Hey there, if you're listening to this and you support us on Patreon, you can hear it via the Patreon page and free. You're listening to Sound Opinions, and this week we talk with Jenny Toomey and Kristen Thompson of the band Tsunami. I'm Jim DeRogatis. And I'm Greg Cott. But first, let's review the new album from Julian Baker and Torres. Sound Opinions is supported by Goose Island since 1988. Goose Island's been brewing beers in the spirit of...
You can find 312 Weed Ale, Big Juicy Beer Hug, and so many other limited releases at either of Goose's locations in Chicago. Goose Island Beer Company, Chicago's Beer. McCrispy Strips are now at McDonald's. Tender, juicy, and its own sauce. Would you look at that? Well, you can't see it, but trust me, it looks delicious. That is a little bit of a song called Sugar in the Tank. from the first album by a pair of much-loved indie underground singer-songwriter musicians, Julian Baker and Torres.
We have talked to Greg about both of them on the show in various guises. Julian Baker, now probably best known as a member of Boy Genius, But she has been a fine, really exciting solo artist for three albums between 2015 and 2021. Born and raised in suburban Memphis, Tennessee. singing about a Christian upbringing and about her sexuality. She is gay in a relationship with her boy genius bandmate Lucy Dacus.
Mackenzie Ruth Scott who performs as Torres we've also reviewed on the show we had them on the show man what an artist six albums between 2014 and 2024. raised in the hardcore Baptist church. That is a subject that they sing about along with their own challenges growing up with an alternative sexuality in a community that didn't look kindly on that. It turns out they were playing at Lincoln Hall here in Chicago together in 2016. They were sharing the stage, different songs.
and somebody says, hey, you know, we should do a country album. And it starts as a laugh, but they realize both had this deep and abiding love for country music. Now comes Send a Prayer My Way, the first joint album by Julian Baker and Torres. We're going to play a track from it called Tuesday, and we'll come back with... That's a little bit of Tuesday from the debut album from Julian Baker and Torres, Send a Prayer My Way. You mentioned the country album that they wanted to make, circa 2016.
And there are some country music signifiers on here. We got a little pedal steel, a little banjo, dobro, fiddle, you know, some backing musicians helping them out. I will note, they spell country. in a very unique way. You know, just look it up, kids. Does it fit for the... No, it's not. But they have both done playlists of some of their favorites under this unique spelling. I have seen that playlist.
And, you know, there's some old-fashioned country themes on here. Drinking your sorrows away. We know that song. We know how that song goes. Loving your dog. Missing your dog. Missing your dog. Not just loving your dog, but missing your dog on the road. The bad thing about going on. I have to leave my dog Sylvia behind. That's what I thought at first was like, you know, there's a great love song to another person while it's about my dog.
But there's also some stuff that you don't hear on typical country records, songs about addiction and religious oppression. songs about scoring hard drugs, and unabashed love and lust between two women. Yeah. Talking about their private lives. Their voices meld beautifully. They naturally harmonize with each other. They trained lines or verses. And on the surface, this is a mainstream country record with progressive type.
The mainstream stuff sometimes can come out a little bit, you know, they verge, because a lot of contemporary country, when people think of it, they think of that sort of gimmicky, sticky. Super produced, super polished. And sugar in the tank, the single... that did pretty well has an aspect of that that's sort of like oh we're gonna you know have a little tongue-in-cheek here with this proclamation of love increasingly outlandish expressions of loyalty I really enjoy you know
when you sleep on my dead arm, you know, those kind of things. But, you know, they also take it to a new place. There's a darkness, but there's also that tongue-in-cheek humor that I really love. The only marble I've got left, that pedal steel, that country two-step, that fiddle. and hanging on to your partner to keep from going crazy. Yeah. You know, that mix of desperation and wry humor, I really like that.
There's some really deep atmospheric stuff in the middle of that record, and I think the high point for me is that song Tuesday. i i love it i love the way that that song ends for a decade i let you live in my head but with this exorcism i put our story to bed and one more thing if you hear this song Tell your mama she can go suck an egg. with this exercise. You know, that's a Torres tune, and they're singing about a same-sex relationship, and there are more.
uh, his mother, uh, vehemently disagreed. Yes. Uh, I just love, you ain't gonna hear that until that point. This is sounding like good Nashville, not bad Nashville. Well, it's interesting, Antares sort of has that humorous aspect. And then you look at some of the Baker stuff, that Tape Runs Out song. I guess Jason Molina was the inspiration. That's the other keeper on this record.
