This Week with David Rovics

My latest collaboration with the Ai Tsuno Project drops on all the music streaming platforms on February 1st.  Here's a guided tour of the album.

Chad Westover is a man around my age, who also lives in Oregon. David first learned about Chad because of having kids, and living in the same city as Chad's extended family. Chad's extended family is full of kind and loving people, which, by the accounts of all of them and many others, Chad is, too. Chad's generous nature was exactly what led him to want to stick up for his friend, who was being threatened and bullied by his friend's neighbor. In the ensuing confrontation, the neighbor pulled out a knife and stabbed Chad three times. Chad then managed to get a hold of the knife and stab his assailant, who, very unfortunately, was killed that night in September 2024. Press reports have tended to paint a picture that, naturally enough, positions the deceased, Tristan Thomas, as the victim, and Chad as the murderer. A simple scenario involving a perpetrator and his victim. But if you look a little closer at the details of the whole encounter, it all becomes much more complex. It's obviously incredibly tragic that anyone was killed that night. There are a lot of things that everyone involved could have done differently, that might have avoided anyone getting hurt in the first place. But that's not how things played out, and ultimately, Chad was not the one who pulled out a weapon, and he clearly does not deserve to be charged with murder. If there is to be justice in this case, Chad should be with his family, rather than in jail in Clackamas, facing a possible murder charge, and a potential sentence of decades in prison. “Song for Chad Westover” will drop on all the music streaming platforms on February 1st, as part of the latest album of the Ai Tsuno Project, War with the World.  

Just before our Berkeley show last night, Kamala and I spent the hour with Dennis Bernstein as guests of Flashpoints on KPFA Community Radio. Along with us there were appearances via phone from the brilliant poet, Anita Barrows, and a report from the streets of Minneapolis as well.

I had a very nice and wide-ranging interview with Rebel Fagin on his Radio Resistance radio show recently, which was broadcast on his show on KBBF Community Radio on Sunday. Here's the podcast version.

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.

The Ai Tsuno Project's latest album, Save the Humans, drops on all the music streaming platforms on January 15th.  Ai Tsuno's 10th album includes such instant classics as “Disarm Israel,” “Message from Gaza,” and “Bisbee, Arizona, 1917.”

A song for Renee Nicole Good, killed by ICE in Minneapolis on January 7th, 2026.

As much as Trump is behaving in ways that could be characterized as unprecedented, in other ways his behavior is surprisingly consistent with the history of US imperialism.

How is it that our oil is always underneath their soil?

What does the US invasion of Venezuela, the Cuba-Venezuela Solidarity Tent at the World Social Forum, and my visit to the US-Mexico border last weekend have in common?

Between abducting the Venezuelan president, killing scores of Cubans, boarding Russian tankers, and threatening to invade Greenland, the immediate future is feeling very sketchy.

Venezuela, 2026.

Meanwhile in Gaza, Israel is banning aid groups and starving all the children to death. Anyone going to kidnap Netanyahu and his wife?

Is there hope for planet Earth? Well, there's always the prospect of being saved by Aliens from Outer Space. Title track of Ai Tsuno's January 15th album release!

Miko Peled was on Al-Jazeera the other day, making so much good sense, I had to write a song about it. “Disarm Israel” will be one of several catchy tracks about the ongoing US-Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people that will be part of Ai Tsuno's January 15th album release, Save the Humans.

Chris Cook did an absolutely wonderful wrap-up of 2025 for his Gorilla Radio podcast, consisting of snippets from interviews he did throughout the year, with a song of mine between each one!

Perhaps the most broadly notable thing about Bisbee is the town's outsized role in US & Mexican labor history. And the most timely piece of information about Bisbee? I'm playing there this weekend!      

One of the things that 2026 holds in store is what some are already calling "the trial of the century."

A guided tour of Ai Tsuno's 9th album, which consists of 12 songs David Rovics created with Ai Tsuno over the course of December, 2025. Topics covered include the ongoing Gaza genocide, the trial of Luigi Mangione, the corporate internet, and the beauty of Bonoboville. The Red and the Blue drops on the music streaming platforms of January 9th, 2026.

