At Dan’s Tunes, we work to bring you a comprehensive picture of the Seattle music scene, and musical artists are a big part of that. But, an album doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It takes a whole host of people to bring a musician’s vision to life. In our new series, “Behind the Scene,” we’re taking a look at all of the people who are integral to the process of making music that you probably haven’t heard of before — from producers and radio DJs to vinyl cutters and photographers. Our goal is to make the series both educational and a resource for artists looking to expand their teams. Today, we’re chatting with Eva Walker.

There are few names more ubiquitous in Seattle music than Eva Walker. Coming onto the scene as the frontwoman of The Black Tones — the punk rock project she fronts alongside her twin brother, Cedric — Walker has since carved herself out a uniquely PNW niche. She hosts KEXP NW segment Audioasis, is on the board of Keep Music Live WA, has worked on local festivals like Refill and Fisherman’s Village, and is the content producer for “Video Bebop,” a PNW music video TV series hosted by both Walkers. New episodes air every second Saturday of the month on The Seattle Channel.

I sat down with Walker to talk about how “Video Bebop” came to be, how she chooses the videos for each episode, and what makes a good submission. Below is our interview, edited for length and clarity.

What is “Video Bebop?”

It’s a Northwest music video TV show. It’s basically the music video version of Audioasis. We collect music videos from artists from the NW, but we try to make Seattle the prominent city because [the show is] on The Seattle Channel. We want to include Washington state; Oregon; Vancouver, B.C.; Idaho — just as many NW artists as we can.

My husband [Jake Uitti], who’s a writer, would get a lot of people submitting music videos to him, and he was saying how there’s not really an outlet for music videos anymore. I also get people submitting music videos to me for Audioasis. I’m like, this is a radio show. The best I can do is put it on the Audioasis Facebook page. The internet is the size of the universe —  maybe bigger — and things kind of get lost in space. So his idea was to create an outlet specifically for music videos. It’s like Seattle’s MTV. The idea was to create something that was a staple specifically for music videos, for visual art. 

Why do you think it’s important to provide a platform for music videos?

Because I love music videos. I was born in 1989. When MTV stopped playing music videos, I was heartbroken. I was like, what is all this reality TV? This is ridiculous. The idea was to bring music videos back to television. Of course, we’re in 2020, so the show’s also online. But we thought it was important to bring that medium back for music videos — where they originated from, being on tv.

But also there’s a lot of amazing visual creators. There’s a lot of amazing directors. There’s a lot of amazing actors. There’s a lot of amazing dancers. There’s a lot of amazing visual artists, and that deserves a platform as much as the audio does. If people have a music video, why not put them in one medium where people know they can find them, instead of going into this infinite space of the internet and hoping you run into it and not know what you’re missing? We get to curate that and put it in one place. So that’s the purpose, to give visual artists and contributors a platform they can’t get on radio. That’s “Video Bebop.”

How’d you come up with the name “Video Bebop”?

We got connected to CW 11 through our friends at “Band in Seattle” because they used to be on CW. We shot a pilot, and CW 11 sent it to CBS in New York, and they liked it. They said yes. When we were filming the pilot, they had scripts for us, but the scripts didn’t really flow. I was saying things I wouldn’t really say. It wasn’t really believable. We didn’t really like the pilot that much. Instead, we were like, let’s look for a station that will provide us the broadcast space, but we get creative control. We thought of our good friend Nancy Guppy and The Seattle Channel.

When we had to come up with a name when we were still at CW 11, I was sitting in our kitchen in our apartment looking through a thesaurus trying to find synonyms for “music” and” image” or “videos.” I was like, we can keep the “video” part because it is music videos. And another synonym for “music” is “bebop.” I really liked the word “bebop.” I had several titles, and “Video Bebop” just stuck out. I was like, this is awesome, this is the one. And CW 11 shot that down. I was like, what? So after we separated from them, we had a meeting with The Seattle Channel, and I was like, the show is called “Video Bebop!” And they were like, that’s awesome. 

How do you go about curating the episodes?

The first two episodes were already filmed before the show was announced. We try to do five videos per episode, so I had to reach out to 10 artists confidentially and say, “Hey, my colleagues and I have a TV show we’re doing. We cannot tell anyone about it yet. We’d like to use your music video, is that okay? I have nothing to show you right now because nothing is shot, but just trust me, it’s good.” We wanted to have really good good good stuff even though they didn’t really know who we were or what “Video Bebop” was. Luckily, they trusted us.

After the first two episodes aired, the submissions just went vrooooom. Now people have an outlet to submit music videos. I look through every submission. All of them. My colleagues look through them, but Danny [Denial] and Alia [D’Alessandro]’s main job is directing and editing, and they film it. All the ones that didn’t make the cut, just delete the email and respond like, “This didn’t make the cut, but, please, I encourage you to keep sending.” I mean, The Black Tones — I don’t know how many times we submitted to KEXP over like 10 years and got nos, until we got a yes. So it’s like, don’t stop submitting.

What makes a video acceptable vs. rejectable?