It's a nice record, but then there's these high points, and you go, wow, there's some real potential here. They're great together, and I would love to see them continue to explore that relationship. Yeah, no, I, you know, this is not my favorite genre, but I do love this record. I just kept listening and listening and listening. And, you know, they said they wanted to be Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Why not? Well, let me put it in context. We have talked about... the big mainstream
unlikely assaults on Nashville. I'm thinking, Beyonce just played two stadium shows in Chicago, sold out, or Shabuzi, right? And then there's these underground attempts to try to reclaim More underground, more under the radar attempts to try to reclaim. country music from its face. in the Nashville pop machine. And this, you know, and we can name a dozen artists who are doing that.
But this record just shot to the top of the list for me. If you don't like that, go suck an egg. That's what we thought of the new album from Julian Baker and Torres. Do you agree or disagree? Let us know in a voice message on our website. Coming up, we're going to talk with the founders of Tsunami. That's a cool one. That's in a minute on Sound Opinion. Sound Opinions is supported by Goose Island Beer Company. Since 1988, Goose Island's been brewing beers in and inspired by Chicago.
They got 312 Weed Ale, Hazy Beer Hug, and many more one-off beers at the Fulton Street Taproom or their new Salt Shed Pub. the perfect place to go before a show at the Salt Shed. Me and Andrew were there on opening night, Greg. It was really exciting. You had Rocky Mountain spotted fever, tick fever. I'm sorry about that.
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Jenny Toomey and Kristen Thompson are the founding members of the indie rock band Tsunami. Between the band, their work in political activism, and their Simple Machines record label, which they use to release their own music, as well as that of some really cool friends, Jenny and Kristen were an integral part of the DC punk scene of the 90s, and they've had interesting careers beyond the music world and that decade.
And now, Tsunami is back together. Though they never officially broke up, the band's last studio album came out in 1997. But last year, our friends at the Numero Group released a comprehensive Tsunami box set, and the band recently wrapped up a month-long U.S. tour. So we had to start by asking Jenny and Kristen if the release by Numero was the impetus for this run-up show.
It was definitely Numero. Numero were the ones who put the sort of bug in our ear about this. And I don't think we were really sure we wanted to do anything. And we just thought about it for a couple of years. At one of these parties that we have every year where Tsunami all come together and we have a sleepover and we play Kariki and we, you know, do all this fun stuff for a weekend every year. We just pulled some amps out and started playing to see like, is it even possible for us to do this?
I don't want to say that it sounded that great, but there was a little spark of something. And so, you know, we learned enough songs to play at numero 20, and then we decided to do the box set. The rest is the next chapter of our history. You know, knowing a little bit about bands, people tell me that, you know, when they are asked to do older songs that they haven't played in a while, they're like, what was that chord again? What was I playing?
And you guys never... did like conventional kind of chord shapes and and song arrangements I always thought that you had your own sound so my question is almost 30 years on Was it hard to relearn, relearn, quote unquote, those songs? Yes. I need to put it. To put it bluntly, the other sort of fun part about Tsunami's history is that we never really wrote anything down as far as chords, good car tours, or anything like that.
So the documentation of what we were playing was pretty slim. There was only a few, you know, YouTube posted videos of us playing live shows. Where we, you know, oh, look, it looks like what I'm doing on this song at CB's in 1993. That's helpful. So we've learned a little bit from just watching videos that other folks took. And then also... Spending some time in the recording studio trying to pull things apart for us to discern who was playing what.
But once we got past that initial rediscovery of what the songs were, a lot of things came kind of flooding back like, oh, yes, this is how it goes. And it's been really fun, actually, to have enough time to not only relearn them, but also just, I think. of get better at them because we have enough time to just dedicate to practicing to make sure they sound really good.