If you're feeling hopeless, most likely the first thing you should do is leave all your devices in a hole somewhere and go outside. This will be one of the tracks on my next album with Ai Tsuno, The Red and the Blue, which, if all goes as planned, will drop on all the music streaming platforms on January 9th.

The modern internet, controlled as it is by the world's biggest corporations and their conflict-promotion algorithms, has become a nightmare of monolithic proportions. This will be one of the tracks on my next album with Ai Tsuno, The Red and the Blue, which, if all goes as planned, will drop on all the music streaming platforms on January 9th.

There's really no such thing as red or blue -- just lots of folks like me and you.

My biggest hope for 2026? That by the end of it we'll be experiencing a more or less normal winter in the northern hemisphere, and not a nuclear one. This will be one of the tracks on my next album with Ai Tsuno, which, if all goes as planned, will drop on all the music streaming platforms on January 9th.

What makes a piece of music good? What makes a song a good song? The music industry has, for a century or so, been obsessively oriented with creating mysterious and exciting identities for artists they want to turn into stars. The industry emphasizes the artist, rather than the art. The art itself, along with the producers, lyricists, session musicians, engineers, and promoters, are all those kinds of things happening "behind the curtain" that, like the Wizard in Oz, are meant to be ignored. But if you extract all the PR and music business hoopla, what makes a song a good song? Is it actually about the artist recording or performing it, or is it about the music itself? If it's the artist that makes the song, then what about the artist? Does the artist need to have lived a virtuous life in order to make likeable art? Does the artist need to be from a certain part of the world, and not another? Does the artist need to be human? My take on these questions is in the end, other factors may play into how a song is perceived in a big way, but what really matters is the song itself. If it's delivered well by a competent performer live or recorded, and the listener is in a good place for really listening, then a sad song will make the listener cry. A song about memories of your youth will evoke such memories. A satirical song about current events the listener is following in the news will likely make the listener laugh. These reactions of the listener are the measure of the song's impact. That's what this song is about. I invite you to close your eyes and give a song your full attention. You might try doing that every day, and call it meditation.

I sat down this morning with the intention of writing a bit of a travelogue about my recent travels in Texas and Georgia, but then I wrote this song instead. I'll probably eventually write the travelogue, too.

British members of Palestine Action on hunger strike are close to death, Israel's "ceasefire" is just a continuation of the famine, disease and slaughter Israel continues to deliver to the Palestinian people, and across the west, leaders express their deference to the genocidal killers, ship more weapons, and ban words and phrases that make fascists uncomfortable. The hunger strike continues In the British prisons As the courts refuse To reach a decision Will they judge this time As they have before That the crime is sending  Weapons to the war Because the terrorists here Are the Zionists Who'd try to hide A genocide It's a holocaust  And it's happening now A hundred thousand lives lost And no one knows how How many more Will ever be found  Under the rubble  Beneath the ground  Chorus The Palestinian people Beneath plastic sheets There's no ceasefire, just a famine  As history repeats History from the Nazis Brought down on the holy land Beside the bloody sea With an F-thirty-five at hand  Chorus As the Israelis go on With their endless killing spree  While Egypt plays the pawn With their new refinery And throughout the west  They ban phrases and words As our leaders do their best At being completely absurd Chorus

Members of Palestine Action are being held without bail or trial in England for trying to stop a British-sponsored genocide.  Many are on hunger strike, and the doctors say they are dying, as their organs are beginning to fail due to some of them now going on 6 weeks without eating.  Meanwhile in Australia, they are talking about passing a law to say that the phrase, "globalize the intifada" is hate speech.  Resisting genocide is apparently a very hateful thing to do.  Terroristic, even.

In the aftermath of an event like Bondi Beach, 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.

David Rovics is an activist musician who composes songs that educate about historical events, provide political analysis about current events, and raise up people from social movements. His solidarity with Palestinian liberation is deep, spanning his entire musical career. Recently, his entire 50-album catalog on YouTube Music was deleted. Clearing the FOG speaks with Rovics about the retaliation he has faced, some of his recent songs, how platforms like Spotify and YouTube are impacting the music industry, his artificial intelligence band, Ai Tsuno, and calls to boycott Spotify. For more information, visit PopularResistance.org.

