We’ve all known the Star Wars galaxy has its own form of jazz music since we first heard the cantina band in A New Hope. Eventually, Lucasfilm revealed the actual name of this form of jazz popularized by bands like Figrin D’an and the Modal Nodes in the Mos Eisley Cantina. And it was quite an unfortunate one. See, in the Star Wars galaxy, they call that space jazz “jizz.” Yes, someone back in the day gave “jizz music” the stamp of approval. But according to a report in the A.V. Club, it seems Lucasfilm might be phasing out the name “jizz music” and replacing it. A recent Star Wars book refers to the space jazz as “jatz” music.
The name “jizz” first turned up in a kid’s novelization of Return of the Jedi back in the ’80s, and the immature among us have been finding amusement in it ever since. (Yes, including our very own Dan Casey, as you can see in the clip above in which Alden Ehrenreich discovers jizz music.) But in the recently released short story collection From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi, a story by Lucasfilm’s creative art manager Phil Szostak tells a tale about how Max Rebo (you remember, the blue alien Muppet-looking guy) wound up playing at Jabba’s palace. At one point in the story, Max mentions “one of any number of jatz standards he knew by heart.”
And there you have it. Jatz seemingly replaced jizz. To be fair, Szostak is quite aware of the previous name and appears to have fun with it in his story. He writes that jatz “came to be known by many names, some less palatable than others.” Jatz wasn’t made up just for Szostak’s story. The term has appeared in Star Wars fiction before, going back to the ’90s. But it now seems to be fully replacing jizz.
We can’t really say that we blame the powers that be here. But those of us who get perverse joy in telling unsuspecting fans this wild but true Star Wars factoid? You can’t take that away from us. We know it happened.