Well, we kind of breeze past the box set, right? This thing, though, is a thing of beauty. Oh, my God. Between the color booklet and the writings and what? Five LPs, 11 seven inches, some four-track demos. I mean, wow. hard scrabble punk band you know everybody's living together loading your own gear in the back of the car or the van you know did you ever think you'd have a document like this someday in the future you couldn't
not one that we didn't make ourselves. I mean, I think that's the amazing thing, because Tsunami and Simple Machines really put a high premium on... Making everything we did really beautiful and special a lot of like handmade things hand silk screened cutouts all sorts of exciting stuff and different than what other people did. so to get something that is like on the same level of of let's say our box set for the the working holiday series
was also a thing of beauty that Kristen was in charge of making beautiful. It was just so great to be able to work with. people who cared as much as we cared back in the day to make something really, really unique and special. And like everything, like getting to do the oral history part. talking to all the friends and members, getting women journalists that we really respected to write essays about the different records. The whole process was just... remarkably fun. It's very comprehensive.
Did you look at it and go, wow, we did that? Like, was there surprises along the way as you were kind of like reinvestigating your past? I think the most surprising thing is that parallel to this project, we've been trying to reconstruct our tour history and we have just like a Google spreadsheet of shows and some of it is reconstructed from old tour itineraries and like random flyers and things like that and
You look back and you're like, how did we possibly play this many shows while also running a working holiday series in the same year that we also did Lollapalooza? I mean, for me, it's like the overwhelming amount of things we were jamming into our schedule. very youthful schedule at that time especially pre-internet because a lot of stuff was like phone calls and postcards and mailing things around so for me that's the most astounding part of revisiting
I don't know how people toured before there were cell phones. Nope, we used that special technology of Atlas. to figure out how to get across the country. It was fun though, an adventure. You know, you're Lewis and Clark going across the great... You know, American continent, you know. Oh yeah, there are books, really big books that I will never read again. But you know, when you're driving between Chicago and Seattle.
wherever it was, you're like, get that infinite jest out from underneath the crate of beer and let's get a couple chapters read, you know. I'm so glad, Jenny, you mentioned that before I had a chance to, because David Foster Wallace, what a song. There's always a literary bet to Tsunami. I mean, How can Greg and I not love you? Above and beyond Foster Wallet, you have a song called Newspaper, right? You guys always seem
to love to read. And I think with the long legacy you both have as political activists, right? I mean, it's all tied up. I mean, in DC, in those days when tsunami was coming together. You know, there's discord, there's Teen Beat, Riot Grrrl is exploding. You know, it's like, no, you weren't allowed to sit on the sidelines. You better be informed, you better read, you better care.
because this music is part of the world it's not a hobby yeah well i mean we did grow up in that i grew up in that water uh and the dc punk scene was very political a lot of that was because like our parents were working at the World Bank or in government or were editors at the Washington Post. Ian McKay always talks about DC as being a company town and the company is the government and it's just the water you swim in. And I always say like every single protest.
We'll start in D.C. There will always be the marches. Every single a non-profit organization from the aclu to the unions to you know the nwcp they're all going to have their main offices in washington so all of that stuff was happening all the time and that politics was just part of what we did. And then, of course, we also met each other through positive force. which was a news-led political.
activist organization that did all sorts of kinds of things, but also put on lots of shows like 50% of the punk rock shows got put on as benefits in DC. So it was just part of how we lived, you know? The scene was already well established, an amazing scene in DC. You mentioned Ian McKay, you know, Fugazi before that minor threat.
great bands for a decade plus in the underground and establishing a scene. How did you two fit in? Or how did you see yourselves fitting in? Because you founded the band and quickly founded a label to put stuff out on. You were right into that DIY thing from the start. It seemed like there was very little hesitation on your part to get really deeply involved. And you mentioned
the positive force thing too, as well, the activism. It all seemed to be together right from the start in terms of how the band approached things. The beginning of Simple Machines always gets crushed together a little bit. A lot happened in those first few years and, you know, Positive Force, that organization.
started at my high school like one of the first meetings i ever went to was when i was like in 10th grade so like the dccn always had optics running through it and Then as soon as I got old enough to go to college, I moved into the Positive Force House. and that
Stuff happened for about two years before Kristen joined the picture. I'd started Simple Machines with Derek Denkla and Brad Siegel. And then when they went off to do other things, Kristen came in and sort of the Simple Machines that most people think about or know. came from that moment with us all together. With regards to the The politics like Everybody was a friend. By that, I don't think we were all best friends, but when we needed to learn how to do something, you'd go over and...
