../tibetan-music-festival-2005

Tibetan Music Festival 2005

At a glance...

When you find a live music concert DVD in the wild for an event you've never heard of, with a signature on the disc, and with no ISBN or other marking to help you find it online, you eat the $1.99 or whatever they're charging for these things at the Goodwill and bring it home. Tibetan Music Festival 2005 took me down a couple of rabbit holes online before finally finishing the movie and writing this review.

I guess I'll start with the perhaps least interesting part to me, which is the actual 3 hour runtime of this movie. It's basically a slightly-edited taping of a large concert that was performed in South India by dozens of Tibetan artists, dancers, and musicians. Unfortunately for me, I do not speak Tibetan (I don't actually know that it is Tibetan being spoken in most of these songs but that is my contextual inference). For most of the songs, I can't understand the words that are being said, which is my loss. What is even worse, however, is the heavy strobe lights that are present in almost every single act in this 3 hours of concert. The camera setup is not equipped to handle this, so there is just a constant blinking of extremely bright light that makes most of these acts impossible to look at directly. It's just unfortunate because if it wasn't so hard to watch, I could still get a lot out of watching the artists on stage and vibing with the music. Plenty of people vibe to music in other languages, so I was a little sad that it hurt me so much to focus on the images here.

However, this does mean that when the strobe stops or when the words are in English, you really notice and pay attention. There was this rock band of younger guys that had this amazing act that started in English briefly. First, the bassist/singer yelled into the mic at the audience, "DO YOU LOVE ROCK AND ROLL?" The audience response was not mic'd up, so I am not sure how enthusiastic they were, but that didn't stop our singer from shouting the phrase a few more times. Then they started playing with a totally different energy, like a low-tempo rock/blues type song, but the lyrics were still all shouted into the mic:

I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL
I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S CALLED
I LOVE ROCK AND ROLL
I DON'T KNOW WHERE IT'S FROM

That was worth the price of admission alone.

I tried to pay attention in particular to the names of the individual acts to see if any were from the United States. Early on in the concert, a young man appeared on stage with some traditional instruments that I don't yet know the names of (though one of them looked very similar to the erhu, which is a Chinese fiddle played sort of like a cello). He had a very strong and evocative voice (and also no strobing lights). The caption popped up on my screen and said, "Techung, United States". I jotted down his name and looked him up afterwards and saw that he was still performing and was active on Instagram. I was able to reach out to him and he actually responded, which was very generous of him.

I didn't speak very much with Techung. After all, I am not any kind of real journalist with institutional backing. I'm just some lady who watched a DVD from Goodwill. He did tell me that Gonpo Entertainment was founded by a man named Gonpo Gyaltsen, who actually passed away a few months earlier this year. I had tried to look up Gonpo Entertainment, and while the site exists on the Wayback Machine, there isn't much information to figure out from the archive itself besides that Gonpo had multiple projects lined up filming other Tibetan music festivals and events. Apparently, from Techung's voice messages, he was very charismatic and had a strong business presence in the Tibetan community in South India. I tried to ask if he had any specific memories about being in the concert, but our conversation fizzled out shortly afterwards.

Afterwards, I looked up Techung on Bandcamp and snagged a couple of albums. I was amazed that the very first track I listened to was an original song written to the tune of a very famous Japanese song from the 60s, Ue o Muite Arukou (also known as Sukiyaki in the United States which is a real Japanese word that is not related to the actual song at all). Ue o Muite Arukou, translated to "I look up as I walk", was the output of the grief and frustration lyricist Rokusuke Ei experienced after the failure of the Anpo protests to stop the US-Japan Security Treaty. Incredibly, the song has reached far beyond the specific boundaries of the time that it was written, as it became popular enough that it charted in the United States (with its stupid food-based name), and then covered with original lyrics in English as well. I know the song because it features prominently in both Yi Yi and in my favorite Studio Ghibli film, Only Yesterday.

Techung writes in the info blurb of his song:

This beautiful melody of this song is Japanese. The story behind it is that in the early 1970s, a group of young Tibetans were sent to study auto mechanics in Japan. When they returned from their training, they often sang this melody with romantic Tibetan lyrics. I was in my teens at the time, yet I have never forgotten how beautiful this love song was to me.

It was a really moving experience to go through all these different pieces and come out the other end listening to a new version of a song I already knew, completely by accident. The artist also writes about this particular album that he made all these songs in 1999 on a TASCAM Portastudio multi-cassette recorder, and that he only now published the works after feeling for many years that they weren't worth showing off. For my own singular experience, I'm glad he did.

When engaging with artistic works from around the world, even semi-professional recordings of concerts that I otherwise would never known existed, it's important to have a consciousness about the context that influences the creation of the media. Tibetans living in exile today are the product of the Chinese state forcibly attempting to maintain control over those lands through many mechanisms that Americans might be familiar with. Bogus treaties, contested negotiations, military violence and political repression, all of these mechanisms of domination that we are familiar with have been set upon the native Tibetan peoples. The material result of this is often exile.

I think leftists can sometimes feel in conflict when considering how to feel about the struggle for Tibetan independence, because we see that it is something that the United States fundamentally supports as it seeks to counter rising Chinese power and influence around the world. It feels weird to me seeing the following that the Dalai Lama has had specifically with American celebrities and it feels weird to support a liberation movement that, while the United States probably doesn't materially support in any deeply substantive way, is aligned with U.S. foreign policy interests.

But this is why it's important to me to remember that, first, China is not my friend and they are not my favorite sports team in global matters. Having anarchist tendencies might inoculate me, to some extent, of coming up with rationalizations for why the state of China is somehow more virtuous or correct in the way that it represses the people who live there. It's important to understand the fundamental right of self-determination, even for people who we might not agree with, even with people who might be opposed by the enemy of my enemy. When double-checking my work about how I felt about Tibetan liberation, I read a lot of Wikipedia articles about the original treaty negotiations and the historical context for why the Communists wanted to keep this territory so much. I also read this article from 2008 by Charlie Hore in International Socialism, which was contextualized in terms of then-current protests happening in Lhasa for Tibetan independence. I won't claim to be an expert, and if you're reading this then don't take my words as replacement for your own effort, but for me it has been enough to validate my sense that self-determination is a good enough of a reason to support Tibetan liberation, just like I support liberation for minority Uyghurs in Xinjiang, just like I support Palestinian liberation.

And so, even though I didn't watch a concert movie that I particularly understood, and even though I didn't really learn that much about the specifics of the DVD's production, I still made some new connections and developed a better sense of my own worldview about a specific and important issue. While the actual movie might have felt amateurish, I'm really glad I scooped this DVD up and I hope this will not be the last time I get to play investigative journalist over a movie.

/2005/ /salvaged esoterica/