add to the scene. Under this kind of influence, protesting against authors or journalists some people don't like seemed to become much more commonplace here than protesting against greedy corporations or authoritarian or imperialist policies of the government.

So we are then left with the idea that being a protester means dressing in black, often wearing a mask, blocking the streets and yelling obscenities at police. And then we are left with people feeling like they either need to say, with feeling, "I am Antifa, too," and perhaps even go and engage with this kind of protest themselves, or people denouncing Antifa for being terrorists.

Forward motion

What we used to know in this country, and what most of the rest of the world still knows now, is for a social movement to grow and have impact, it needs to be a very inviting one, with a vision for the alternative society it seeks to manifest. It needs to communicate well, which means it needs to be a very artistic, musical movement, and it needs to be the sort of movement that will genuinely cause the opposition to question what they're doing, in a way that shouting obscenities at cops will never do.

If we could manage to form a movement like that, that doesn't get bogged down by provocateurs or other factors, then we'd need to grapple with basic questions, and have answers for them that aren't just oppositional in nature. For example, many of the folks protesting at the ICE building really do believe in what the rightwingers say they believe in when it comes to taking down national borders. The liberal politicians running the city would rather avoid the issue by not enforcing immigration laws.

Now would seem to be the time for a third position to come to the fore from somewhere that is rooted in some way in practical thinking rather than just moralizing, involving people who understand how immigration has always been used as a tool by the capitalists to divide the working class in this and other countries, just as creating an underclass of super-exploited undocumented workers has been a divide-and-conquer tactic, and a very profitable one.

Rounding up the undocumented workers and deporting them all, along with whoever else the administration decides to target, is yet another tried-and-true, longstanding divide-and-conquer tactic that goes back to the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Anarchist Exclusion Act, and the Palmer Raids.

All we're going to get from the vast majority of the media and social media most of us are regularly exposed to is more black-and-white thinking -- immigration good or immigration bad, Antifa good or Antifa bad, pick your strawman and hold on tight.

How we form the kind of movement that can communicate effectively, that harnesses art and music effectively, that can grow instead of eat itself alive, is a complicated question, especially in the face of obstacles like corporate and (anti-)social media being so prevalent and powerful. But the first step in the process of changing the paradigm, presumably, is understanding what paradigm we're operating with right now, and the one we're operating with now, it seems to me, is broken.

Some Thoughts on Technology, Artists, and Society, in the Past, Present and Future

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 16:38:00 +0000

We're at another one of those seismic moments in technological development as it applies to the arts and most other things.

We're at another one of those crossroads, it's very palpable. Feels like a good time for a little rumination on the overview and background to this situation, specifically with regards to technology, society (or capitalism) and the arts.

Looking back at the past century, since the rise of radio in the 1920's, especially at this kind of distance in time, it's pretty easy to see that there have been pros and cons to the technology, and all the others that have come along as well. More pros or more cons depending on how it's all used, but also just pros and cons of the technologies themselves.

Radio may have contributed to broadening the scope of music many listeners out there were exposed to, but for working musicians as well as for folks who liked to gather and play music together as a regular pastime, the introduction of radio into society was tremendously disruptive, and overwhelmingly negative. Instead of playing music together, we listened to the stars on the radio do that. Instead of having a live musician playing in a venue, we could turn on the radio.

The introduction of film and movie theaters, first silent and then with sound, had a similarly devastating impact on live theater.

Even without radio or film or TV being industries largely concentrated in a relative few gigantic corporate hands, the very nature of the mediums led to a more selective presentation of what was out there in the world. Even without all the corporate consolidation, these technologies were having their socially isolating and alienating effects, and their effects in terms of the loss of employment for so many people who used to be involved with one or another form of live entertainment, musical performance, theater, etc.

When radio and movies and record players all came around way back when, there were many eminent musicians and actors who were horrified by these developments and their implications, and who called for other artists not to participate in them. In the end, radio and movies and all the rest were all here to stay and became completely ubiquitous, and record companies worked out a deal with the radio stations to get paid royalties for airplay.

Lots of people didn't like the new technologies at all. They were seen as cheapening the experience of art, delivering bad quality sound and visuals, causing mass unemployment of so many artists, and having a generally alienating impact on society. But in the end an arrangement was made, at least with radio airplay, that allowed for the wealth resulting from all of this to be shared among copyright-holders of the music, rather than all of the profits going to the broadcasting corporations, as had initially been the case.

Big record companies as well as independent musicians also adapted to the new reality by recording music and selling records, and later tapes and CDs. Traveling vaudeville shows might have been long dead, the theaters didn't need orchestras anymore, and the bars didn't need pianists, but the musicians who could adapt to the new reality might at least sell recordings and perhaps compensate for their losses, or make some extra money, depending.

Live performance always continued, and continues, to happen, and for various reasons I'm sure it always will, as long as there are still people. But each new technological development seems to lead to further concentration of wealth at the top, and to working artists generally facing more challenges than benefits from each new phase.

Cable TV, home video, and then the internet, and cell phones, all served to encourage people to stay in their little bubbles, and to engage in less collective, live activity out in the world. They led altogether to more TV shows being filmed and actors and musicians and others being employed to create all that content, but for those artists who didn't move to Los Angeles or London, our worlds have just seemed in so many ways to continually shrink further over time, as the rents rise and the venues close.

With the dominance of music streaming platforms giving anyone with an internet connection free access to virtually all the world's recorded music, suddenly the basis for survival for millions of artists -- CD sales -- vanished, pretty much overnight for many, including for me. According to what I've read about the available data, this period was seismic for the music industry, probably in much the same way as it was for working artists and so many others when radio stations starting cropping up all over the place a century ago.

But once again, as with the time when radio came around, the time of the music streaming platforms playing music entirely for free ended, and the platforms that became dominant were the ones that paid some nominal amount to the copyright-holders to play our music.

For so many years I felt nothing but resentful about how this process had taken place, how these companies could just stop charging a monthly fee for the content, and make it all free. How they could only do this by lowering the payout amount dramatically as they grew more dominant.

But now, of course, for anyone much younger than me, selling hundreds of CDs in a given month is a thing of fantasy, and those of us making a few hundred dollars a month from streaming royalties are considered highly accomplished.

There have been many artists who have pulled their catalogs from Spotify for one reason or another, generally very good ones. In protest against Spotify's low payout rate, in protest against Spotify's unilateral decision to pull the rug out from under the music industry overnight with the introduction of their free tier, in protest against Spotify's spending priorities. I have never seriously entertained the idea of taking my content off of Spotify. After already having my career dramatically undermined by their corporate practices 12 years ago, the idea of abdicating the money they send me every month and thus punishing myself further in order to make a point just doesn't make enough sense.

Now we're at another one of those seismic moments along the lines of moments like the advent of radio, or of the internet, or of Spotify's free tier. Of the few working artists who survived all of that and are still on the tax rolls, a whole bunch of them are writing and recording jingles for commercials and soundtracks for TV shows, or they're licensing their music for such purposes.

It seems very obvious that the rise of the AI-driven music generation platforms will drastically reduce the numbers of artists involved with any of that content creation. The ranks of session musicians will shrink to a relative handful. If it seemed very few people were taking up the project of learning how to play a musical instrument before, that tendency more and more in the direction of karaoke or whatever we're calling it these days will grow.

We live in a very dystopic situation, under the rule of massive corporations that have a stranglehold on both of our ruling parties here in the US. These corporations are not being effectively regulated, to say the least. In any case, over time, although radio devastated live performance a century ago, at least the broadcasters eventually had to start paying some royalties. Later, although the free corporate streaming platforms similarly devastated the way so many independent musicians around the world had previously survived, eventually they started paying streaming royalties, to sort of make up for some of the losses for some of the musicians.

At this juncture I feel compelled to say very earnestly that if there were a way to somehow banish the AI music generating platforms from existence, this should be done. I would also like to see all the music streaming platforms be legally required to pay 1 cent per song streamed, which would immediately cause them all to re-erect those paywalls that came down 12 years ago.

What at least might be realistic, because it would serve various corporate interests, would be for the music streaming platforms as well as the music generating platforms to pay more for the content they're using. But to consider that any kind of victory for artists would be very sad. Because what these AI music generating platforms are going to do to the arts at every level seems really impossible to get my head around, but it will be absolutely devastating. It's going to be huge, like as huge as ChatGPT has been in the world of business, programming, or academia.

The idea of making any of this technology go back in the bottle seems very impossible. What seems possible, at least, if we lived in a functional democracy or had a big enough social movement to make such demands, is regulating the technology, controlling who profits from it, and having a system in place for making it feasible for a society to have musicians, journalists, and painters in it, even if they're all doing things that could otherwise be replaced by AI.

