|
|
|
|
|
David RovicsDavid Rovics is an indie singer/songwriter and outspoken grassroots political protester from the United States. His music is most accurately described as protest-folk and concerns topical subjects such as the 2003 Iraq war, anti-globalisation and social justice issues. Rovics is also an outspoken critic of George W. Bush. He is also vocal on these subjects on stage, radio shows and in press releases. Although most of Rovic's work is fully-copyrighted and commercially-distributed, Rovics has made most of his music freely available as downloadable mp3 files from his website. He encourages the free distribution of his work by all non-profit means to promote his work and spread political messages. Rovics has also advocated the performing of his songs at protests and demonstrations and has made his sheet music and lyrics available for download to this end. It is worth noting that this means of promotion contains elements of the copyleft licensing scheme. Although Rovics is not strongly associated with any particular political or ideological movement, his lyrics and recorded interviews encompass a wide range of left-wing, humanitarian interests. He has suggested a commonality or synthesis between these varied ideologies in several of his radio interviews, and cites his music as a means to disseminate these ideas.
Biography David Rovics was born in New York City on April 10th, 1967. His family moved to Wilton, Connecticut when he was young. Rovics was politically inspired during his adolescence by his experiences with the conservative-orientated, fundamentalist Christian milieu of his home town. His parents, both skilled musicians and educators were liberal in their outlook. Perhaps for this reason, Rovics was to become a hippie in his teens and acquired interests in nuclear disarmament, vegetarianism and other counterculture issues. Although Jewish, he is atheist and is not religious. In his early twenties, Rovics dropped out of college and moved to Berkeley, California. He worked in varied occupations, including as a cook, barista, secretary and typist, while pursuing his musical interests as a street and subway performer and in small clubs and bars. He immersed himself in the popular leftist counterculture and made contact with other songwriters and performers on the underground circuit. On May 1st, 1993, Rovics was involved in a traumatic incident in which a close friend was shot dead after intervening in a gang shoot-out. This was a turning point in his life, forcing him to concentrate on his songwriting career, initially as a means of dealing with the grief over his friends death. He had already amassed a fair collection of lyrics and songs by that time, but his own admission, his compositions prior to this time were inferior and preachy, and none were used in his later albums. From around the mid 1990s, Rovics has spent most of his time on concert tours around the world. In 1996 he self-released his first album, Make It So, which consisted mostly of covers of other artists songs. He released his second cover album in 1998. He produced a series of five original song albums between 1998 and 2003 as self-release titles. The album Who Would Jesus Bomb? is notable for being entirely distributed in mp3 format over the internet and having no commercial release, although it was included in a later best of album. In 2003 Rovics signed up to Ever-Reviled Records and produced a studio album, Return. Later that year, he released Behind The Barricades: The Best Of David Rovicsin association with AK Press, including titles from his earlier self-releases which met with minimal commercial success. He has since released the Songs for Mahmud album as a self-release in association with Ever Reviled Records. Despite being the sole performer in most of his work, he usually describes himself only as a songwriter. Although Rovics' work has never met with great commercial success, it has been critically-acclaimed in the press and continues to be popular with a small yet widespread base of fans with similar political interests, as well as supporters of internet file sharing. Due to his outspoken political views, Rovics has been embraced by various left wing, anti-war, environmentalist and social justice groups. Conversely, he has been reviled as anti-Christian, anti-American and pro-terrorism by others. While it is fair to say that his work is only enduringly popular with a limited fan base, this has nonetheless occurred with little promotion.
External Link http://www.davidrovics.com http://www.davidrovics.com Official website. Additional information, huge collection of free mp3s, sheet music and links. Rovics, David Rovics, David Rovics, David Rovics, David
|
 |
|
| Copyright 2005-2009 OnPedia.com. All Rights Reserved |
|
|