We want content that’s really different and that stands out. Because it’s a video, we want the quality to be somewhat good. I know that’s sort of classist because not everyone can afford certain cameras. But we want it to be somewhat TV ready. We have to have some kind of standard on it.

On top of that, it can’t be offensive. Does it interest us? Do we like the way it sounds? Do we think it looks cool? This is me doing Audioasis in video form. As far as FCC regulations — if the video is that good — I scan through the videos, and then I tell the editors at what time they need to black certain words out. We won’t not play a video because there’s FCC violations because we can edit those out. Now if there’s too many, we don’t want the whole video to be beep beep beep beep. So we won’t play it if it’s too many. And if it’s hate music, we’re not going to play it.

The Black members of the team — Cedric, Danny, and I — had a conversation about how we feel about the n-word being said on the show. The n-word is not an FCC violation, believe it or not. We ended up coming to the conclusion that we would bleep out the n-word. It was nothing because we wanted to suppress rappers or anything like that. I am a very big defender of rap music. I think it’s very, very important to American culture.

What are the FCC regulations?

For television and radio, there’s seven main words you can’t say. Not all of them are curse words. The only curse words are “fucker,” “motherfucker,” and “shit.” You can actually say “bitch,” “damn,” “ass,” “hell,” “God damn,” and the n-word. Some of the regulations are considered obscenities, and that’s why you can’t say them. You can’t say “tits.” You can’t say “cock,” “cock sucker,” or “pussy.” I don’t get why “tits” is one. You can say “dick,” but you can’t say “cock.” So those we have to bleep out. If the person’s face is being shown as they’re saying the word, then we mute the word and put a “Video Bebop” logo over their mouth. 

Also, signage. There’s a Perry Porter video we played on the show. Perry Porter is incredible. I haven’t met him yet, and I want to and just fangirl. So we play the Perry Porter video, because Perry Porter exists, so you play the Perry Porter video. In his video, there was a sign that said “fuck” in the background, so we covered that with a “Video Bebop” logo.

Some stuff is debatable, like sometimes you can show butts, and sometimes you can’t. Since it’s The Seattle Channel, we try to just steer away from it. If there’s signage or visual issues, we’ll cover it with a “Video Bebop” symbol. All of that, though, won’t disqualify a video from being played. That’s just not enough to not play it if it’s that good.

Is there anything that would disqualify a video besides hate speech or too many FCC violations?

That’s mainly it, but also if it’s just not good. I hate saying that because that’s all relative, but “Video Bebop,” like anything else, we want to have standards. It’s not by any means any kind of gold standard, rule of the universe, or that we’re better. It’s just, this is what we consider to be “Video Bebop” standard, and that doesn’t need to mean anything to anybody. Fuck us. It doesn’t matter. Put your video on something even better. Maybe we just missed out. 

I never want anyone to feel like their art isn’t good enough. You made it. It exists. So, guess what? It is good enough.

How do you pick which videos to include in each episode?

We try to make the show as diverse as possible — not just race-wise, but gender-wise and genre-wise. We only get five or six videos an episode, so we try to fit the diversity in. Let’s say I have 20 videos to look through, but they’re all white guys and one Black girl video. As the content producer, I look through all the videos. I narrow it down to the ones I like from the 20, or if I like all 20, I keep all 20. 

When it comes to making an episode, I’m like, cool. I’ve got 19 white dues playing rock and one Black girl playing rock. So I’ll pick maybe one or two of the white guys and put them in an episode. Then I’ll go research videos I like from artists of color who did not submit. There’s not going to be a video where it’s all white or all male or all rock. That’s just not gonna happen. It doesn’t matter if I have 50 white submissions. Then that means it’s my job to go out and find the queer, the trans, the brown, the green, the yellow videos that I like.

It doesn’t matter how old or young the video is. We wanna do current ones, and we have mostly done current ones. But if it’s a good old one, we’ll play it because there’s a lot of people who still haven’t seen those old ones because it got lost in that internet space. 

Do you only pull submissions from that week, or do you have a running list?

It’s a running list. I’ll like it, and maybe it will sit on hold for awhile. Like okay, I’ve got a flow for this episode, so I’m not gonna put this one in even though I like it. I’ll wait to put it into whatever episode it flows in. Thunderpussy wanted to premiere the song Molly [Sides] wrote about her mom, “Powerhouse.” Thunderpussy is really good friends of ours. They’re like Perry Porter — everything they do is amazing. So I was like cool yeah, I’ll play it. It ended up being played on our Mother’s Day episode. It was a song about her mom, so it just fit perfectly. She gave it to me months before Mother’s Day, so they don’t get played right away. 

The show is typically filmed a month to two months before it airs because we still have to go through the editing process. If you submit a video, it’ll probably get played maybe three to four months later. 

What makes a good submission?

A good email would be a very short description of who you are and who shot it. First and foremost, a way to stream it. If it’s not out yet, make it available on Vimeo. Otherwise, send us a YouTube link. Don’t send us the file and make us download it to watch it first, and then we don’t use it and my memory is all taken up. 

Catch a new episode of “Video Bebop” every second Saturday of the month on The Seattle Channel (channel 21). To submit your music video, email videobeboptv@gmail.com.