Steve Zeltzer and I talked for over an hour about all sorts of interesting things the other day.

On the daily news and information show broadcast out of KPFA in Berkeley, California, every Friday host Dennis Bernstein is joined for the first half of Flashpoints by Sam Husseini to talk about the latest in Israel's genocide. Today journalist Robert Inlakesh and I joined Dennis and Sam to talk about our respective experiences getting blacklisted by YouTube, or in Robert's case, by Google altogether.

The latest David Rovics musical production, Ai Tsuno's eighth album, drops on all the streaming platforms later this month. In this podcast special, Ai Tsuno herself presents a guided tour of Rage Bait, and introduces you to songs such as Pogroms of the Occupied West Bank, Tweedledumb and Tweedledumber, Let's Talk About Sex, They Deleted David Rovics, and the title track.

I had a conversation with Scott Harris on Counterpoint Radio earlier this week. The first half is about news of all my albums being deleted from YouTube Music, and the second half is about the double-edged sword of AI and AI music.

The Labor Heritage Power Hour is a weekly radio show on WPFW in Washington, DC, as well as a podcast. Most of the hour consists of Chris Garlock and I diving deep into the weeds of AI music generation and the future of humanity. It was a great interview to begin with, but then the way the songs were edited in for the final version makes it even better.

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

The Oxford English Dictionary announced yesterday that their word or phrase of the year for 2025 is "rage bait." Here's a song about it from Ai Tsuno.

It's a sunny forecast for the rest of the weekend in Portland, Oregon. Our weekly neighborhood vigil for Gaza is happening Sunday at noon, and I wrote a jingle for it.

When YouTube Music deleted all of my albums from their platform the other day because my very existence apparently violates their terms of service, Ai Tsuno wrote a fairly blistering song about 1984/2025.

Ai Tsuno presents a guided tour to our album, Class War Zone, which drops on music streaming platforms on December 4th. Class War Zone consists of very recently-penned and tremendously catchy songs about things like the ongoing Starbucks workers strike, the Jeffrey Epstein files, the cost-of-living crisis, the campaign to bring the killers of Hind Rajab and her family to the ICC, and the nonexistent ceasefire in Gaza.

A guided tour of Ai Tsuno's album, Gaza Riviera, which drops on all the music streaming platforms on Thanksgiving Day (November 27th).

I had another scintillating conversation with Gorilla Radio host Chris Cook today.  He interviews me for the last half of the hour.  Mostly we talked about AI...  (The first half of his show, interviewing another pro-Palestinian guy named David, was also very good.)

Kamala and I were guests for the better part of 2 hours on Graham Dean's Common Sense Songs show on Berkshire Community Radio a few days ago in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, along with our good friend, Massachusetts-based singer/songwriter Ben Grosscup. The live talk and music starts about 25 minutes in.

Sam and Amal are the hosts of a show on WUSB community radio in Stony Brook, New York called Unbound:  the arts & culture of Palestine.  They interviewed me for a very enjoyable hour the other day, in advance of the show we'll be doing on Long Island on October 26th!

Scott Harris interviewed me a few days ago for the Counterpoint public affairs radio show. We talked about the situation in Portland and other things.

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

Everything else happening in the world aside, we are at a fascinating juncture in the history of humanity.  Assuming we live long enough to witness it, many people would say we're on the cusp of a new reality, represented by the three words, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).  Ai Tsuno's fourth album gracefully explores this theme.  For this special edition of This Week with David Rovics I bring you Where the Algorithms Rule:  a guided tour.

Chet Gardiner has delivered a remix of "Invisible Rulers" that sounds just like the collision of the rumor mill with the propaganda machine! And with that, the next album is coming. This'll be track #1.

When I heard on the news that the Global Sumud Flotilla was being attacked by drones and Abba music, I was struck by the muse.

As the Trump administration tries hard to capitalize on this latest instance of political violence in the USA, Chet Gardiner has for us a remix which vastly improves everything.

Renee DiResta's book, Invisible Rulers, does a brilliant job of introducing us to the modern online age -- an age which she characterizes as one during which the rumor mill and the propaganda machine have, in so many ways, collided.

He spent most of his short life feeding off of algorithms, and now the algorithms are feeding off of him.