In the absence of such a regulatory framework, in the context of the current Big Tech free-for-all, artists are faced with the choice of using these new AI tools, or not using them. There are lots of good reasons not to use them. But I know so many people out there in the world who aren't artists, and for so many of them, using ChatGPT in order to be more productive is becoming the norm, and very much a required norm. I'm appalled to be saying it, but I have no doubt that this same phenomenon will soon apply to the arts as well with platforms like Suno, across the board, especially in relatively non-regulated environments like the US.

This latest development once more underscores the necessity of establishing a society where profits from such technologies are shared equitably, rather than hoarded among the trillionaires. These technologies are increasingly derived from the basic elements of what makes humans human, such as music, art, and reasoning. Their existence in their current form, with Big Tech calling the shots and making the money, represents an ongoing theft in progress.

If you might be among those inclined to harbor resentment towards artists who don't pull their material from Spotify, or artists that use AI music generation tools, you'd certainly be part of a long and vibrant tradition of sensible people wanting to stop the horrors of what some call progress, by attacking its victims. I would submit, however, that it is the rules of the game that need to change, and the rules won't change whether you're among the decreasing numbers of people who are avoiding the use of these technologies, or resenting anyone else for using them, but only through a whole lot of collective action.

In the meantime, I don't know about you, but I'm going to learn how to be a better prompt engineer.

From Songwriter to Prompt Engineer

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:03:00 +0000

Up until the advent of Artificial General Intelligence, there will at least be prompt engineers.

I'm going to come up for air long enough to share a little about the rabbit hole I've been stuck in for the past few weeks. Then I'll probably dive back in there for more, for better or for worse.

We all hear the news stories about how anyone who does work that isn't physical work will soon be replaced by AI. Many of us, when we hear such a story, are apt to be dismissive about it, remember something we experienced with an AI chatbot hallucinating, and get on with life. As many of us try and fail to find work as software engineers, studio musicians, paralegals, writers, and a rapidly growing number of other professions, we learn to take this AI stuff more seriously.

I did play with the chatbots since ChatGPT swept the news, and found their ability to write good lyrics was very limited. But after hearing what a friend in Australia was doing with Suno, the leading AI music platform, I was eventually compelled to spend $10 for a month's worth of membership and play with it myself.

I want to say upfront that me playing with Suno is not meant to be an acceptance of the model of development here. As with all the other massively popular platforms that are so often part of the oligarchy of Big Tech, the notion that profits derived from various methods of monetizing our common cultural heritage should all continue to be funneled upwards into the coffers of the trillionaires is an outrageous one. Having said that, however, I still have my music on all of Big Tech's streaming platforms that haven't taken it down, and I don't think I'd help solve any problems by withdrawing my participation in the method through which most people in the world now get their music (those streaming platforms).

Same rationale goes for Suno. It exists, and it's being used on a widespread basis. If it gets sued out of existence for copyright infringement and all the songs anyone has created using the platform get stricken from the web, I will celebrate. Given the trends with Big Tech and what Big Tech wants over the course of my lifetime, however, I suspect Suno and so much more like it are not only here to stay, they represent the future.

In the future -- the near future, I suspect -- the most important jobs in society of the few that remain will be prompt engineers and consultants. Prompt engineers mostly, but we'll always need some consultants to figure out what the prompt engineers did wrong, when that happens, especially when it comes to professions more important than, say, composers, musicians, or directors.

Ethics aside, however, the experience of obsessively writing lyrics and feeding prompts into Suno to create songs together has been intense. Intensely exhilarating as well as intensely shocking. I feel like I'm just going through life in a daze derived from the effort to reconcile what I'm experiencing here with what the near future of music and society is going to look like.

Over the past three weeks I've put out three full-length albums as a prompt engineer working with Suno. The song I'm sharing with this post is not on any of the albums. The albums are all sung in a woman's voice.

While I and I think most other artists don't have any ethical issues with someone of one gender writing songs to be sung by someone of another gender, the ease with which one can do that using Suno is fairly breathtaking. Much easier than hiring a singer, let alone a band. Also far easier than taking hormone blockers, or even putting on makeup. In the "voice" field you just click "female."

For anyone who has ever recorded an album in a studio with highly-skilled musicians, engineers and producers, and agonized over choices about whether we should hire that keyboard player or whether we should hire that drummer, when what you really wanted was both, being able to come up with directives like "newgrass chanson skiffle with a modal sound" and see what Suno comes up with is thrilling in a way that's hard to describe.

It's as appalling as it is thrilling, however. As with other prompt engineers, I imagine, the idea of taking credit for these musical creations just because I played the role of writing lyrics, giving a few musical parameters, and rejecting the first fifteen efforts Suno came up with, doesn't feel right. It feels like Suno is doing most of the work.

As a songwriter, for decades I have been writing lyrics, which I'd say are still better-crafted than what AI tends to come up with, or, for that matter, what the music industry hit machine comes up with most of the time. And for decades I have taken those lyrics and worked hard to come up with effective music to make the song a song, and make it do what a good song can do. I've gone through this process thousands of times.

If I'm being honest, and not trying to play it cool, I would then have to say that what comes off as fairly inventive, natural-sounding, quality music, recorded at extremely high fidelity, is what Suno does to lyrics I feed it, within seconds. At least as interesting as anything I would have come up with -- but then it doesn't just come up with the idea, it spits out the whole recording, including of course natural-sounding vocals.

I go back and forth between mourning the impending AI-ification of everything, and being enthralled with the ease with which I have created a whole new musical identity. The simple fact of her having a woman's voice -- or being a woman, as we may phrase it -- keeps on giving me ideas for songs to write that wouldn't seem to have the desired impact if sung in a man's voice. More liberating still is knowing from the outset that I'm not at all confined by what instruments I play, or anything like that -- you want newgrass chanson skiffle, with a tuba? No problem.

Judging from what happened when Angry Birds came out -- I lost three months of my life -- I'll probably recover from my Suno addiction eventually, and start doing more useful things. In the meantime, my apologies if you're being overrun by AI slop, and whatever role I may currently be playing in that phenomenon.

Bread and Circus During Genocide

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 17:40:00 +0000

Party in the USA.

Decades from now, when people wonder what it was like to be alive during the years when our government was funding and arming Israel as its military carried out the Final Solution, annexing the rest of the West Bank and completely annihilating Gaza and all of its inhabitants, half of whom used to be children, what will they imagine? Will they imagine we all knew what was happening, or that most of us basically didn't? Will they imagine large numbers of people were engaged in trying to do something, or that we were mostly being silent and keeping our heads down?

When I look at my Instagram feed I'm seeing huge marches for Palestine along with prominent, prime-time displays of solidarity in huge soccer stadiums in various countries, gigantic Palestinian flags formed by huge crowds of soccer fans, "death death to the IDF" sung by tens of thousands of festival-goers at festivals where musicians make bold statements and face all kinds of legal and other negative consequences as a result.

But here in Portland, Oregon, a city that is sometimes considered to be one of the hubs of radicalism in the US, what was it like during the summer of 2025, in the fifth month since Israel stopped allowing virtually any food or water or anything else into the Gaza Strip, as millions were facing imminent death by starvation, as Gaza City was being relentlessly bombed, as its inhabitants fled to hospitals that were then being bombed, all with US-made fighter jets and US-made bunker-busters?

I don't know what might be out there on Instagram that could give people the impression anything is happening in Portland to oppose this genocide, or that anyone around here is even trying to raise awareness about it. But as I walk all over the city, it bears no resemblance to what most every neighborhood looked like, say, in 2020, when some variety of "Black Lives Matter" could be found in every direction, wherever you looked. Whereas in 2020 some kind of statement against police brutality and racism could be found on approximately one in every three front yards, a Palestinian flag or a statement in solidarity with those being genocided right now can be found on maybe one in a thousand front yards today.

Of course, putting a sign in your front yard doesn't stop police brutality or a war against a population somewhere far away. But speaking out is probably where a lot of movements get started -- people refusing to self-censor, despite the potential consequences. This can be done on an individual basis, with a sign in the yard, but it can be done in a much more powerful and media-savvy way through collective action, at a major event that attracts lots of people and/or lots of media. This is why we see the footage of the football supporters (as they call soccer fans in modern-day British English) at matches with huge Palestinian flags and other statements going out to the stadium and the world beyond. This is why artists like Kneecap and Bob Vylan get thousands of folks at a festival singing against genocide together. It gets out there.

