Jazz became the first, though not the last, popular music to be trapped by its intellectual pretensions, on the one hand, and its anti-intellectual appeal, on the other.
Early sound technology such as phonograph records and radio spread jazz around the world, and the speed with which it spread frightened many people in its early days, especially because the music in its inception appealed so powerfully to the young. Jazz emerged in the twentieth century, the Age of Music, when people not only heard more music than ever before but consumed it more voraciously than ever before in human history, largely attracted to music for its emotional and psychological effects. Jazz became the first, though not the last, popular music to be trapped by its intellectual pretensions, on the one hand, and its anti-intellectual appeal, on the other. Jazz has been condemned and promoted by various political ideologies and governments: Nazis called it “Nigger-Juden” music;12 the Soviets thought of it as music of the workers and the dispossessed, on the one hand, and a sensationalized, bourgeois art, on the other; in the United States, it was once considered low-class, dance hall music, on the one hand, and the music of democracy, the Only Original American Music, on the other. So powerful was the presence of jazz when it first emerged that it is the only music that has a social epoch named in its honor: the Jazz Age (1920s).