Free Tibet! — On the Tibetan Freedom Concerts and how musicians joined the Free Tibet movement
For many people who grew up in the 90s and 2000s, the Tibetan Freedom Concerts were a moment when the whole world seemed to know something terrible was happening, as information of how Tibetan people were being oppressed by China became known. The first Tibetan Freedom Concert was held in 1996, and Tibet and their spiritual leader the Dali Lama become topics widely known thanks to greater media coverage.
Now, perhaps understandably, focus has shifted to other injustices around the world. Ukraine, Xinjiang, or Afghanistan, and their people, have all been in the news these past years.
2021 was the 25th anniversary of the first Tibetan Freedom Concert, and while each of the concerts inspired many to take up the cause, for others a free Tibet was already a major concern, and remains a fight they want to see to the end.
Tibet is a country bordering Nepal, India, Myanmar, Bhutan, and China, with Mount Everest and the Himalayas sitting along parts of their border. Although Tibet has suffered conquest from other nations across its history, in 1913 the 13th Dali Lama Thubten Gyatso declared they were an independent state. Later, the People’s Republic of China, under Mao Zedong, entered Tibet in 1950 and an agreement was signed to bring Tibet under Chinese rule. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dali Lama, who remains the spiritual leader of Tibet, has said this agreement was signed under duress and is invalid.
Many reports of unrest in Tibet were reported by English and American newspapers during the 1950s, with support for a free Tibet gaining in both countries. Then in 1959 an uprising in the city of Lhasa led to thousands of Tibetan deaths, China taking full control of the city, and the Dali Lama escaping to India where he has remained with members of the Tibetan government-in-exile.
Tibetans and their fight for freedom have been in the news ever since and international organisations have been founded to campaign for Tibetan independence. In the UK, the Tibet Society was founded in 1959 by people who had met the Dali Lama, and during the 1980s several more organisations were founded after the Dali Lama spoke of the need to ensure the survival of Tibetan culture. Two of those were Tibet Support Group UK (renamed Free Tibet in 1996), and Tibet House US, founded by Robert Thurman, actor Richard Gere, and pianist Philip Glass.
The Dali Lama also spread the word, releasing books on his life, Tibet, yoga, and enlightenment. In 1992, he visited Sydney, Australia and predicted Tibet would be free from Chinese occupation within ten years. Tibetan’s in exile were equally hopeful. Jhampa Chosang, who left Tibet during the 1959 invasion when he was seven, found his home in Surrey, England. He told the Surrey Mirror in 1996, “I will never go to Tibet until it’s free…Eventually the world will support our cause. We put great hope in that.”
In Spring 1993, while recording their fourth album Ill Communication, the Beastie Boys took a week off so bandmember Adam Yauch could visit a five-day teaching led by the Dali Lama. Afterwards, he was inspired to write Bodhisattva Vow, a song based on one of the readings he was prescribed, and it was included on the album. The song, along with another called Shambala, sampled Tibetan chants and Yauch wanted to give back and redirect the royalties to relevant charities. To do this he set up the non-profit Milarepa Fund with Erin Potts, a friend he made in 1992 when they were both visiting Nepal and had met some Tibetan people.
“Some of the royalties from Alright Hear This go to [Milarepa] also. We were trying to figure out what to do with the royalties since we had sampled the monks and we had also sampled the didgeridoo…and we felt like those sounds came from the cultures more than individuals, so we wanted to do stuff to give back to those cultures,” Yauch said in 1998.
Royalties from the songs were donated to Tibet House, the Office of Tibet, and Aboriginal Children’s Service, and while the Beastie Boys played 1994’s Lollapalooza tour, Erin Potts gave out pamphlets about Tibetan independence at an information booth.
To spread their message to a wider audience, in 1996 they launched the first Tibetan Freedom Concert. Held in San Francisco on 15–16 June, 100,000 people attended and $800,000 was raised for charities. The lineup featured the Beastie Boys, The Smashing Pumpkins, A Tribe Called Quest, John Lee Hooker, Rage Against the Machine, Sonic Youth, Björk, De La Soul, Yoko Ono, and many more. Speakers like Robert Thurman gave context to why they were there, but when MTV reviewed the concert, they wrote the crowd seemed bored and agitated during the extended speeches, and attendance for the second day dropped significantly.