A friend who moved to Portland a few years ago from DC eventually got so tired of just about nothing local happening in opposition to this genocide that we're watching on Al-Jazeera every day, that she started up a weekly vigil in town, every Sunday at noon at 12th and Hawthorne SE. At that vigil both times it's been held so far, there was a woman from the nearby town of Happy Valley who was recounting to me her many efforts to try to bring the genocide to the attention of anyone at the very popular and well-attended Pickathon festival that happens in Happy Valley every summer. At every turn she was told that no one from the stage would be making any announcements about any upcoming events related to opposing this genocide. The theme of the festival this summer was "love is the answer." To what? Who knows. Love is the answer and the Palestinian children may burn, unmentioned, unacknowledged.

The day I got back from touring Australia at the end of July and encountering another large, popular event that happens in Portland every summer was another of those cases in point. The Naked Bike Ride attracts many thousands of participants, I believe upwards of 10,000. The folks constructing their various wildly-decorated bicycles have lots of leeway to make a statement, or to work together with other folks to collectively make a statement. Although this was the first Naked Bike Ride I had ever witnessed, after living in Portland for 18 years, I'm quite certain that five years ago you probably might have seen something about Black lives mattering in the course of the very visible artistic and cultural statement that this event represents. Among the hundreds of bicyclists I watched pass by with my children that evening, I didn't see a single Palestinian flag.

The experience I had last weekend attending my first-ever major league soccer match was identical, sadly. A friend visiting Portland from the east coast got us both tickets to the game on Saturday night, as well as guest passes to the Timbers Army fan club just down the street from the stadium, where the most hardcore Timbers fans hang out, drink beer, and watch soccer games on big TV screens that are happening somewhere else.

Aside from seeing the footage on Instagram and other places of the statements made to the world by fan clubs of soccer teams in places like Scotland, Ireland, Italy and many other countries, I have many friends who are involved with those sorts of groups organizing those sorts of coordinated stadium actions in that part of the world. Over the years I've heard that the vibe at Timbers games can be like that, too. I believe Black lives mattered to Timbers fans five years ago, in fact.

Everybody was friendly in the Timbers Army warehouse and in the stadium. Very easy to imagine they'd all rather just get along and avoid controversial subjects. There was no question that most of the crowd came from the suburbs. My guess is among those who have opinions on political matters, opinions on what's happening in the Middle East right now probably vary as much as opinions on whether Trump's immigration policies are good or bad.

In the Timbers Army warehouse it was mostly local beer being served, no cans of Budweiser to be seen. Most people were dressed in green jerseys, many adorned with logos of sponsoring corporations. Scattered among the green-clad crowd were the occasional older, usually bearded man who wore a vest covered in patches. Some of the guys with these vests were involved with directing the chants and such inside the stadium later, I observed.

In the warehouse there was a banner on the wall in support of trans rights. In the gift shop there was a t-shirt that derided TERFs, and there were patches and other items that included the popular anti-fascist symbol with the three arrows.

Any notion that supporters of the Timbers had any desire to make anti-fascist statements against actually existing fascist, genocidal regimes carrying out an actual, ongoing genocide of an entire civilian population trapped within a walled ghetto right now as we watch this soccer game was completely absent, either in the warehouse or in the stadium. Among all the thousands of people I walked past in that stadium, I was certainly the only one wearing a t-shirt with a Palestinian flag on it, and there wasn't a single reaction from anyone about it either, of any kind. Live and let live, I suppose -- or live and let die, either way.

During the game the chant-leaders led chants of all sorts, a couple of which seemed to include some kind of vague anti-fascist reference. When the Timbers scored a goal, the stadium was filled with acrid green smoke, which was fun. But if anyone thought about challenging the rules of the Major League Soccer organization and using this big forum to speak out against this genocide we're all financing, no one acted on such thoughts last weekend.

On Sunday, at the second in our new series of little vigils at 12th and Hawthorne, as with the previous Sunday, many passing drivers beeped supportively at our "free Palestine" banner and "stop arming Israel" sign. Only one driver sped up aggressively as he passed us, telling us of his disapproval that way, in a manner that only really works because he wasn't driving an electric.

Among the thousands of cars that passed us during the course of the vigil was a convoy of many dozens of cars that were all decked out with signs in opposition to Trump, his immigration policies, and opposition to rule of the billionaires, with the "No Kings" theme dominant.

As with the other passing cars, some of them took the flyers folks were handing out, others didn't. The "No Kings" convoy was beeping incessantly as they went everywhere anyway, so it was impossible to tell if they were beeping in support of Palestine or just beeping, but any sign that they opposed Trump's support of Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people was completely absent in this convoy, with not a Palestinian flag to be seen, or anything else like that. Not even a damn watermelon.

The silence from all of these Good Americans is deafening.

Mental Health, Music, Community, and the Resistance

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 21:56:00 +0000

What's one thing that just about all of us can do right now? I've got answers.

A large percentage of the people I know are losing their minds. The ones I know who aren't losing their minds somehow or other manage not to follow world news at all. Many of them are children. Whether you're an adult or a child, though, it's apparently possible to have no idea what's going on in the world outside of your suburban neighborhood, I can say from plenty of direct experience with my fellow residents of Oregon.

But those of us who do follow the news are generally not doing well, in terms of mental health. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about ways to deal with that that might actually help everybody. I know something that works very well for me and a lot of other people around the world. If you have access to a large living room wherever in the world you are, this is probably something you can do, too: host a house concert. Then do it again, at whatever kind of interval works for you.

If you're still with me, I'll explain how this sort of thing, if widespread, can potentially cure depression and loneliness for a lot of people while simultaneously jumpstarting the movement.

Yesterday I was feeling immensely stressed from reading about Israeli soldiers driving bulldozers to bury alive starving, wounded children in Gaza, and other such stories, of the sort that so many of us read or listen to every day for the past two years or so at least.

I was sitting in my living room playing the mandola to try to calm down and not randomly snap at one of my children, when I had the thought, "I'm at my wit's end." Which I realized was a good opening line for another song about the genocide of the Palestinian people that Israel embarked upon in October, 2023, so I wrote one -- my 64th song on that awful subject. After I wrote, recorded, and broadcast the song, I felt significantly better.

Then, so many people who heard the song on one of the platforms I put it out on commented or wrote me to say that this is exactly how they've been feeling for so long now, for the same reasons, and hearing the song helped them cope a little bit better.

This is how a good song, and music generally, works. The sharing of the song and of the ideas contained within it feels good for the songwriter as well as for the listener -- even though the song may be about feeling despondent and helpless in the face of an ongoing, livestreamed genocide.

OK, I can hear some readers thinking, it's good if people don't feel like jumping off of the nearest tall building, but that's not going to halt this genocide. What we need are thousands of people shutting down all the ports and stopping the arms exports to Israel, stuff like that.

So, let's explore that thought a little. Shutting down the ports would require the kind of social movement involving tens of thousands of people prepared to commit civil disobedience and go to prison for it. We don't seem to have that kind of movement in the US -- or for that matter, in any of the other countries I regularly visit.

What we have in the US, instead, are fewer and smaller demos over the years, with more and more people I meet feeling despondent, and shutting themselves off as best as they can, to get on with life, in the face of coming to the conclusion that under the circumstances there's no other way forward. I know so many people who went to protests at the beginning, who now can't bear listening to the news or going to the few, straggly little protests that are occasionally happening in some cities.

What these many dropouts from the movement needed was community. Not just protests or other actions, but protests and other actions that involve collective recognition that we're all in terrible pain as we watch what is happening, and we desperately want to do something about it, collectively. Instead they went to rallies where they got yelled at from the stage for not doing enough to stop the genocide, and then they went home.

What they needed -- what would have made the protests potentially grow instead of shrink and disappear -- was not to hear about how inadequate we all are, but to hear about what we are collectively going to do, together, as a movement. A movement that recognizes the vital importance and value of everyone who comes out into the streets, while at the same time one that communicates the urgency of this genocidal moment.

We won't build a movement by shouting at each other about how we're suffering more than you are and nobody else can understand Palestinian suffering, or any other versions of identitarian nonsense with no bearing on reality. In reality, we all can feel the horror of what is going on -- that's both the problem here, and the solution. Pretending it's not the case is profoundly demoralizing for so many people who are in pain that is deep. How deep? That matters about as much as the length of your middle finger does.

If it is the case, as I would argue, that music and community could have kept all those people in the fold who are now being hermits and avoiding the news to try to keep what's left of their mental health intact, and if it is the case that music and community could also bring so many more people into the movement, to grow these currently unimpressive ranks, then we obviously need more music and community.

