She isn’t a household name. But, she’s working for every regular Joe throughout this land. Meet Jenny Toomey, musician, artist, and political activist. As the Federal Communications Committee plans to further deregulate the bounds against complete corporate media consolidation, the public threat remains as insidious and invisible as the deliberation process within the Beltway. Ms. Toomey, however, is trying to help this cat out of the bag, and claw her way through as many homes as possible. After all, she feels that our right to access diverse and localized media is, and could be more, severely neglected.
On June 2nd, the FCC is scheduled to vote and abolish 6 of the existing media cross-ownership rules. This could mean that media moguls like Clear Channel, controlling the majority of the major radio market, could move into television and print news territory, gripping all forms of public information in their greedy little hands. Ms. Toomey feels that Chairman Michael Powell (incidentally, Colin Powell’s son) and the three republican commissioners of the FCC are on a fast-track initiative to get this done. She wants to stop them.
As a high school student, Toomey was always interested in political activism and this sprit inspired her drive to ultimately become a musical artist. During her formative years, she spent a lot of time as a card-carrying member of Positive Force. The people of Positive Force, which included activists, anarchists, politicians, punk rock runaways and assorted dissidents, met weekly and learned about organizing for social action. While in college at Georgetown University, she lived in the Positive Force house, constantly in touch with the progressive political culture.
At the same time, the Washington D.C. punk rock scene became a source of intrigue. Toomey was inherently attracted to the scene because of its overtly political nature. As a part of this scene in the late 1980’s the feminist in her wondered about the irony of this progressive scene with an overly male dominated musical landscape. In 1989, given her passion for expression and her iconoclastic drive, she formed the band Geek.
“I was a self-conscious activist before I was a self-conscious musician…music, for me, it’s speech, it’s just a form of speech, it’s like speech with extra vitamins. It gives you all these extra tools to color, to shade and put (words) in another context.”
Along the way, she met Kritsin Thomson and the dynamic duo was formed. In 1990, she and Thomson ran the nascent independent record label Simple Machines, which was as much about putting out music as it was about social responsibility.
Simple Machines was a punk experience/ partnership/record label out of a house in Arlington, VA stressing the “do it yourself” ethic with an emphasis on finding creative ways to avoid the established and boring music business bullshit. The label donated over $15,000 to a youth-at-risk house in Washington, D.C. from the 1992 Fortune Cookie Prize LP and its Neapolitan Metropolitan triple 7-inch box set included a 16-page booklet with information on alternative businesses and community-based groups working on tenants’ rights issues.
Thomson and Toomey were living in the same house where they ran Simple Machines. In that same summer of 1990 they met Andrew Webster when Toomey’s band Geek had done a three-week tour with indie legends Superchunk and Seaweed. Andrew and Jenny made fast friends and he came up to Arlington around Thanksgiving 1990 to try to form a band that could play at a New Year’s party. After enlisting the support of former housemate John Pamer to play drums, Tsunami was formed.
Tsunami went on to be a presence and inspiration for many bands in the independent music community. At the same time, however, in the parallel universe of Seattle, the independent rock scene was starting to explode. Although the explosion offered generous rewards for independent music industries, very quickly, large corporate labels recognized the market potential of this edgy culture. Thus, bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and the like were scooped up and posted as the next rock music revolution. This “revolution” in the main stream had serious effects on the health of the then thriving independent community. As Toomey remembers, “Very quickly the underground independent music community that we were a part of was cannibalized over three or four years…for the most part the major independent bands were cherry-picked into the major labels. Through that process there was a collapsing for everyone else…suddenly, the small labels do not have cash to promote young bands.”
Simple Machines too felt the effects of this independent community implosion. In fact, it was a struggle throughout the mid-90’s to achieve their goal of finishing in the black. Most independent record labels had an infamous history of ending in bankruptcy, so it became a serious mission to finish their enterprise owing nothing. Ever excelling, Ms. Toomey and Ms. Thomson accomplished this goal in 1998. Impressively, Simple Machines released 72 records from 1989-1998.
During that hairy time of the mid-90s indie infrastructure collapse, Kristin and Jenny created a 24-page guide which distilled the steps to putting out a record called the Mechanic’s Guide. In addition, they began assembling interviews with digital music experts and posting those alongside editorial position papers, assisting indie rockers in negotiating the complex realm of digital age technologies. Ultimately, this project, known as The Machine, hosted the latest political news and an updated Mechanic’s Guide, educating musicians on alternative business options as the new digital music age evolved. The project grew substantially to include interviews with musicians, lawyers, webmasters, indie-label owners, and essays about the current mingling of music, technology, policy, law and economics.