“It was embarrassingly obvious, though, that many simply did not care about the cause and wanted to see the bands, as the crowd got restless when speakers were on stage,” Jazzbo aka Joseph Patel wrote at the time.
Neither Erin Potts nor Adam Yauch felt discouraged though, as they later explained during a live chat when asked about perceived apathy towards their cause.
“I think that even for the people who just came there to hear the music although they [may] not have gathered very much, they are at the show. It may have been the door for them to learn more later,” Yauch said.
After the concert the Milarepa Fund took a bus around American universities for their Tibetan Freedom Tour, to spread the word about Tibet, non-violence, and human rights, while supplying free BBQ and tofu dogs.
It wasn’t just Milarepa and the Beastie Boys who were promoting Tibet either. In London, Heaven nightclub streamed the Dali Lama speaking onto a large screen via the internet. The Evening Standard noted the club was owned by Virgin and sold “Free Tibet” coffee mugs inside, describing the scene as “a typical tale of 1990s youth culture…bought and sold by corporations”. This being 1996, the internet connection had some issues and for the first hour no audio of the Dali Lama’s speech could be heard. But people still enjoyed themselves.
Later in the year, The End club hosted Shiwa, a fundraising event for Free Tibet. This was repeated in May 1997 with DJs such as Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Mr C, Mixmaster Morris, James Lavelle, Tsuyoshi, and Goldie all donating their fee to the cause.
The Tibetan Freedom Concert was also repeated in 1997. This time it was hosted in New York, with a similar lineup to 1996, alongside newcomers Lee Perry, U2, Radiohead, Blur, and more. The first years concert was also compiled onto a CD album, released later that year, which helped get the message out beyond the concert itself, as Adam Yauch explained in 1998.
“It seemed that the best way to have change come about, and to raise awareness of Tibet, for me, was through music. Buy the Concert CD from Tower…People can write letters to their local congressman, write to their Senator, or write to the President. We have this enhanced CD of the concert with letters that people can just fill out and basically you hit a button and it’ll e-mail out the letters.”
The Milarepa Fund had set up a website in 1996 to send faxes to the White House, calling on them to support Tibet. Later in 1997, visitors to their website could email then President Bill Clinton or order postcards to sign and send as part of a petition calling on him to “take a strong stance on the issue of Tibet” and “insist on negotiations between the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama of Tibet.”
Interest in Tibet grew across American universities too. Prior to the first concert in 1996 there were only 80 chapters of Students for Free Tibet and by 1998, this had grown to over 350 as Erin Potts and Adam Yauch asked people to start their own if there wasn’t already a chapter on their campus.
Although such campaigns helped build awareness of Tibet, the US has never recognised Tibet as independent of China and currently, no country recognises Tibet as independent. Since the 1980s, the Dali Lama has promoted the “Middle Way” which would allow Tibet to remain part of China, but give Tibetans autonomy to allow them to preserve their culture, religion, and identity.
The Dali Lama says he doesn’t seek Tibetan Independence, but not everyone agrees with him, and many inside Tibet, its exiled citizens, and the international organisations like the UK’s Free Tibet, continue to petition governments to stand up to China and recognise Tibet as being occupied by an oppressor. John Jones from Free Tibet clarified the many differing views, noting China has so far been unwilling to negotiate with the Dali Lama.
“Whether Tibet should be independent or an autonomous province is a debate among the Tibetan diaspora, and one that Free Tibet does not attempt to arbitrate. We simply believe that Tibetans need to be given the freedom to determine the future of their homeland,” Jones said.
Back in the 1990s, the dream of a free Tibet seemed very real. Following 1997’s Tibetan Freedom Concert in New York, the concert was brought to Washington in 1988, before going international in 1999 with concerts held in the span of 24 hours in Australia, Japan, Netherlands, the US.
Selections from the 1999 concert were uploaded online, with interviews and one song from each artist posted after their performances. Previously, the concerts had been streamed online in their entirety, sometimes with behind the scenes content, and in in 1998 some 300,000 visitors watched the concert, with an average of 2,000 watching at one time.