How do we build that? And more specifically, what can one person do to contribute towards that end?

I would say the most universally accessible kind of initiative, that can potentially involve most individuals in most societies who want to do something, is host a house concert in your living room.

Of course you can just bring people together for other activities, and that's great, too. If like-minded people gather together for conversation and food, that in itself is a very good thing, that helps sustain the mental health of everyone, as it at the same time helps keep people engaged -- socially, with each other, and potentially also with activism.

But if you host a pot luck dinner followed by a house concert -- which has long been the common procedure in the folk and punk music scenes in the US and Canada in particular -- at least if the artist or band is up to snuff, this is what will be the most optimal for fostering that sense of community and collective engagement that we all so deeply require in order to keep going.

In many parts of the world this sense of community is ubiquitous, and it's amazing to visit those places. In the US and some other countries, though, this sense of community desperately needs a whole lot of rekindling. So many of us who are horrified by what's going on in Gaza, within the US, and elsewhere on the planet are isolated, atomized, depressed, lonely, and disengaged. We need to find each other, to bring us all together. One living room at a time seems like a good, realistic place to start. It doesn't need to be a small start either -- there are a lot of living rooms in the world, along with a lot of potential audiences, as well as a lot of good artists.

Wherever you live, there are brilliant artists you can hook up with to work out the details. Artists who are used to playing for a couple dozen people in a living room, who are already putting your feelings into songs, are all over the place. If you're reading this, you probably know that I'm one of them. But there are many others, and I may be able to introduce you to them, depending on where you live.

In conclusion: don't be disengaged, and don't jump off a bridge. Instead, organize a house concert. It'll make you feel better, it'll make your guests feel better, it'll make a musician feel better, and probably most importantly, it'll make more of us more ready for building a real, sustainable resistance. Gotta start somewhere, and if we overlook the crucial role of the arts and community in the process, this plane will remain grounded.

Five Pillars for Growing Social Movements

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 17:58:00 +0000

What do we need? Historical knowledge, vision, optimism, organization, and deep culture. When do we need it? Always.

For a very long time, whenever a social movement gets off the ground anywhere in the world that I've seen up close, and in pretty much all the ones I've read about as well, there has been an ongoing conflict between forces within the movement that are oriented towards effectively building it and actually reaching the goals it is aiming for, and forces that are more interested in other things, like being morally superior to others, winning arguments, rising through the ranks of the leadership, or incessantly criticizing comrades for not being dedicated enough to the cause.

What has seemed particularly evident since the Israeli-American genocide against the people of Gaza began, and then even more since the latest election of Trump, is that there are a lot of people out there trying to organize things who are desperately frustrated with the fact that despite their herculean efforts, the protests they're organizing generally keep getting smaller, and the vast majority of society seems to be disinterested, or at least they're not coming to the protests.

At the vast majority of protests I have been to in the US as well as some other countries in recent years, crowds are being berated by speakers who are at their wit's end with all the lack of serious opposition to the genocide, or to Trump's many horrible initiatives, and we're being told by people who are almost literally pulling their hair out while shouting with exasperation, that there are children being slaughtered in Gaza every day, and all kinds of people being abducted from streets of US cities and sent to gulags in Florida, and they're asking with an accusatory tone, why are there so few of us? Why are we not mobilizing the way we should be? Why is society not more outraged? What's wrong with us?

These are, of course, extremely good questions, that really need to be answered. And there are answers, I would humbly submit. There are answers that are very obvious ones, in fact -- obvious to many people in many places at many times in history, but not obvious to a lot of people in the English-speaking world these days, I can't help but notice, repeatedly.

It is, of course, tremendously discouraging that US society generally, the more dominant tendencies within what we might call the contemporary US left, as well as the dominant tendencies within the sector of US society that would self-identify as liberals, are currently in such a paralyzed state, so apparently incapable of rising to the current moment, at least according to my estimation and that of so many people speaking at rallies I go to. Their solution, generally, is to keep digging the hole they're in, and hope if they dig harder, the outcome will change.

I'll offer different solutions, and I'll contrast my solutions with the solutions that seem to be the agreed-upon ones in recent years that have so persistently failed to deliver the goods. I offer these thoughts with humility but with a lot of experience in the world of social movements, in many different countries. I offer these thoughts not to demonstrate my superior knowledge of anything, nor because I take pleasure in criticizing dominant trends in society and on the left, nor because I enjoy being called all kinds of wild names as a result of sharing my thoughts publicly. I offer these thoughts because I, too, am driven daily close to madness by witnessing the horrors that are happening, and bearing witness to my society's overwhelmingly passive response to it all, and I can only hope that I might be able to offer some analysis that might make one of those proverbial light bulbs flash above the heads of a few people out there.

There are so many other things to be said about how to grow a social movement, but I would say there are five pillars that pretty much all successful movements need to be standing on, in order to have any chance of getting very far at all. I'd categorize those pillars as historical knowledge, vision, optimism, organization, and deep culture.

Historical knowledge

Knowledge of history makes the world a four-dimensional place. Without history, the world only has three dimensions.

That crucial fourth dimension of reality is a battleground, with many different contestants. We can learn history as told by the rich people in charge, we can learn about history from the vantage point of the outcomes of various wars, we can learn mainly about the most horrible things that people have done to each other, or we can focus on the heroic stuff. We can learn a version of events that says that every social movement prior to our times has somehow failed and therefore isn't worth knowing anything about, or we can learn about how social movements succeed in other parts of the world, and about the victories that have been won by social movements in the past in the US, and we can build on that knowledge -- but only once we have it.

A crucial aspect of history to understand in the first place is that it is a battleground, and one with far more than two contestants or versions of reality to contend with. There are many different realities to focus on, or to ignore, and many different lies to spread, for different reasons. One lie is past movements have been ineffective and aren't worth paying attention to. Another lie is that recent movements have been bigger than ever before, which is comparing apples with oranges, given the media-driven nature of social movements in recent decades, which is a new phenomenon in my lifetime. Another lie is US history is full of massacres but lacking in powerful, inclusive social movements and great solidarity.

The biggest lies are lies of omission. If nobody told you that there was a thing called Cointelpro, you don't know about it. There's no need to tell us about things we don't know about, if it's much more convenient for the ruling class that we remain ignorant. But some of us are armed with the historical knowledge of the incontrovertible fact that the main purpose of the FBI, from its inception in 1908 right up until 1971, was to undermine, misdirect, and destroy the US left, by any means necessary. Those of us armed with this knowledge are also armed with the knowledge that there is no doubt Cointelpro didn't stop in 1971, and that the sorts of activities involved have also long involved many other agencies in addition to the FBI, such as the CIA, and local police department Red Squads across the country. Those lacking this context for reality are basically the human equivalent of a deer in the headlights.

Reality-based history will tell us that society and the left have been actively targeted in so many ways, in order to spread division and confusion, and knowing about this reality, we can clearly see that in so many ways, these sorts of efforts have been working exceptionally well in the age of social media. Reality-based history will also instruct us that past social movements, and social movements existing now in various parts of the world, developed strategies for minimizing the impact of efforts at division coming from mass media or secret police. But if we don't know about these strategies and how they were used in the past or how they are used elsewhere in the world, how likely are we to come up with all these good ideas by ourselves? Much less, I would postulate.

Knowledge of history teaches us that social movements that grow and become seriously threatening to the status quo share in common certain characteristics. The ones that collapse can do so for many reasons, but some of those persistent reasons are when they lack these characteristics, and thus have no solid foundation to stand on.

Vision

My understanding of history and my observation over the past several decades of traveling tell me that the social movements that really capture the imagination of large numbers of people who keep coming out into the streets and otherwise being deeply engaged are movements that involve a radically different vision for how society should be organized.

Those with the historical knowledge to know which social movements have in the past caught the imagination of tremendous numbers of people in US society know that what was so enthralling for so many people about the syndicalist labor movement in the early 20th century, the socialist labor movement in the 1930's, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, or the Vietnam War-era antiwar movement of the 1960's and 1970's, included the fact that these movements involved so many leaders and participants who viscerally and broadly understood that they were in this movement to transform society, whether this transformation would involve the IWW's vision of One Big Union for the entire working class, or the 1930's vision of prosperity for the entire working class, or the Civil Rights' movement's vision of not just equality between people of with different hues of skin, but prosperity for the entire working class, or the 60's antiwar movement's vision of the total demilitarization of American society, starting with the hearts and minds of the youth.

