The tale of English spreading around the world, killing off other languages as it goes, is a spectacular and sad story, but it is not the whole story. There have been a few cases, such as the Labrador Inuit-Métis, where English first of all established a presence on the territory of a particular indigenous language only to be replaced in the long term by that indigenous language as native anglophones abandoned their mother tongue.

Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

As an anatomist of socially inculcated identities, DeLillo deploys a recurring motif of automobility, which helps to dramatize and often satirize some common white American male inclinations. Propelled by a sense of something missing in their routinely plotted lives, DeLillo’s protagonists often lurch into escape mode in an archetypal white American male way, by jumping in a car and hitting the road. However, their clichéd and encapsulating choice of vehicular transport itself signals how difficult it can be to escape an identity largely formed by negation, that is, by white masculinity’s self-defining exploitation of others. Given the conceptual emptiness that DeLillo finds at the heart of white American male identity, pursuits of a seemingly more genuine self usually result in such protagonists driving themselves right back to where they more or less began.

DeLillo was not the only author to recognize the importance Madison Avenue was accruing, but his engagement with it is perhaps the most sustained of any American writer. This chapter examines DeLillo's personal relationship to advertising and the ways in which its language is central to understanding his novels.

In this chapter, I explore the aesthetics of drumming in Americana, focusing particularly on the work of session drummer Jay Bellerose. By attending to the material cultures and various lineages of drumming in the genre – spanning from the blues to country, jazz, rock, and early field recordings – I consider how an underlying aesthetic discourse inflects Americana drum kit performance and reception. Specifically, I outline how discussions about ideal drum tones, ‘less-is-more’ approaches, and preferences for American-made vintage kits signal shared understandings about percussive music making in the genre; highlighting key figures that helped develop recording techniques and drumming conventions.