SOURCE: “Theodor Adorno on Jazz: A Critique of Critical Theory,” in Popular Music and Society, Vol. 12, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 69-73.

In the following essay, Nye examines the ways in which Adorno's opinions about American culture affected his criticism of jazz.

The school of social thought called critical theory has two major branches. The younger is associated with the work of Jurgen Habermas and colleagues and has little relevance to the concerns of this paper. The focus here is on the other variety of critical theory which often goes by the name of the Frankfurt School, for it officially began with the establishment of the Institute of Social Research, in Frankfurt, in 1923. The Institute sought to synthesize aspects of the work of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Weber, Lukacs and Freud, among others, and attracted a diverse and discontented group of intellectuals. Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock, Franz Neumann, Leo Lowenthal, and...