Ian would show you how to do something or Jeff would show you how to do something. When you needed suggestions where you might tour, some of these other folks would have already been on tour and they'd say, oh, here's the person we go to in Austin or whatever. But then Kristen came to DC for exactly that same purpose. She came because of the politics of the city. And we found each other very quickly through positive force.
I mean, it was about two or three weeks after I moved to D.C. to work at the National Organization for Women. The reason I was in DC, but... I saw a flyer for a show that Positive Force was organizing with Fugazi, shot her to think in Jawbox. And I was like, I think I'll go to that. And Jenny was the person that was in between the bands sort of talking about the beneficiaries for the show and about positive force. And so I immediately went to the table and signed up for the next thing.
So we were pretty much in each other's orbits almost immediately because of that. But just to add on to what Jenny said about the community aspect of DC. Yes, absolutely. Discord was, you know.
Always a great example of how to operate a label, how to treat people fairly, customers, everybody, the bands. I mean, they were a paragon of that. But we also had our friends at Teen Beat and our friends at... slumberland and we were oftentimes sort of trading information or seeking their advice or working on projects together like little
Not little. Well, we did this, you know, weekend festival called Lots of Pop Losers in 1991. And you look at the bands now and you're like, oh, those are all our friends. And it was like a Summerland, Teen Simple Machines collaboration. And so there was oftentimes a lot of intermixing of all the musicians and friends and bands that were in the DC region. I really do feel like there's some through line that continues. Like there's often moments where people think about like a glory day of...
the time but like when i think about the bands that are playing in dc now like the hammered holes and the desdemonas and the bad moves and mary timoney there's so many great bands there's usually some political or feminist element to them still. And people are still helping each other. Like when Kristen had to figure out how do we take everything that's in like 20 suitcases worth of archives and begin to start organizing them, the first person she spoke with was Ian, who's been doing
like this incredible project of documenting everything to do with Discord and his own archive. And it's just amazing that those connections are still there. Well, like you said, it's like it never ended. And hence, you know, why it didn't end, you guys, is because you paid it forward. An introductory mechanics guide to putting out records, cassettes, and CDs. A pamphlet, which I still believe I have a copy of. I was telling Jim earlier, I think I still have a copy of that.
That was like a guidebook to how to do stuff. Simple Machines Mechanics Guide. Yeah, and an amazing thing. What motivated you to do that? Because it's such an essential part of what I think of 90s indie and beyond. The origin story of it originally was a record that Discord put out.
that i think they're reissuing i think because of the 40-year anniversary but it was a benefit record and it had a booklet inside it and in that booklet was like how to make a flyer how to put on a show and and we did the how to put out a record part and a friend of ours who ran meat records helped us put the sort of basic recipe of that together.
But then, Kristin, you want to talk about why we kept it in print for so many years? Yeah, so the State of the Union album that Discord put out, which was like a compilation benefit record, came out probably in 1988, probably. By the time I got to DC in 89-90, for a while it was like a stapled sort of handout. But Sassy Magazine, which was a girly magazine in the early 90s, oftentimes had these columns where they would highlight something. And sometimes it was the sassiest boy in America.
fanzine of the month. And so they approached us after doing a few fanzines that were written by people we knew, like Toby Vale's fanzine and stuff like that. they wanted to talk about the mechanics guide. And we had heard that expect to get hundreds of letters if you are listed in SASE. So in preparation for that, we... converted it into the booklet that people mostly know it as and we made it you know something that
had, you know, staples and we could put the address right on the back. So we were trying to prepare ourselves for the fact that we were going to get a lot of letters if we were in SASE. Which we were. And we did get about 700 letters from Sassy Readers. So it was easy for us to sort of quickly address that, put the stamps on that they had sent us or given us the money for and be able to respond quickly to everybody that sent us a letter.
was part of the simple machines offerings for many years we did like maybe four editions over time slightly amended it and uh You know, it was just one of the things that simple machines did. You know, when I talk to my students about how easy it is to start a blog, and how they'll never know the pain in the palm of your hand from stapling 700. You know, I still, it's like a ghost limb. I feel it now from having done Fancy.
