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title: Jazz Police and Political Correctness

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# Jazz Police and Political Correctness

This is a guide to the oft neglected and maligned _Jazz Police_, the odd song out in Leonard Cohen's 1988 album _I'm Your Man_. In '92 Cohen claimed that his songs last about as long as Volvos - roughly 30 years. _Jazz Police_ is about 33, and consequently many of its themes are a little more difficult to place in the present culture. To this end parts **II-III** are context, and part **IV** has the lyric interpretations. Skip to **IV** if you're short on time.

## I

I searched around for a label for the phenomenon Leonard Cohen describes in Jazz Police, and to my surprise I found there was one. "Political correctness" [became a popular concern in the early 90s](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=political+correctness&year_start=1900&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0), right on the heels of the release of Jazz Police, following the general pattern of Cohen being ahead of the culture. It's not a perfect fit - the term is loaded with neurotic partisan political baggage, whereas Cohen is speaking to something fundamental, but it fits more closely than you might expect.

There's something deeply mysterious about political correctness; who exactly are you afraid of when you say something un-PC? If PC bothers you, why does it bother you, what are your motivations for transgressing? Who decides what is PC, and how do you know what is? Who enforces it, and why?

Cohen describes a sort of mystical police force that comes after anyone who goes off-script; the "Jazz Police". The jazz police are working for your mother, they have their final orders, you feel seduced by them yourself.

We'll examine Jazz Police in closer detail, but first, some background needs to be painted in.

## II

Content warning: politics.

Set your time machine for the 80s. Vietnam is lost, The War on Poverty has failed, crime rates are sky high, inflation is breaking 10%. The horrific failures of Socialism overseas are now general knowledge. Most Americans have become disillusioned with the idealism of the 60s and want law, order, and free enterprise back. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are in power, paring down their respective welfare states and ramping up the War on Drugs.

At the same time as it is politically ascendent, the conservative revolution finds itself in a difficult state among the highly educated. Universities look down their nose at Reagan. The New York Times dubs him "The Cowboy President". It's an understandable divide; educated idealists have had their ideas find power the last two decades, and Reagan's revolution is to some degree a repudiation of them. Many are at least sympathetic to socialism, and attached to the progressive projects that Reagan has snubbed.

Universities are also growing rapidly, and education is becoming more "normal", not just something for intellectuals. As they have done so, their political demographics have [shifted](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics#Carnegie_Commission_on_Higher_Education) further and further left, especially in the humanities. It's under these conditions that conservatives begin to decry an ideological culture that is hostile to their perspectives. In 1980 Allan Bloom publishes [The Closing of the American Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics#Carnegie_Commission_on_Higher_Education). A decade later Reagan himself will be making campus tours speaking out against "political correctness".

## III

Leonard Cohen stands somewhat off to the side of all of this.

In '69 Cohen had rebuked the utopianism of both the left and the right in his telling of the _Story of Isaac_, claiming both that the capitalist US lacked the moral mandate necessary to fight in Vietnam, and that socialism was incoherent. In both of these he proved prophetic. In the 80s he is singing an extra verse in _Diamonds in the Mine_ that looks back on this:

> I thought I told you all about it in the days of Vietnam
> When your poets marched for Uncle Ho, and your sons for Uncle Sam
> Well whose side are you on today, whose song are you gonna sing
> With the mega stench of corpses that is blowing in the wind?

(Uncle Ho was the leader of the Vietnamese socialists, Cohen is speaking of how America's idealists "marched" for the socialist side. _Diamonds in the Mine_ itself documents the depletion of the spiritual resources available to the state, in some performances he dedicates the song to the president.)

In '79 Cohen released _Ballad of the Absent Mare_, a song that takes the [Ten Bulls](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ten_Bulls) story from Zen Buddhism depicting progress to enlightenment and transposes it East to West, making it about American politics. The song tells of America's traditional ruling class (personified as a "cowboy") losing control of the people (the mare) as the country's institutions break up in the flood. Enlightenment is reached when the cowboy relinquishes control (you can see a few more notes [here](https://www.leonardcohennotes.com/doc/song.ballad_of_the_absent_mare)).

The cowboy in _Ballad of the Absent Mare_ is a good match for america's conservative revival at the time, and indeed the character of Ronald Reagan, though it likely is not about him in particular. Cohen does not identify with the cowboy, but he does sympathize with him; the song asks us to "say a prayer" for him. Ultimately Cohen detaches himself from the cowboy and the mare, and suggests that they are both destined to disappear.