Based largely on these progressively minded tasks, Toomey and Thomson became founding members of a creative and powerful new voice for the independent music community on Capitol Hill called the Future of Music Coalition (FMC). In the fall of 2000, the FMC published a manifesto on their website. This was followed by a Policy Conference in Washington, DC in January 2001 in which over 500 activists, artists, lawyers, academics, and technology professionals gathered to debate some of the most critical issues facing the emerging music/technology environment. By organizing the independent communities, the Coalition believed it had enough muscle to provide a strong and articulate voice for artists and labels in the policy-making venues of Washington, DC.
Members of the Future of Music Coalition have toured many university and college campuses all over the US where they have helped to educate lots of folks about the critical issues at stake. The tours have also included a rock show at night with Toomey joined by local musicians and bands.
Currently, The Future of Music Coalition, of which she is the Executive Director of, is attempting to inform the public about the potential elimination of limits on media consolidation. Although much of their work is geared around raising awareness amongst musicians to take control of their future and fight for fairer business practices in the recording industry, she understands the relevance of media conglomeration, as spurred on by the 1996 Telecommunications Act, to the impact on the public’s perception of information dissemination. So, why is something so integral to our “democracy” deliberated on in such a covert way?
Jenny says, “It’s not particularly sexy, also it is not a publicly debated process, it’s something that is being done by the FCC, and what’s worse, all of the large corporations stand to gain if they can become bigger corporations, so none of the major networks are covering this…If you’re someone who is just getting your news from the five major networks you would never know about this.”
Since the 1996 Telecommunications Act passed by the FCC, Clear Channel, the world’s leading purveyor of live entertainment, has expanded from 40 stations to 1,225, exerting unprecedented control over the radio industry. Essentially, further deregulation, as proposed for June 2nd’s FCC vote, would allow for television, cable and newspaper companies to do the same. Jenny thinks, “it’s like making Rupert Murdoch’s out of everybody in the space, and making it impossible for anyone to compete. You see these people who are very successful, like Frank Levin, who runs the Seattle Times…and he is fighting against deregulation of media cross-ownership because he doesn’t want to own a television station. But, if these things change, it is pretty obvious to see down the pike that he would have to in order to compete with the size of competition.”
As Democratic FCC commissioner Michael Copps says, “Many observers say that radio now serves more to advertise the products of vertically integrated conglomerates than to inform or entertain Americans with the best and most original programming.” Jenny would agree and feels that, “the same mechanism that forces you to pay money to get on the radio is the mechanism that is advertising to support these wars, is the same mechanism that is not allowing people to voice dissent through the radio channels.”
As Dan Kramer of the BBC reports, “the Dixie Chicks were banned on American Radio. Not for the obvious reasons that their music is limp, middle of the road country, but because they dared speak out against George Dubya Bush. The band have been pulled of all Clear Channel Radio Stations and copies of their albums have been publicly burned.”
Hmmm…
Ms. Toomey is offering hope, however. In our phone conversation she energetically grounds me and makes me believe that we can do something about this deleterious cultural recession. I wonder out loud, and ask how to make it impossible for further deregulation and the inevitably harmful consequences of monopoly-like media. She assures me that there is some public influence and there are over 10,000 comments filed with the FCC. Although the three republicans commissioners are on a fast track to eliminate these regulatory rules, she exclaims, “We need to hold the line.”
“Chairman Powell is on a fast track to eliminate these rules, he is clear that we do not need to hold them, he has been very arrogant about the thousands of testimonies that have come forth saying not to do this, and he is on a fast track to do it…we need to make sure that every single person knows about this and we continue to make it impossible for them to publicly do this.”
The Future of Music Coalition is doing specific things, jenny assures me, “we are writing letters to the editor, we’re organizing major artists to come out publicly and say that this is a terrible thing, we’re trying to do things that will force the major networks to cover it.”
When I ask how this helps, she likens the process to the way in which it became politically impossible for our government officials to take tobacco money and vote in favor of their special interests. The more that people understand the implications of these internal deliberations, the less likely government officials will be a able to justify corporate media special interests and pass future legislation like the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
Our minds and future generation’s minds are at stake. Will we continue to allow public information to be controlled by behemoth corporations or will we take back our culture’s media outlets? Ask Ms. Toomey what you can do.
