there are a lot of branches of cultural criticism inheriting from postmodern philosophy, and it's quite likely that some of them will end up being flattering to our higher-level instrumental values.

This is how I got into it. I had just started getting seriously into thinking about popular music (and unpopular popular music) and the horrifying quantities of bullshit surrounding it, and found Mythologies by Roland Barthes at the local second-hand bookshop, and went "HOLY CRAP THIS NAILS IT." Bits were opaque and bits were stupid, but enough made what I'd already been thinking make more sense that I got quite a lot out of it. (It's generally regarded as a classic, and IMO it's a great book, and Barthes is really pretty easy to read as critical theorists go, but I have no idea if this is a good introduction to anything whatsoever, so am not recommending it to anyone as such. But it was the right book for the right person at the right time.) Possibly the main failure mode was helping encourage me to think listening to records was much more important than it actually was.

(Oh, and Paul Morley in NME. Yes, that Paul Morley.)

tl;dr: It's better if you've got an actual use for it. In this regard, it's like the broader field of philosophy.