A broader survey of Cohen's works finds his politics to be apocalyptic, marrying a progressive sense of the inevitability of progress with a conservative pessimism as to its character. He speaks of an America that is unravelling, that neither left nor right have an answer to, in a flood that will destroy everything. Cohen describes the scene, gives comfort to the losers, and promises new life on the other side.

## IV

We've covered political correctness, the conservative revolution, and Cohen's relationship to it. With this context in hand, we are can turn to the lyrics of Jazz Police.

Verse 3:

> Jesus taken serious by the many
> Jesus taken joyous by a few
> Jazz police are paid by J. Paul Getty
> Jazzers paid by J. Paul Getty II

Getty I was a wealthy industrialist (in fact, the richest man in the world in his time). He was rather cheap and hard-hearted; He famously said that he would donate all his money to solving poverty, but he was convinced that it would not work (his son's generation would prove him right on this). He instead spent a lot of his money on collecting art pieces to "preserve western civilization", and opportunistically supported Hitler, Stalin, and American patriotism as each came into favor. This lifeless, conformist mode of action dedicated to safely boosting existing power structures is what Cohen ascribes to the Jazz Police.

Getty II, by contrast (and to his father's horror) dove into 60s hippie counterculture, burnt himself out with drug addiction and depression, and found his way back by embracing British culture. He became a great patron of the arts in Britain, cultivated a more conservative politics, and (tying this back to the political context established in part **II**) was a supporter of Margaret Thatcher's successful bid for office.

The song returns again to the political connection again in verse 5:

> Wild as any freedom loving racist
> I applaud the actions of the chief
> Tell me now oh beautiful and spacious
> Am I in trouble with the jazz police?

"Freedom loving racist" is a term that doesn't much make sense outside of the politics surrounding America's conservative revolution.

Reagan (and Barry Goldwater before him) ran on a libertarian vision of America, valuing the freedom of the individual from the state. This meant that it should not be the business of the state to treat people differently according to their race, or even to remedy the imbalances between races; the government should be fair and minimally oppressive to individuals, and leave citizens to succeed by their own industry.

In previous decades this "colorblind" state had been the liberal view of non-racism, but after the civil rights movement of the 60s, things had changed. Americans felt that [utopia](https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/johnlennon/imagine.html) was just on the horizon, and that the resources of the state could be used to get there. Many were confident that with a great communal effort in education, redistribution, desegregation, criminal justice reform, and affirmative action, equality was within reach, and America's founding sin of slavery could be finally healed. Amid this heady optimism the idea that the state should restrain itself seemed, well, "racist". What motivation but white racism could explain this fear of equality?

Thus we arrive at Cohen's paradoxical "freedom loving racist". The description is pejorative, mocking the view that the Jazz Police have of the Reaganites. As to the other lines; the "chief" is likely Reagan, and "Oh beautiful and spacious" refers (somewhat mockingly) to America, as described in [America the Beautiful](https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/music/library/hymns/america-the-beautiful?lang=eng).

Verses 9-10:

> They will never understand our culture
> They'll never understand the jazz police
> ...
> Stick another turtle on the fire
> Guys like me are mad for turtle meat

Following the theme of verse 3, the last two lines here are also lampooning the view that the Jazz Police have of their suspects.

Turtle soup was a popular dish, but it became unfashionable due to its colonialist origins, and concern for the turtle population. To a right-thinking American in 1980, turtle soup appears immoral, irrational, and probably racist. Cohen provides us with the caricature of someone wantonly burning turtles, out of what can only be presumed to be a mad lust for turtle meat.

Cohen doesn't provide the other side of this caricature. This is by design, like the Jazz Police you are forced to "never understand our culture", and you're treated to the same view that they of their suspects.

## V

There's much more to be found in this song, and more to be said about Cohen's politics*, but this post is too long already, so I'll leave it there. I hope my notes provide some cultural context to keep this particular "Volvo" running, and make further interpretation more productive.

*(In particular some readers may be skeptical of Cohen's portrayal of reaganites as the targets of the Jazz Police, even as they were politically powerful. This is a complicated topic, but I would argue that history has proved him right - conservative victories survive in some broken form in neoliberalism, incarceration, etc... but culturally they been completely routed.)