You know, the downside of being a rock critic is you don't get to go back and live in music that you love that's old. You're always moving forward, right? Oh, but I got a good excuse. We're talking to Kristen and Jenny. I can live in this numero box for a couple of weeks. You know how... far ahead of your time that music was. We haven't talked a lot about the music, but the guitar interplay,
and the rhythms, that lyrical wit. We have been raving, Greg and I, about the Horse Girl album that just came out. I mean, I hear your influence in so many places today. Certainly a lot of bands that are fronted by young women, formed by young women, but in general. But it seems like you were just a little ahead of your time.
Right? Two or three years later, all that alternative rock money from the majors, you know, I mean, the Melvins were getting signed to a major label. God, I can't believe that time ever happened, right? Do you feel that as you look back and had the chance to consider all of this wonderful music on the box set? What else might have been for Tsunami?
Well, you know, I think people regret things they didn't do and I feel like we really did everything we wanted to do and left it on the table. There were moments where A&R people... you know major people reached out to us but we were never that interested and that we were much like we're more like we were best friends with super chunk right and they're one of the few bands that just sort of kept doing it their own way
So no, I don't feel that. It's nice to think that people are going to get a chance to listen to the music again because we have exactly like what they call the first movers problem which is like we were the first people to think about these internet issues and so we did a little bit of work on them and then we went off and had these completely different careers and so like you know Ken from Numero
Justin was teething us mercilessly about how completely disorganized and unavailable our music runs on the internet. considering the fact that we were like people who are at the front end trying to think about, think through these kinds of issues. You were in no rush to put it all out there to give it away for free. You know, I mean, at least when you were selling it from the back of the van, you were getting five bucks.
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don't think it was even that thoughtful. Like, if I have any regrets, I wonder if the internet had been a little bit more developed.
like say five years before we decided to close the label whether we would have been able to continue to do the work because we could have worked more remotely and we could have worked more from the road because a lot of what made it impossible to be successful was having to come home and service the records that were our friend's records when the one thing that was bringing the most money in and us touring.
Right. So it just became like a little bit of a Sophie's Choice, you know, between whether we served our friends or whether we sustained ourselves. And we ended up with like really crappy jobs.
you know working double time and feeling exhausted and and also like that time you talked about with the melvins i mean you know maybe the melvins deserve to be on a major label i i like to listen to them But I always call that period the chump days where, you know, since everybody was getting a deal, everybody felt like they were a chump if they didn't get a deal, which changed all of the dynamics because
People stopped focusing on the things they could do themselves, and they were focusing mostly on how to attract capital, you know? And it just made everything feel a little bit, I don't know. awful. In a minute, we'll continue our conversation with Jenny Toomey and Kristen Thompson. That's coming up on Sound Opinions. And we are back. We're talking with Jenny Toomey and Kristen Thompson of Tsunami.
As we mentioned earlier in the show, the band's last studio album came out in 1997, and we wanted to know what led them to essentially step away from the project after that release. Your swan song album was called A Brilliant Mistake and it's an incredible critique of what you were seeing happen to indie and the music industry in general. What I love about your story, you alluded to this earlier, Jenny, you didn't even have a thought about
you know, presenting it to some label A&R guy and saying, could you please sign us and put this record out? It was just completely off your radar. And then that started to happen, I guess, which ended up being the brilliant mistake that you're critiquing there, right? I assume I'm reading that correctly. And then I saw a great quote from you the other day where you were talking about the demise of the band. Why did you break them up? And you said, we got bored. It was just boring.
You know, it wasn't fun anymore, right? I mean, that's essentially it. What happened at that point? So yes, Greg, I mean, I won't speak for Jenny on the actual lyrics about Brilliant Mistake, but I think that what she said a few minutes ago about us being... really spread thin. That brilliant mistake is a reflection of us trying to manage, do a really good job of being in a fun band, write interesting things, but also serve the record label well.
navigate the changing landscape of the music industry and the sort of indie music economy, which was really, I mean, what we were just talking about is true, but there was just so many things going on because major label versions of how things operate, you know. PR, radio airplay, blah, blah, blah. All that stuff was filtering down and there was an indie version of it. And so you're trying to always figure out what do we do? What should we be engaging with?
