Behind the music

kd lang speaks out on Tibet (full interview)

Behind the music
For someone who says she's not a political person, k.d. lang has no trouble speaking her mind
by Jen Zoratti,Uptown Magazine

Although k.d. lang has a new, big-deal record to promote - the recently released Watershed marks her first collection of original material in eight years - the four-time Grammy winner is focusing her attention on Tibet.


The 46-year-old singer/songwriter made headlines in late April when she made a special trip to Canberra, Australia to join pro-Tibetan demonstrators protesting the Beijing 2008 Olympic torch relay as it made its way through the Australian capital. She also spent time in Melbourne as a guest editorialist for The Age, another forum in which she worked to raise awareness about human-rights issues in the repressed country.

Although "Free Tibet" has been a rallying cry among many musicians over the years - a certain trio of white rappers from New York and its groundbreaking Tibetan Freedom Concert series in the late '90s immediately comes to mind - lang has personal reasons for speaking up for Tibet.

"I'm a Tibetan buddhist, that's foremost," she says matter-of-factly, over the phone. "And I have a lot of Tibetan friends. So it's my job, in a way, to be a voice of the Tibetan people."

The upcoming Olympic games in Beijing has certainly put an amplified spotlight on China's spotty human-rights track record - Google 'Beijing Olympics' and see what pops up - but Beijing isn't the first host city to endure international criticism. The 1936 Olympics, hosted by Berlin during the rise of Nazi Germany, faced a boycott by the U.S. Sixty-two countries didn't participate in the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, most protesting the 1979 Soviet invaison of Afghanistan. Over 20 African countries withdrew from the 1976 games in Montreal, protesting New Zealand's rugby ties with South Africa.

And who could forget the 1972 Olympics in Munich, in which 10 Israeli athletes and a coach were murdered by a Palestinian terrorist group?

lang says the Olympic Games has a more political past that some care to admit.

"I think the Olympics has, historically, been a political platform," lang says. "This is no exception, especially with a country who's been historically very cryptic and don't want people questioning their human-rights practices. And it's the Chinese government, not the Chinese people."

Still, there's many that would - and do - argue that sports and politics don't mix.

"That's not true," she says, simply. "Politics is people. The Olympics is the perfect place. I don't think it's necessarily the athletes themselves - they aren't hurling their politics back and forth with the tennis ball - but when you carry the torch through a country that's repressed, you make yourself open to commentary."

It would be easy to assume that lang is political in all areas of her life - and indeed, her storied music career has been punctuated with bold acts of activism, both intentional and unconscious.

When lang exploded onto the Canadian music scene in the mid-'80s and came out as a lesbian shortly thereafter, the gay community quickly embraced her as its own. Although being an openly gay musician wasn't necessarily a political move by lang, posing on the cover of Vanity Fair in a barber's chair while supermodel Cindy Crawford shaved her face with a straight razor certainly was.

Then there's the notable furor she caused in her home province of Alberta with her Meat Stinks! animal-rights campaign in the early '90s.

Incredibly, as pioneering as lang has been, none of her politics make it into her music.

"I don't use my music to voice my politics - I don't think of myself as a political person," lang says. "I have passions that become political - whether it's my sexuality, or my eating habits or my religion. I think music itself should transcend all those things. I've never used it to promote my gayness, necessarily. Music is about the listeners' relationship with the music."

So while her latest effort, the stunning Watershed, doesn't get political in the social-issues sense, it certainly gets personal. A milestone in her exceptional 25-year career, Watershed is the first record that lang has produced - as well as written and performed - entirely on her own.

Serving as a follow-up to 2004's critically lauded Hymns of the 49th Parallel - an album on which lang lent her pipes to tunes by fellow Canadian songwriters such as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell - Watershed is a revealing album that sees lang flex her muscles as a songwriter, not just as a singer.

"I wrote over the period from 2001 to 2007," lang says. "I really took my time. It's a culmination of all the things I've touched before. I've gathered all my favourite sounds and genres and mixed them all into one."