(Saturday 29 July 2006)
LIVE: David Rovics
Thursday July 27, 2006
WHO would credit George Bush as a co-writer of their song? Radical folksinger David Rovics tells us that his opening number Operation Iraqi Liberation was inspired - is that the right word? - by the name initially given to the Iraq war by the president's men.
"Tell me, what does that spell? Oil." You couldn't make it up, could you?
More likely to be found singing on US anti-war platforms in the company of Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis, Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon or Pete Seeger, or even behind an anti-globalisation barricade in Genoa, Rovics slams Bush and his neocon puppeteers in front of an appreciative crowd at Glasgow's weekly Star Folk Club.
He is a young US Dick Gaughan. His open-tuned guitar is similarly percussive and his slightly nasal voice rings with conviction over a radical agenda of burning issues from past and present.
St Patrick's Battalion commemorates Irish Americans who fought with the Mexicans for self determination in the 1840s.
Song for Hugo Chavez brings the struggle bang up to date.
Rovics's progressive global aspirations show in his song New Orleans - written in Beirut, recorded in Ramallah - about the avoidable flood which hit the poorest most.
It's not all gloom and doom. Rovics's acerbic banter raises some laughs and he writes and sings a mean love song too.
Nice to have it reaffirmed that some US citizens are standing up against the warmongers who run their country.
MALCOLM BURNS
Link: www.davidrovics.com
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