And for simple machines and tsunami, we were always defaulting to, we can do it ourselves. figure it out but there's at some point you just run out of time or energy or knowledge or everything and so I think brilliant mistake kind of captures that moment in time where it was not only about simple machines and tsunami but also about the music economy changing as the internet's just bubbling up and what's going to happen.
It's interesting to take this one step past 1997 and tsunami, but what Johnny and I did right after that, before Future Music Coalition was... to start to talk to indie labels like our friends at Kill Rockstars and our friends at Merge about like, how are you dealing with this thing called the internet? Are you going to make a website? Are you going to put your stuff up online? You know, like there were all these brand new questions.
And so I think Tsunami is kind of the end of 1997-98 was like the moment where the internet started to seem like it might actually affect how indie labels and bands work. So that, I don't know. I'm just saying that we just rolled that right into bigger questions. That's what I think about. Well, obviously you both were working for Future of Music Coalition, and Jenny, you really were the face of that organization for a long time.
Neither of you is there anymore, but obviously you still follow where music is going. So what's the perspective today? I mean, in a lot of ways, the alt-feeding frenzy was crazy, right? I mean, who cared if Geffen drove a dump truck full of money, up to Urge Overkill's crash pad and dumped it out. They spent it. They lived large. They had a great time. And then they were back working as bartenders and that jiffy lube again, okay? But today, what you did, what Discord did, what TeamBeat did,
You know, selling those records lovingly made in the beautiful artwork, Kristen, you did from the back of the van. You know, it was real DIY and you could sustain yourself. Nobody was getting rich. but you could break even or slightly better and be generous to your friends by helping them put out their record and do their t-shirt. Today, nobody's making a dime.
On any... I mean, Lady Gaga is. But that's it. That whole major label thing is gone. They've sunk into the tar pits and good riddance to them. But wow, it's harder than ever to be indie because aside from playing the gig and getting the 30 bucks, That's the only money you're making. Yeah, the market has been incredibly concentrated and the power of big tech has completely diminished the value of artistic labor.
this is not just happening in music music was the canary in the coal mine but we saw it happen right in the newspapers right after that and now we've seen it happen in every place i mean um like the numbers tell the story so spotify apple amazon and google control 97 percent of screaming subscriptions right this is such a concentrated market. And it's really like the company store, because if you're not on those places,
you're not considered a real band. This is something that was a real eye-opening event for us. We haven't played music together in years and we hadn't even thought about putting a tour together. And realizing that we need a certain number of Instagram followers in order to be considered a legitimate band to get a show is just insane to me. So it's really like...
My first song for my first band Geek was called Horasure, and it was about how women had to use sexist language, you know, words that were created by men and that were blatantly sexist in order to speak. And I really do feel like that's the exact same structure that musicians are existing in right now, where they actually have to work with their abusers in order to get their music out into the world for people to see it.
What's so sad about it is it really doesn't have to be this way. It never had to be this way. And the reason why we spent so much time at Future of Music working on what was going to come in the future was because we wanted to influence. what it would be and Unfortunately, it's become way worse than anything I ever. imagined it would be, making everything extractive and transactional in culture instead of additive and generative, the way the internet was originally supposed to be.
So I don't think it's necessarily stuck here. I think it could change and get better. And oftentimes you see in history things. get really really bad and then people turn things around and make things better uh and i'm hoping that something like that happens but we really are at a very very bleak dark moment where
The very, very fewest musicians can actually sustain themselves. You were addressing that right from the start, I remember, when Future Music Coalition started, thanks to you two. It was, uh... an amazing opportunity. I talked the Tribune into sending me. I think I went to just about every one because I knew this was going to be important. I remember a Columbia Records executive calling me up in like circa 98. What's an mp3 file?
I said, well, you better learn because this is coming really fast. Then Napster happens. You start this thing. And it's an amazing cross-section of music, the music industry, the tech industry, government policy. It was exactly what people needed in the music world. That wasn't happening. Those discussions weren't happening anywhere else, as far as I could tell, on that sort of level.
where you bring in these people. And I remember the great promise there, just a sense of optimism about what this could be, because essentially, you know, in its most idealized form, the Internet's leveling the playing field. and suddenly making everybody putting everybody on an equal plane. And then I remember meeting this guy, Daniel Eck, at...