Movements that have lacked this kind of vision, as I have observed them, have tended to be flashes in the pan -- they have some dramatic moments early on, with lots of appearance of potential, sometimes helped immensely by massive amounts of media attention and algorithmic attention on social media, but then they fizzle out and die within a few months. There are lots of different reasons for this, of course, but one consistent one is these movements are mostly oppositional in nature, seeking better treatment or conditions for a certain category of people, but without tying this goal to the broader goal of the transformation of society as a whole.

Oftentimes the messaging of these short-lived movements that involve any kind of vision call for other categories of people in US society to make sacrifices in order to provide for the betterment of another category of people. Those people who are supposed to make sacrifices for the betterment of others never seem to be the top 1% of society -- the abundantly obvious category that needs to make sacrifices, given that they literally own half of the wealth of the nation -- but other people defined by things like race and gender, which statistically makes no sense in terms of the 1% owning half the country, and is akin to fighting over crumbs. It's a very convenient form of logic if you're a rich liberal. It manages to hold all white people responsible for fixing racism in US society, while leaving the ruling class off the hook.

Hearing what passes for discourse from the stages at rallies I have attended, what passes for vision among the anti-Trump protesters is maybe now the Democratic Party will develop a backbone and start leading the resistance against authoritarianism. What passes for vision at some of the protests against Israel is all the descendants of settlers in all the countries that are largely or mostly populated by European settlers, immigrants and refugees should go back to Europe. Both of these visions are completely detached from historical reality, and are born out of a deep lack of understanding of the nature of class society. Without knowing the details, most people in the US sense that this kind of talk is nothing but wingnuttery, and they want nothing to do with it. The kind of vision that mobilizes people recognizes the nature of class society rather than pretending class and race are the same thing. And the kind of vision that mobilizes society is inclusive of the vast majority of people, not exclusive towards some large segment of the population -- as evidenced by the social movements today and historically that have had any staying power or impact.

Optimism

"The arc of history is long, but it leads towards justice," to paraphrase MLK, whether true or not, is the kind of sentiment that has a history of mobilizing millions of people, and keeping them mobilized for years and years.

By contrast, "do this because it's the right thing to do and if you don't do it you're a bad person" is a sentiment that has never mobilized a sustained mass movement.

Around the world today, and historically in the US, it's abundantly clear that for large numbers of people to mobilize and stay mobilized, there needs to be a widespread understanding that victory is possible. A widespread understanding that if we keep this up, we stand a good chance of actually winning. Whether it's a movement to bring back the subsidy for bread somewhere, or a movement to demilitarize the hearts and minds of a society, or a movement for universal suffrage, or universal prosperity, or whatever else, one of those key points at which a movement really catches on in a society is when a whole lot of people start to believe this might actually work, if we try hard enough, and if there are enough of us.

This kind of optimism contrasts completely with the attitude of so many recent and current groups in the US protesting inequality or empire or support for fascist regimes such as Israel. What you can hear coming from those sectors is much more along the lines of nihilism than optimism. The dominant sentiment is there are not enough of us, most people don't seem to care, but at least we're out on the streets doing something, unlike everybody else. At least we're on the right side of history. At least when we're old we can tell our grandchildren we tried.

This is the orientation of the White Rose collective in Germany, who held a little protest and then were executed for doing so. There were, by some estimate I came across, around 20,000 Germans who sacrificed their lives in such a noble fashion during the rule of the Nazis. They were all incredibly admirable people, no doubt, just as Aaron Bushnell was, and the actions of the White Rose collective, as with Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation at the gates of the Israeli Embassy, will probably be remembered for a long time still.

But even 20,000 Germans carrying out such self-sacrificial actions didn't spark a mass movement against fascism back in the day. This is because a tiny minority of society being extremely dedicated to a cause can make a stir, but if there's no conceivable road map to victory, no hope in doing anything other than making a point before you get yourself killed or imprisoned, then people don't mobilize. That's how we humans are, whether or not we like it. Most of us don't stick our necks out in order to make a point before getting our heads chopped off. Many of us are willing to take tremendous risks, but only if there's a chance that the risk will lead to some kind of tangible result.

Organization

To state the obvious, young people in the US today have grown up online, in an online world hegemonically dominated by massive tech corporations. At the same time, young people in the US today have also grown up in a polarized media environment, with Republican corporate media and Democratic corporate media, vying to spread different forms of lying propaganda. The same is true not just for people under the age of 30, but for anyone of any age who has only gotten involved with organizing the resistance in the past two decades.

The impact of social media has been devastating to the hearts and minds of America, leading to an unprecedented crisis of depression and loneliness. This reality is fairly widely reported these days. Less widely reported is the way social media has facilitated the atomization of society as well, and has been the major force in helping society un-learn how to organize, along with the new, polarized media landscape.

With the media paying attention to certain protest movements -- which for decades they never used to do, except very occasionally for one token story here or there -- people today have come to expect that if the protest is around certain issues during a certain kind of political environment, the media will cover your protests and will be the main way so many people hear about them.

Social media has done the same thing. People organizing anything these days now will very commonly announce from stages throughout the English-speaking world, "if you want to know what we're planning to do next, follow us on Instagram." In other words, follow us on this massive corporate platform that can ban us, shadowban us, or change their algorithms at a whim, and make us invisible. We give the Meta Corporation full control when we say "follow us on Instagram." "Follow us on Instagram," translated, says "we abdicate all control over our messaging, and whether or not you hear it in the future. We are powerless in the face of Big Tech, and we supplicate ourselves to Mark Zuckerberg."

I am not here blaming anyone for using modern technology or for never learning how real organizing works. We are all products of our environment. If you grow up in an environment where the algorithms seem to be working for you and what you're trying to organize, and in an environment where the corporate press sometimes does what appears to be a great job of promoting your next protest, then it's very easy to forget about the "old-fashioned" organizing methods, or to never learn about them in the first place.

But as many more people viscerally understood in the pre-social media era, which was also the era prior to the polarization of the corporate media -- when it moved from having the broad, and broadly false, pretense of objectivity, to abandoning that altogether in preference for blatant tribalism -- real organizing is not something you can outsource to social media algorithms or MSNBC.

If what you're organizing is a completely illegal action, that's one thing. But if what you're organizing is a social movement, then real organizing requires that we actually know each other. Real organizing is the opposite of what so many of us in broadly-defined left circles have come to know as "security culture." "Security culture" has been an unmitigated disaster for the left, and a massive gift to the FBI. The FBI already knows who we are, but as we attempt to organize on anonymous chat groups, going out into the public wearing masks so people supposedly can't identify us, we increasingly don't know each other, and this way we create the perfect environment for our continued reliance on the press and the algorithm, and our continued susceptibility to the rumor mill and the troll farm.

Deep culture

Lastly, what is probably the most important, and most overlooked, fifth pillar.

Around most of the world today, and throughout the US up until around the advent of social media, there was a broad understanding that any social movement needed a sense of community in order to sustain itself, and for a social movement to have a sense of community, it was necessary to have a deep association with culture -- with things like music, art, and food. A singing movement is a movement that says "come join us -- join the choir -- here we are, acting in unison, singing the same song together."

Authentic, grassroots social movements -- rather than their media-driven, simulated equivalents -- are easily recognizable around the world and throughout US history by the way they naturally mobilize the artists and musicians and writers in a given society, who collectively and individually and organically engage with the movement by communicating with us all through the incredibly powerful means of songs, giant puppets, murals, films, plays and poems that can break through the programming of a society's people and go straight to the hearts of so many of them, inspiring, educating, and sustaining them.

In societies where real mass movements are happening, the movements invariably have a "yes and" orientation. They naturally incorporate the best communicators into the movement, and use them -- the artists -- for all they're worth.

By contrast with this kind of movement, the algorithm- and media-driven movements that have characterized so much of the past two decades in the US seem intent on alienating all the people involved as soon as they arrive at a protest, with endless angry speeches, berating us all for our lack of engagement, interrupted by angry and often rhythmless chants that someone seems to have adapted from chants they heard in a Hollywood movie they saw about the 1960's. I have attended protest after protest for years in the US and other English-speaking countries where at just about no point in the proceedings on the stage was there any form of culture represented, where those in attendance are mostly being berated rather than inspired, where most of the crowd has left before the demo is over, feeling dejected.

Getting even angrier about the situation and shouting at us even more for our lack of engagement will not improve anything at all -- it will only dig the hole deeper. Whatever the way out may be, it will definitely involve abandoning all of that puritanical nonsense, and mobilizing people through communicating about the historical knowledge that leads us to the movement we're trying to organize, communicating the vision that this movement has for the future of our entire society, and communicating the optimism we have that by mobilizing people in pursuit of that vision, we can change the world, and make it a better place not just for some of us, but for all of us.

