“Defiant Jazz”: Corporate Culture, Irony, and Joe McPhee
As per usual, I start off planning my blog posts with one concept or topic in mind, and about halfway through the process, I stumble across something that causes me to change course. Today’s blog post is no exception. A couple weeks ago, Superior Viaduct announced another big batch of Joe McPhee reissues, all recorded in the same sessions as Nation Time (1971): Black Magic Man (1975), The Willisau Concert (1976), and Tenor (1977). Their 2019 LP reissue of the McPhee staple Nation Time has thrust him into the zeitgeist more and more in recent years. After taking some notes on the prolific career of McPhee, I sat down to write and pulled up Nation Time on Apple Music to listen to while I worked. The bottom of the page indicated that Nation Time was featured on the playlist, “Severance: Defiant Jazz.” And suddenly, my course shifted.
The Apple-created playlist corresponds with the television series, Severance, whose first season aired in 2022. I have watched it twice so far and have frequently and dramatically opined that it is one of the best series released in the past ten years. Severance follows the daily life of a man named Mark S., who works for the enigmatic Lumon corporation. Lumon offers a service to sever one’s brain spatially, so that you have two distinct consciousnesses for work and for your personal life. As the lines between Mark’s two sets of memories become blurred and he starts to uncover what kind of work is done at Lumon, the dystopian implications of the severance procedure become abundantly clear. Pulling inspiration from the literary works of Orwell and Sartre, as well as films ranging from Brazil to Office Space, the series lampoons corporate culture while also scrutinizing its sinister underbelly.
Joe McPhee’s “Shakey Jake,” from Nation Time is one of the few musical appearances in the show that is not original music for the series. After the employee Helly nears 75% to quota, the team is offered a reward by middle management called the “Music-Dance Experience.” Helly selects the option titled, “Defiant Jazz,” the needle on the turntable dropping onto “Shakey Jake.” As most of the employees awkwardly dance, one employee named Dylan tries to control his rage, a result of uncovering an important fact about his life outside of Lumon. Dylan loses his temper and attacks their manager, effectively ending the “Music-Dance Experience.”
After realizing that “Shakey Jake” was featured so prominently in Severance, and to some degree plays a crucial role in the plot, I tried to put my finger on why this revelation struck me so much. I was thinking about it for hours afterwards. There was something about the interwoven threads of free jazz, corporate culture, and streaming services that compelled me to try and untangle them.
While doing some reading on McPhee before the “Defiant Jazz” discovery, I stumbled across a Wire online essay from several years ago by Liam Weikart. He reflects on the legacy of Nation Time as an emblem of the Black cultural nationalist movement in the sixties and seventies, while considering corporate representations of jazz and McPhee’s interests in the management theories of Edward de Bono. I found the overlap between this essay and the use of “Shakey Jake” in a show about corporate culture to be a strange coincidence. Weikart discusses how McPhee was intrigued by de Bono’s concept of lateral thinking, a problem solving method that uses roundabout and creative approaches to finding an answer, and translated de Bono’s ideas into his own concept of PO music. McPhee stated in the Wire essay, “When you’re making this detour you’re going to make a whole other bunch of discoveries along the way, which will perhaps influence you and change your original ideas about where you wanted to be. And that’s what I wanted, that’s PO. The PO is a language indicator to show that it’s provocation. Don’t take things to be what they seem to be.”
That last sentence of McPhee’s statement rings in my head as I think about the plot of Severance, of office drones whose worlds begin to expand as they find ingenious ways of uncovering the nature of their seemingly by-the-book work. While I may never know whether McPhee’s idea of PO music was part of why “Shakey Jake” was selected for use in this show, there is undoubted odd connection between McPhee’s approach to collaboration and how the characters in Severance search for answers. Ben Stiller, one of the directors of Severance, described “Shakey Jake” as: “It embodies the weird tension under the surface that always exists with the characters. And the saxophone is insane—I don’t know how he gets those sounds. It’s a 13-minute-plus track and the build is amazing. It’s pushing the bounds of the jazz form, almost to an anarchic level.” It is worth nothing that McPhee’s extended techniques and noisier playing coincides with the rising tension in the “Music-Dance Experience” scene, as Dylan’s anger and desire for justice builds. While a bit on the nose, the symbolism of McPhee pushing his boundaries while Dylan loses his control and finally fights back against the company is powerful.
Within the realm of the show though, can this symbolism still exist? Because the employees at Lumon only have a consciousness that exists within the corporation, they have no knowledge of particular musical artists or records. “Shakey Jake” is effectively stripped of its meaning and history at Lumon. There is no Nation Time, no Joe McPhee, there is only “defiant jazz.” The exceptional is made generic. That is how it feels sometimes when a corporate entity pigeonholes an artist into a specific Spotify playlist or an ambient techno record is relegated to background study music (the latter of which I am guilty of doing, I will admit). There is something fascinating about how Severance takes a radical piece of work like Nation Time and strips it to its parts and smooths off the edges. It is a metaphor and a reality all at the same time.
I can’t ignore the irony of the fact that this playlist was Apple Music-created for an Apple TV+ television show. The fact that one of the world’s biggest corporations produces Severance is a great contradiction in itself, with an additional layer of their own music streaming service having a hand in shaping its musical identity. The “Defiant Jazz” playlist also included selections from Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, and Alice Coltrane, visionaries of free and spiritual jazz. Ben Stiller spoke of the playlist: “We wanted it to reflect the weirdness of the corporate culture. The feel to me of the show is always ‘generic retro.’” While Stiller’s description of Severance as “generic retro” is highly accurate, it is unsettling to see the varied and dynamic outputs of the aforementioned free jazz figures whittled down into such a box. The “Defiant Jazz” playlist manifests a real-world example of the plastic, generic void of Lumon, via Apple itself.
Apple controls all the strings in this situation, while its own show feeds back critique of its mechanism in an endless loop. It makes me think heavily about how playlists, streaming services, and visual media influence how we perceive music, categorize it, and analyze it. How much power can one of these elements hold? While record labels, radio, and television have had this leverage since the advent of the industry, how will these larger entities shape it moving forward? Are we headed toward a “generic future?”
– Hannah Blanchette
May 16, 2024 | Blog