After taking 2000 off, a planned London concert to be held 15 September 2001 was cancelled just one month before due to scheduling complications. Then, following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, the Milarepa Fund organised two concerts in New York that October billed as New Yorkers Against Violence and featuring a similar mix of bands to the previous Tibetan Freedom Concerts. This time there was an even greater focus on spreading a message of non-violence, and money was raised for New Yorkers. The Milarepa Fund wrote at the time:
“Many of you who are familiar with our organization know that our main focus is on Tibet. We are drawn to Tibet because we value the Tibetan people’s commitment to nonviolence in their struggle to regain their freedom. In the face of terrible odds, they are able to uphold the basic tenets on which their society is based. And we believe that theirs is a model from which we can and now must learn.
We find ourselves in our own country struggling to regain control of our lives amid feelings of loss, sorrow, fear, and anguish. These emotions can easily give way to hatred, and vengeance. What we learn from Tibet is that we must never let ourselves sacrifice our humanity.
In this world we cannot control events, we control only how we react to them. Let us show strength, intelligence, and dignity.”
Two smaller Tibetan Freedom Concerts were held in Japan and Taiwan in 2003, and another in Taiwan in 2004, but following these, the Milarepa Fund seemed to wind down. Their website posted updates on Tibet, the Dali Lama, and related topics for a few years before it went offline in 2005.
Although the Milarepa Fund and Tibetan Freedom Concerts were gone, people were left with a greater awareness of Tibet. In 1997, Hollywood released two films, Kundun and Seven Years in Tibet, about Tibet and the Dali Lama. That same year saw the release of the Tibetan Freedom Concert CD, and a film of the concert was also later released on VHS. There was a hope at the time that these projects and products helped make the message more accessible, and John Jones from Free Tibet agreed the 1990s saw a massive growth in people’s knowledge of Tibet thanks to the concerts, CDs, and films.
“They elevated Tibet’s profile and brought it to a new audience. You could see cultural references to Tibet on TV programmes like The Simpsons and the slogan “Free Tibet” was widely known. It was a real cultural moment and had a lasting effect on those who grew up in the 1990s and who remain in the Tibet movement to this day,” he said.
So why, if there are so many people still focused on Tibet, does it seem like we hear about it less? One of the reasons could be that the media landscape and how its curated has evolved, but there’s also the fact little has changed for Tibet, as it has remained part of China since 1959, with China unopposed.
“The political realities also play their part,” John Jones said. “We are currently bombarded with news of crises around the world that quite rightly deserve international attention, whether it is civil wars like Syria, Ukraine and Yemen or global dangers like climate change and COVID-19. The harsh reality is that Tibet has to compete for attention with these crises, and one thing Tibet lacks is coverage; China has closed it off from the world, so what was possible in 1987 in terms of getting photos and video from Tibet is now incredibly difficult and risky. It is striking that Tibetans do still protest though, despite the risks, and those who we are able to reach and speak to about Tibet do become engaged when they hear the scale of the repression.”
It can be difficult to feel we as individuals can make a difference in the world, but even small changes in your life can help. Whether you want to make a difference in Tibet or more locally, it comes down to having an awareness over your actions, as Adam Yauch explained in 1996 when asked how to make a difference.
“Everybody can and everybody does, whether they are aware of it or not. We are constantly affecting a situation with all of our actions, some more subtle than others, especially going shopping or talking about this stuff or goofin’ on it, gettin’ Beavis and Butthead with it… Everything we do is constantly affecting the situation. That’s the main thing, getting people to be more aware…It is easy just looking to see if it says “Made in China” on it.”
For anyone interested in learning more about Tibet and what they can do to help, check out the website freetibet.org who were interviewed for this article. Free Tibet also recommend the following resources:
- International Tibet Network — a global coalition of Tibet-related organisations
- High Peaks Pure Earth — A library of Tibetan culture, new literature about Tibet and by Tibetans, translations and analysis
- Eat the Buddha by Baraba Demick, which describes the history of the Tibetan region of Ngaba and provides an overview of the situation in all of Tibet.
This article was originally published in The Shadow Knows Issue #4, March 2023. Buy the fanzine here or read more at our website.