Those of us who are ready to undertake the journey of becoming effective movement-builders must all grapple with the question of how we got to where we are now, on many different fronts, and how we can overcome the obstacles that we now find around us.

We must ask how did we get to the point as a society where it is broadly accepted by many that all those hippies and commies didn't accomplish anything worth knowing much about, and the past basically is irrelevant, along with the elders?

We must ask how we got to the point where the best thing most of us ever think a protest might accomplish is that we had a chance to "speak truth to power"? How did so much of what we might call the activist element become convinced that our greatest achievement as a movement is what most radicals in previous generations would have dismissed as blatant tokenism?

We must ask how we arrived at this stage where the activist element in society is overwhelmingly alienated from our fellow human beings in the US and beyond. How did we develop the notion that there is any possible way to effectively organize anything without constantly recruiting among broader society, and constantly reaching out to people who aren't part of our social circles? How can we function if we're actively avoiding at least half of society for fear of feeling unsafe?

We must ask how we developed the notion that it's even remotely possible to organize a movement if we're not collecting names, email addresses, and phone numbers of lots and lots of people? What has led us to believe that there is any way to organize effectively when everyone's identity is secret and people are living in fear of being doxxed?

We must ask how the activist scene broadly has become completely disconnected from any sense of our culture. We lambast cultural appropriation and seem to have become paralyzed, perhaps unable to live with the subtleties inherent in the reality that art and music are inherently always cross-pollinating and will continue to do so, regardless of how racist or not racist society or the music industry is. How did we possibly get to the point where for one reason or another, we almost never have live music at protests? How did a whole series of majority-white social movements in a majority-white society develop the idea, in so many cases, that the best way to use culture is to avoid it completely if it means having a white musician on a stage? How is it possible for a social movement to shoot itself in the foot repeatedly so many times?

I don't think we'll find good answers to all of these questions in any one place. But what can be easily observed over my lifetime is that each of the five pillars I describe have been actively undermined by provocateurs, social media algorithms, corporate media coverage, and liberal politicians -- all elements actively and constantly fulfilling one of their most important roles, which clearly is to undermine and atomize the coherence of society and specifically the coherence of what we might still call the left.

By my observation, the gift that Big Tech's rise to almost completely dominate our communications landscape has given to those seeking to do the divisive work of endeavors like Cointelpro is beyond estimation. The impact on the culture of the left has been absolutely extraordinary, and overwhelmingly destructive.

I hate to end on such a downer of an observation, so I'll just add in closing that sometimes the darkest hour is just before the dawn.

Going Down Under

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 19:28:00 +0000

If it weren't for a very long flight, all the kangaroos and kookaburras, and everyone driving on the left side of the road, I might have thought I was still in the USA.

One of the most interesting things about traveling is how sometimes it can feel like you're traveling in time as well as in space. Like how going to Scandinavia involves so many reminders of what life must have been like, or more like, 60 years ago in the US, when the rich were still taxed, housing was affordable, and higher education at a state school was almost free.

A trip to Australia, by contrast, feels more like traveling back in time about 5 years. It feels more like leaving a place where the figurative skies are growing ever darker, and going to a place where the skies aren't as dark yet, but everything is pointing in the wrong direction, with what feels like the toxic influence of the US and US-driven social media environments spreading, and infecting that country, along with all the other English-speaking countries, and beyond, but especially them.

The ever-present and ever-relevant backdrop of my trip, which began just after the beginning of July and ended on July 26th, included the ongoing daily massacres conducted by Israel and the US against starving Palestinians in Gaza, the ever-expanding famine there, and the ever-increasing ranks of shrunken, starved children dying of malnutrition.

I left Portland after one massacre of starving children, and by the time I landed in Brisbane there had been another one, and it kept going like that, and keeps going like that.

I left Portland on July 3rd, and by the time I crossed the International Date Line it was July 5th. I completely missed July 4th, by a happy accident.

Life on Earth continued while I was missing Independence Day, however. By the time I landed in Brisbane I was hearing about scores of people being arrested in London and other cities in England for holding signs saying, "I Support Palestine Action, I Oppose Genocide."

The British Parliament had voted by an overwhelming margin to label Palestine Action a terrorist group, despite the fact that no one acting under the banner of Palestine Action has ever harmed another person, let alone killed one. But expressing verbal or written support for the group on a piece of paper had become an offense potentially imprisonable by 14 years.

Something else that had just happened before I left the US was a young man I know in California had his home raided by the FBI, which seemed to be entirely due to his involvement with antiwar organizing. What distinguishes him from so many other activists whose homes have been violently raided by police in recent months is that he is a white, US-born US citizen.

After a little jet lag recovery time and a beautiful drive down the coast from Brisbane, the first gig on the tour for Kamala and I was in Newcastle, New South Wales.

Newcastle is one of at least two cities in Australia that used to have the nickname of Steel City, in the days when there were lots of steel mills. The opening act was a brilliant old-time fiddle player whose stage name is Steel City Sue, in fact.

That first gig happened in a place called the Resistance Center, located in the center of town, across from a big university building.

There is a profound significance to the fact that the first gig, as well as the one in Brisbane, happened at one of these centers.

Resistance Center is the name used by the left political party most recently calling itself the Socialist Alliance. The Socialist Alliance is not a cultural organization, it is a left political party that runs candidates, prints a weekly paper, organizes protests and other events. But this party, both since and prior to its most recent name change, frequently makes use of its Resistance Centers to host touring musicians like me. In past tours, the numbers of venues I played in that were affiliated with the Socialist Alliance has been an even larger percentage -- long before my singing partner was a member of the party.

Left political parties -- and far beyond the left, political parties more generally, along with unions, corporations, and other organizations -- using their buildings and activating their networks to host musical events is, historically and around the world, completely normal. In fact, this kind of thing is generally seen as a vitally important element in the project of building and sustaining a party, an organization, and/or a social movement, historically, and still today, around the world -- excluding some of the most prominent English-speaking countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia.

For people from these countries it may seem particularly notable and unusual to hear about a musician performing in the offices of a leftwing political party. For that matter, for people living in the US, the idea of a leftwing political party having a physical office at all may be surprising in itself. (I wish that were a joke, but it's not.)

Every one of the gigs we did, from Newcastle on, was well-attended and organized by highly competent organizers that I have worked with before, all of whom come from different sorts of activist orientations. Some are coming from Socialist Alliance, others coming from groups or networks associated with the rights of refugees, or opposition to the war on Gaza, or from the environmental movement. All of them support the idea of more music in the movement, for the same reasons I or any other sensible person does.

I accidentally organized our little tour in such a way that we were in Sydney on the weekend of a rally for Gaza there, and we were in the Australian capital of Canberra for rallies the following weekend, that coincided with the opening of parliament for the legislative season.

The Sydney rally, as with the one we sang at a year earlier, was attended by many hundreds of people, roughly half of whom appeared likely to be Muslims or from majority-Muslim parts of the world. Events on the stage were well-amplified, with people standing on the back of a pickup truck. We did two sets, before and after the march. The few speakers that were involved all made powerful points, and came from various backgrounds.

Just two weeks before that Sydney rally a much-loved local activist, Hannah Thomas, was struck by a cop at a protest and was at risk of losing the sight in one of her eyes. Undeterred, word was she was in the crowd.

Days before the rally, federal police raided the home where a 61-year-old Palestinian grandma from Gaza was staying with her son, having arrived from the war zone on a tourist visa. It was a violent, predawn raid that caused this war refugee obvious emotional trauma.

With no explanation that I've heard of, and after some outcry and some international news coverage, the authorities released her a week later. (While she was detained I wrote a song about her, but she had already been released by the time we recorded it.)

Similar to the Sydney rally but with a smaller crowd, the iteration of the weekly rally they've been having in Canberra since October, 2023 that we sang at once again was organized by people who enthusiastically welcomed our musical participation -- headed up by a Muslim woman named Diana who deeply believes in the power of music and culture as part of a social movement, and told me so on several occasions during our time in Canberra, where we ran into her everywhere.

At this weekly rally in Canberra they have taken to holding a sort of memorial for someone who died in the war on Gaza, often a memorial for a child. It's a powerful way to tell the story of the genocide through the example of one person, in one family, in one place, which is the sort of human-scale story we can all relate to so well, as humans.

Following that local rally of the Canberra Palestine solidarity group was a national convergence, as it was being billed, around calling for Australian sanctions on Israel. At least a thousand people, by my observation, came from all over the country to attend the main rally on Sunday, quite a few of whom stuck around for more events on Monday and Tuesday, involving various workshops and more rallies.

