Despite the many negative aspects of European colonization endured by indigenous peoples throughout North America, music served as a powerful and positive force. This study demonstrates that musical life in the Franciscan and Jesuit missions throughout Spanish North America was fully developed, was a most important part of the evangelization process, and involved music similar to that performed in other mission areas in Spanish America. Musical life in New France and Louisiana is summarized here to show that the French operated a parallel system of musical evangelization and that the establishment of French settlements in North America corresponded in certain ways to Spanish practices.

The Franciscan mission repertory in California, c.1770–1830, includes numerous collections of chant and polyphonic music. Scholars have assumed some direct connection with music used in Mexico, but this assumption remains difficult to prove on the basis of the surviving Mexican repertory, which is mostly associated with cathedrals. Chant and polyphonic settings from the Liturgy for the Dead in Californian sources are compared with those from Mexico. Mexican cathedral music, even in the 1790s, reveals connections with pre-Tridentine liturgical traditions; but the California repertory is based on different liturgical and chant traditions. This supports William J. Summers's hypothesis that polyphonic works in the California Missions are based on a peripheral tradition associated with the religious orders.

Sheffield pop band Pulp's album This is Hardcore (1998) problematizes media constructions of fame, masculinity, youth and sexuality as self-aggrandizing fantasies. Pornography and glamour function in the album as cyphers for the disparity between fantasy and reality - a disparity fuelled by the media and their highly alienated cultural forms. The album's critique of these fantasies is made both in its subject matter and through the alienated subject position it solicits - a subject position at odds with constructions of macho masculinity as the protagonist in sexual encounters, and with constructions of fame and stardom. Drawing on media theory, I situate the album as part of a more general critique of spectatorship and voyeurism, and of the forms of cultural consumption (including music) which encourage passivity and disengagement.