This Week with David Rovics

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.