What was abundantly clear from being involved with these events was, on the one hand, there are lots of wonderful people who are desperately concerned about the ongoing genocide they're bearing witness to every day who came to Canberra to do something. This was a highly select and motivated group of people, beyond doubt, if you struck up a conversation with most anyone.

Kamala and I hosted a workshop on the importance of music and culture in social movements. What was very clear from that very well-attended workshop was that there were many, many people who came to this convergence with exactly the same sorts of ideas that I and other people like Pete Seeger and so many others are or were always going on about: that social movements need music and culture to grow and thrive.

After the workshops some young activist musicians led a march around downtown Canberra, where we visited various stores of companies on the boycott list for one reason or another. At each stop along the way, someone said a few words, and then we all sang two or three songs -- either all together, singalong style, with the use of lyric sheets organizers had handed out, or songs Kamala and I were singing that were generally very recent and not known by folks, but deeply appreciated.

Many people involved with that singing march seemed to be profoundly impacted by it, commenting that passersby were interested in what was happening, rather than put off by it.

The orientation of the people at the workshop and those at the local rallies around culture was in stark contrast to the organizers of the national rallies. Both Kamala and I were struck by the similarity in tone and content at these national rallies, and the tone and content of what was going on on the stage at the national convergence against the war on Gaza that we had attended together in Chicago a year earlier.

The striking similarities were that there was an almost total lack of live music or any other form of culture represented on that stage. It was almost entirely one person yelling into the microphone after another. Very few people spoke at a normal tone, trying to tell an engaging story about the horrors we were all there to protest. Most shouted, and much of the time it was unclear whether they were directing their anger at the Australian government and its complicity with this genocide, or at the people in attendance at the rally. As our numbers were naturally shrinking with each passing hour of being shouted at, some of the speakers became that much more animated, blaming the crowd for a lack of enthusiasm, by the time the crowd had dwindled to 20% of its original size.

This was identical to our experience in Chicago. It's also identical to the program at rallies run by front groups of the Workers World Party that I've had the misfortune of attending in Washington, DC. Which made sense, since what was happening on the stage in Chicago was determined by the Party of Socialism and Liberation, which clearly has inherited the two-dimensional, sectarian orientation of Workers World.

At these rallies, aside from any form of culture -- in full disclosure, our participation in the main rally was turned down -- what was happening on the stage didn't seem to involve anyone representing either labor or business, and no one representing a church or a mosque. The closest thing to a representative of mainstream society we got to hear from were Green Party members of parliament and Socialist Alliance representative Alex Bainbridge, who were some of the few speakers who weren't shouting at us, by my incomplete assessment, at least.

Friends from around Australia who I'm regularly in touch with, who were not at the national convergence, were telling me that in their view, this convergence was being run by a group of sectarians.

By my observation (as I also told them), whoever was making decisions about what was going on on the stage appeared to be very heavily influenced by some of the most puritanical, alienating, and identitarian elements of the Australian left, of a sort that I have rarely encountered outside of the US and Germany. For example, we were told repeatedly by the MC that if we encountered any media who wanted to talk to us, we should refer them to the official representatives of the rally to talk to. Why? It's up to everyone to guess at what disqualifies the rest of us from talking to a journalist, but the implication seems to be if you're not of Palestinian or Lebanese heritage, your voice shouldn't be "centered."

The most bizarre aspect of this particularly toxic rendition of identity politics is that you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone in the actual Arab world who thinks this way. Anyone in the Arab world seems to know very clearly that everyone everywhere should speak out in whatever ways might best communicate to their people, to stop this genocide. None of them are talking about "centering Palestinian voices."

This is a form of thinking, in a world with very, very few actual Palestinians in it -- and fewer by the day -- that is completely toxic and counterproductive. And it is a form of thinking that is quintessentially American, and now Australian as well. It has its origins in American universities, among members of the privileged American elite desperate to convince themselves that they were something other than what they were. It's a perspective that leads automatically to atomization and isolation, as little groups continue to subdivide in order to feel more important. It's the opposite of the kind of inclusive movement-building we so desperately require.

But equally notable to me was the lack of influence of this sort of sectarian thinking on anything else that was happening in Canberra. Most of those involved with the convergence seemed to be very dedicated activists from various communities, sometimes involved with bigger organizations, usually not, but all passionate people who all seem to think we need more music in the movement (though I'm admittedly a biased source for this sort of observation, since of course it might be disproportionately people who think this way who would be seeking out a conversation with me in the first place).

But certainly my observation applies to hundreds of people who were there -- a large chunk for sure. How is it that their view on the importance of putting on events that are engaging and help build a movement is so absent among those deciding on the programs on the stages of the national rallies?

It's a question that probably has many answers, all of them correct.

It would be much too simplistic to attribute the dismally alienating and disheartening, totally nonmusical rally program to a small group of dedicated sectarians. Or even if the situation could be characterized that way, crucially important questions to answer include: how does a group's leadership develop this kind of orientation in the first place? How does a group's leadership become so disconnected with society that they think for a moment that this is the way to organize a rally? How do participants in such a movement get to the point where they're ready to put up with this kind of thing?

I'll define what I mean by "left" for a moment: those whose thinking is so much more radical on issues around the distribution of wealth, the rights of people, or militarism that they are generally not represented in the legislatures of Australia at most any level of government. Although participants in the broader convergence and those attending the rallies and marches came from many walks of life, the left, as I've defined it, has become a phenomenon that seems to be, at the level of actual organizing, completely disconnected from society in Australia as well as in the US.

What do I mean by this, or how is this disconnection in evidence? And how did the alienation of the left become so normalized in the Anglosphere, whereas in most of the world the left is very deeply a part of the society, steeped in the culture of their society and beyond?

In countries where this disconnection hasn't happened to such a degree, or at all, protests or most other big gatherings of people are full of cultural representations of the feelings of the people about the war on Gaza, as the case may be. They are full of music, and full of people who will readily state what is to them abundantly obvious, whether they're from Asia, Africa, or Latin America, that music is the beating heart of the movement. In so much of the world, in so many countries less impacted by the corporate music industry, very radical musicians are some of the most well-known and well-loved celebrities

On the stages at such protests in countries where this disconnection has not happened, the people speaking between the performers represent major blocks of society -- unions, professional associations representing farmers or medical workers, leaders of associations of religious institutions like mosques, churches, and synagogues, along with cultural workers of all sorts, famous and unknown.

I would postulate that it's only really possible for a movement or a network like this to become led by people who are basically alienated from most of society because so many of us have been feeling so alienated from society for so long. And then in practice, we can see how many of the even pre-alienated people attending rallies find the whole thing totally off-putting, and they leave the rally even more alienated than when they came, long before the rally program is over.

What we witnessed earlier this month in Canberra, and last summer in Chicago, and for me on so many prior occasions at different points in the US, was so far from how a functional movement puts on a rally that it would be hard to know where to begin deconstructing the insanity inherent in thinking a movement can be built by people who are yelling at those in attendance about how they're not working hard enough at their anti-imperialism or cheering loudly enough.

Even in the darkest times, in the vast majority of the world, and in past eras in Australia as well as in the US, the left (as defined above) was deeply connected with society, and society was represented, broadly, in the crowds and on the stages. Most especially on the stages, cultural workers were in abundance. They are known worldwide to play the role of the glue that holds everything together, without which it all falls apart.

That it all falls apart without that glue keeps on being proven again and again in my lifetime, as I watch one social movement after another drown beneath the weight of its own social alienation, one of the most depressing examples being what happened on so many of the stages at the rallies that the media dubbed the "racial justice movement," circa 2020, which seemed to be driven by a sort of guilt-ridden, tokenistic form of progressive puritanism, designed to alienate all "allies" one group at a time.

In our discussions about the need for more music in social movements -- a phenomenon which Kamala has increasingly come to observe, in her international travels with me -- we started talking about organizing a tour that included not only concerts in Resistance Centers around Australia, but also workshops to help people think about different ways they can introduce more music and culture -- art, food, puppetry, poetry, group singing -- into their activities and events.

At this stage, by my estimation, in much of the English-speaking world it has been two decades since the last time having music fill up half of the program at a rally was standard procedure. While there is lots to criticize about past movements everywhere, the decision to include music in their rallies is not one of those things. That was one of the things they were generally doing right, once upon a time. Not just since the Sixties, either -- this is not a generational question. The nonmusicality of the left in the Anglosphere today is, as far as I know, a new phenomenon, one that was not at all an issue in the Sixties, or in the Thirties, or in the beginning of the twentieth century before that, all times that saw seismically massive and massively musical social movements, all of which changed the world in dramatic ways.

