SOURCE: “All That Jazz Again: Adorno's Sociology of Music,” in Popular Music and Society, Vol. 15, No. 3, Fall, 1991, pp. 31-40.

In the following essay, Hamilton argues that Adorno's ideas about jazz, understood in their proper context, do have relevance as a part of his larger aesthetic theory.

Theodor Adorno's “On Jazz” is as infamous in academic circles as it is misunderstood. In the Winter, 1988, issue of Popular Music and Society, William P. Nye renewed the attack on Adorno, dismissing not only his analysis of jazz, but his work in general, that of other Frankfurt School members, and the claims of critical theory to be a scholarly, oppositional means of understanding popular culture. The subtitle of Nye's article is “A Critique of Critical Theory,” and he quotes Zoltan Tar's damning one-sentence summary of the Frankfurt School: “Critical theory is the document of the disintegration of old Central European bourgeois society...