Future of Music Coalition a few years later. I haven't heard this story. Have you met Satan? I met the Antichrist, and I actually thought Spotify was quite cool for a while. you know, a number of years. And I have to admit, I still use it. It's incredibly useful in a lot of ways, but it is an awful corporation as much as Columbia or Sony or whoever it was back in the day. Amazon, Google. But that feeling that this could be
this could be amazing, was there, right? Like at the start, like we can do this. And this is actually a good thing for a lot of bands, right? I mean, that seemed to be in the air around circa 2000, 2001. Yes, I think there were moments of promise and it was interesting to straddle the two different versions of it with simple machines, you know, putting together seven inches, like, you know, physically taking whole bins of packages to the post office and like a lot of.
tactile letter related commerce. The thing that I think was the most fascinating, I remember just being astounded, was when Apple created the iTunes Music Store and they, after the sort of initial launch, when they invited the independent labels. to Cupertino to roll out a sort of a wider place where people like indie labels could participate in it.
And the things that were like really struck me were everybody's getting all songs are the same price. So there was sort of this equitable sheen on it. And X, you know, you get about 70% of whatever. which seemed like a nice number and then also like the grind of trying to get paid back in the day like calling the distributor okay you owe us x number of dollars for those seven inches i sent you all that stuff kind of faded away when it was all just became a sort of uh digital transactions
sent through a digital distributor. So there's some benefits of having it all convert into this like iTunes music store. But that version of it where there was like a discrete, like download a seven inch or download an album for an equivalent amount of money, right? Those quickly got surpassed or superseded by the streaming platforms that we are familiar with now. But there was like that 10-year period where the iTunes Music Store... was a really interesting example of how things could shift.
But, you know, we could tell that the streaming version was about to overtake it just because of the convenience of it all. Are you on top, Kristen, of how many streams Loud is? has gotten so far in the box set. I mean, we can... sort of see it on things like Spotify, but we don't know the total numbers only because we haven't really focused on it. I've just wondered a number of streams versus like, have you made a dime?
Oh, not sure yet. It's only been a couple of months. Um, so we'll see. I mean, I think, I think that the loudest ass box set is a success in a number of ways already. I mean, What Jenny said earlier about us working with Numero, with the writers, with the friends who are photographers, just the assembling of the box was amazing, super fun. We scanned thousands of things from our archives and Jenny's suitcases just to put it all together.
so that was super fun to revisit things but also the fact that we were able to compile it and have it just as serve as like a you know, a really comprehensive version of Tsunami is great already. So I'm just glad it's out there. Yeah, it's a very DC punk way of thinking about it. The record exists in the world now, and so we have achieved our goal.
I want to go back change that you were asking about for a second for a couple reasons maybe you can actually help me because peter decola i don't know if you remember peter Greg from the Future Music Coalition, but he was our friend who was getting an economics and law degree during the times we were starting Future Music Coalition. Peter and I just wrote an op-ed to try to support Chapel Rhone when she so bravely stood up and said, like, I was dropped, I lost health insurance.
the labels need to do better but of course what we're saying is like they're just like the operators who are like enforcing the mafias you know like the mafia is the problem they're like the street guy who's like shaking somebody down but the mafia is like these companies that completely devalued artistic labor and he did a little bit of of his magical economics research and he proved that basically like if those Four companies that I mentioned, Spotify, Apple, Amazon, and Google.
paid about 5% of their music streaming revenue, it could cover health insurance and resources for all the artists, right? So this idea that somehow it's impossible for us to build a system that would be more respectful and supportive of the musicians that are actually... engaging in the labor and creating the art.
It's just wrong. There was all sorts of problems that you guys raised. The whole fact that copyright law hadn't been updated. There was a number of fascinating discussions about it. And yet... It's still not updated. So we have all these problems still continuing. 20 years on, Future of Music was exactly the kind of organization that enabled at least a discussion to start to take place and put these ideas out there.
But is there any cause for optimism now about what's happening? Because basically a new boss, same as the old boss. What is the future of music right now, in your opinion?
I think it goes back to what I was saying before, which is like, so I heard an interview about some kids who created like a community where you can create like i don't know lists for all your different communities and it's a way to like know what's going on because one of the biggest problems with the algorithm is like if i tell you that tsunami is playing on these dates you might get that in your feed, you might not get it in your feed and you might get it a week later, right?