In the past, the degree of emphasis on the arts as a tool for organizing has varied widely, from movements that used it brilliantly and so effectively, along with those that didn't, so much. But the general assumption that it should be part of things was widespread -- as it still is in most of the world today.

Now that this is no longer the case -- now that it has been for many young people their entire lifetime that so much of the organized left has been essentially nonmusical -- it has been occurring to both Kamala and I, among others, that an important job for cultural workers like us at this point is to reintroduce music and its relevance to the left, under the assumption that people can't make use of things they aren't thinking about as useful, or that somehow or other they have become convinced is something frivolous or trivial.

We need to reconnect ourselves with culture, with music, with the vital importance of things like singing together, eating together, and turning protests into festivals of resistance -- which are more like festivals than what we Anglospheric mutants think of as protests. These are the kinds of protests that have a history of growing, rather than shrinking -- while they're happening, as well as over time. It's not a guarantee, but what is a guarantee is the nonmusical protest movements will tend to stagnate and die.

When I hear well-meaning left intellectuals talk about different strategies for building an effective movement to oppose wars and authoritarian governments and whatever else, I feel like shouting, but wait a minute. We are so far from being in a position to effectively think about implementing such strategies, in this anemic state. They're talking about doing things that are very necessary. Either way, it seems obvious to some of us that for a real resistance to get off the ground, first we need to grow, which will require learning how to use culture, and learning how to stop systematically alienating everyone who comes to our biggest rallies.

I don't believe in omens, necessarily, but whether there's meaning to be derived from it or not, I left Australia on July 26th, Australia time, and by the time I landed in Portland on the evening of July 26th, US time, one of the most influential musicians for left movements in the Arabic-speaking world and one of the most influential musicians on the English-speaking left both died. Ziad Rahbani in Lebanon, son of Fairouz, died at the age of 69, and Tom Lehrer died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts at age 97.

Another thing that happened on that very day of July 26th? When Reiko and the kids picked me up at the airport in Portland, we went to visit our eldest daughter where she works, which happened to be right smack on the route of the annual Naked Bike Ride.

I've lived in Portland now for 18 years, but I had never gotten around to either participating in or witnessing this annual event. Sure enough, as I had heard, the street had been taken over by naked people riding bicycles. My kids and I watched as they went on and on, many thousands of them -- incidentally, a larger group of people than I've ever seen at a protest in Portland.

I don't know if everyone who participates in a naked bike ride is up for civil disobedience to oppose a genocide, but if you can get thousands and thousands of people to violate social norms as well as nudity laws and risk the opprobrium of elements of the public, I'd say this would be a good bunch to work on recruiting, and that is almost certainly a task for well-placed music and art, not for people shouting at them, judging from the vibe.

Two days later, another white male US-born US citizen had his home somewhere near ours violently raided by the FBI. This pacifist was told he was being charged with assaulting a police officer at a protest at the ICE facility in town. Along with so many, many noncitizens who are receiving even worse treatment, every day I was on the road in Australia, and every day since I returned, including on many occasions in this city and its suburbs, now the FBI raids are apparently becoming more commonplace for certain citizens as well as everyone else.

And the famine in Gaza is worsening exponentially, while the western world wrings their hands and exports more arms to Israel.

This would sure be a fine time to make the left great again. We can start, I'd suggest, by reviving that feeling of community, that well of perseverance, and even that sense of optimism that can come from collective cultural activities such as putting on festivals of resistance that live up to such a name. We can start by showing we're here, and that our ranks might be ones any sensible, life-loving person would naturally of course want to join, not run away from.

Of course, the future is unwritten, and everything could soon start moving in a much more positive direction than my observations on the state of the Australian left might seem to indicate. We are talking overwhelmingly about good people trying to do good things, regardless of the outcome of their efforts. While it's impossible to share an account of my recent travels in Australia without being critical of certain political tendencies and other things, I hope any individuals that feel like they're being singled out here understand that, at least in my view, no one should hold them responsible for the state of the left in Australia, or any other trends like that. It would be utterly pointless to make these observations in order to assign blame or make anyone feel guiltier than they already feel. I only make these observations in the hope that we can together overcome our current state of what often feels like a collective paralysis born of collective social alienation.

Is Trump Going to Nuke Tehran?

noreply@blogger.com (David Rovics) — Wed, 18 Jun 2025 01:21:00 +0000

What's in a tweet?

Trump is notoriously capable of changing his mind on many things, and even pretending he never thought differently before, regardless of any video evidence. He's notoriously capable of making apocalyptic threats that he may or may not deliver on. He's very good at constantly staying in the headlines, one way or another.

There are different ways the current situation vis-a-vis Iran vs. Israel and the US might develop, various potential "off-ramps," as the pundits say, regardless of the rhetoric from the various players.

But the potential for the world to see the third use of a nuclear weapon against an urban population seems higher now than ever in my lifetime.

The president might be the most unpredictable element of the whole equation, among the many elements giving any reading of the geopolitical tea leaves a low likelihood of accuracy. But with some of his most prominent advisors regarding what some are calling the Israel-Iran war being Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, it all gets much more worrying.

These men in particular positions of influence and power all have long histories of being obsessed with regime change in Iran. Much like a previous Trump cabinet member, John Bolton, who thankfully failed in convincing his boss to invade Iran, that time around. This time seems very different, with the war Israel recently initiated with Iran causing serious destruction in both countries.

That they are threatening to nuke Tehran is obvious. If they followed through with all their threats in the past, the planet would have been destroyed by now. Recommending the evacuation of Tehran, and sharing Huckabee's message about how Trump is in a position of decision-making unlike any faced by an American president since Truman in 1945, are both easy to interpret as threats to use nuclear weapons, whether we call them veiled threats or naked ones.

But there are also particular reasons to take note of the reference to Truman in 1945, when it's coming from a self-described Christian Zionist with an obsession with regime change in Iran, like Mike Huckabee.

At the time of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it was said that the use of these most destructive of weapons -- where one bomb can completely destroy an entire city and kill everyone in it -- was necessary, because it saved hundreds of thousands of lives of American soldiers who would otherwise have died in the process of occupying Japan. Japan's virtually unconditional surrender was supposedly a direct consequence of the use of nuclear weapons.

This wasn't actually true -- the Japanese Empire had already been trying to surrender in the days prior to the bombing of Hiroshima. But the point is, in the popular imagination of much of America, and certainly in the popular imagination of Mike Huckabee, Pete Hegseth, and Netanyahu, the fiction about using nuclear weapons saving American lives is taken as a given, an historical truth -- among many other fake truths that form their worldview.

Another of those truths these people all believe is that the United States military fought with one hand tied behind its back in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, hampered by concerns about human rights and things like that.

It's hard to judge how much people in the public eye really believe any of the things they profess to believe. But if these men all really do adhere to the worldview that says using nuclear weapons on Japan saved American lives and the Vietnam War was lost because the US fought with one hand tied behind its back, and if they are also convinced that American "boots on the ground" in a war these days is to be avoided, then if they do have any kind of game plan with regards to Iran, what might it be?

Regardless of any evidence, these men profess to believe that Iran was close to developing a nuclear weapon, and that Iran developing a nuclear weapon poses an existential threat to Israel, which is unacceptable to the United States. Depending on which day you catch them, they generally tout the line that the talks around nuclear issues failed, and Iran has to be stopped somehow. Sanctions haven't stopped them, so the military option seems to them like the best way to save Israel from this completely hypothetical future Iranian nuclear attack.

If they are indeed actually convinced of the things they profess to believe, then they need to overthrow the Iranian government. They've wanted to do this for decades, and now Israel has helpfully started the process for them.

They don't want to put American boots on the ground, but they want to overthrow the Iranian government. In their mythological reality, however, air power alone could perhaps cause an otherwise proud nation to surrender unconditionally, if the bombs used are big enough. According to their worldview, as long as the war is fought without concern for human rights or public opinion, victory is possible.

Their take on history informs us that according to precedent, if they nuke Tehran, Iran will surrender unconditionally the way Japan did, and the Iranian government can become a docile puppet government afterwards, run by the Shah's grandson. Their understanding of the past tells us that even though the US dropped far more bombs on Vietnam as well as on Iraq than all sides of World War 2 combined, these wars didn't go well because insufficient force was used.

Whatever happens next, we can be sure that Trump will be getting very little good advice from his closest advisors, and a lot of bad advice.

We can also be sure that all of the dramatic news out of Iran and Israel will cause the deaths of more than two million starving Palestinians in Gaza to occur unnoticed.