And so this kid started something called FreakScene. And I don't know. I mean, when these things get big, that's when they get capital and that's when they make transactional decisions and things get worse. But there's no reason why people can't create competitors. and particularly filling market gaps. And there's a huge market gap for knowing what's happening in your communities.
so that made me very excited you know i i want all the tsunami shows to be on freak scene now you know like i i think we have to create competing systems and we have to incentivize imagining and getting away from allowing just a handful of people to determine what we see and how we see it. That's what I think was so valuable about future music, is there was a place where you could have these conversations among like-minded people, people who are thinking the same thing.
So how do you do that now in this environment? You know, you would need a certain amount of, if freak scene is to succeed, it would need. sort of a number of people advocating, right? Going out and saying, you got to use this and let's spread the word, you know? How do we do that? And them not selling out. Yeah, I mean, it's not usually even selling out. It's because they run into a problem, you know, like a bunch of, you know.
a pedophile ring decides that freak scene is a great way to do something and then they actually need to bring in you know then there are lawsuits or then they need to bring in capital or whatever so you can see how these things this is the same thing with major labels right like artists can be a certain way and then when they get to a certain size suddenly they need someone who's servicing them to commercial radio they need somebody who is you know
negotiating with Ticketmaster, whatever it is. This is not a new set of problems, but without a new set of options, we are just Continuing to allow a calcification of a kind of asymmetry of power, which always ensures that artistic value will become less.
valuable you will become more dependent uh you know more vulnerable in relation to these systems and so i don't know i've had another job for many many years i haven't sat down and thought about this actively but you know if you just look at history there are moments where people can't even imagine that something will change I mean like the the idea that the internet even was created is amazing because you know had
Had AT&T, who had such a monopoly, known that by putting a modem on their phone lines, it would create a competition that would have undermined long-distance phone calls, it would never have happened, right? So who knows? I think that the next generation of kids aren't as bedazzled by tech. I think the reason we've had such a bad last 20 years is because the people in power.
are not tech natives and they're afraid of it. And so they've been kicking the can over and over again and deferring to the technical people. And those technical people have huge... I'd say you, I don't want to say. emotional gaps, but people who have only studied engineering and only tried to solve technical problems have missed out on a wealth of humanities.
that we all had to study at one point that actually helped you contextualize like second order effects and third order effects, et cetera, of how you design a technology. So I don't know. I think these new kids aren't going to be as... Bedazzled and... and mesmerized.
they will just see it as the water they're swimming in and they're going to want cleaner water. The real thing I worry about though is this precarity because we came up under a right system that said, you know, you've got freedom of expression, you've got the right to protest, you've got all these kinds of things.
And you have a right to go to school and you can get a cheap loan and go to college. There was a sense that if you worked, you could succeed. I think that sense is going away a little bit. that means we're gonna have kids who are better prepared to take on these tech problems but i hope they Hold on to the kinds of
rights that they haven't been able to enjoy and they fight to make sure that those rights are re-established in this new environment. I don't know. We have been talking to Jenny Toomey and Kristen Thompson of Tsunami. Loud is as Loud does to give the box set its full title. What an accomplishment. Thank you so much for spending some time with us.
Thank you. Thank you. God. That's it for our conversation with Jenny Toomey and Kristen Thompson of Tsunami. Now we want to hear from you. What did you think of the Tsunami box set? Did you see any of the reunion shows, or were you there back in the day? Tell us about it in a voice message on our website, soundopinions.org. Mr. Cott, what is on the show next week?
Next week, Jim, we're going to revisit our conversation with Jo Sobial. She passed away recently. What a fantastic artist and a great conversation. Great she was. And she did a few tunes for us. And don't forget to check out our bonus podcast feed wherever you get your podcasts. And join us on Patreon for our Monday podcast.
everything else. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this program belong solely to Sound Opinions and not necessarily to Columbia College Chicago or our sponsors. Thanks as always to our Patreon supporters. This episode of Sound Opinions was produced by Max Hatlam with help from Alex Claiborne and Andrew Gill. Our business development manager is Gary Yonker. Our Columbia College intern is Joe Pennington. And our social media consultant is Katie Cott.