What is a global culture? To what extent is it meaningful to speak of such a culture today? What is the relationship, within a global culture, between global and local, center and margins, core and periphery? How are we to evaluate such a culture, as a positive or as a negative phenomenon? As something to be welcomed and celebrated, or resisted? These are some of the questions that recently have been the subject of intense discussion and debate among cultural theorists (Schneider and Wallis; Featherstone). To these questions, however, I would like to add a further set which frames the preceding ones. Why are cultural theorists so interested in global culture? What is at stake for them in theorizing about it? What larger issues and agendas are being played out in their debates? What are the implications of this theoretical discourse about global culture for that discourse itself? These are the two sets of questions I will be exploring in this essay: the first concerning the nature, meanings, and value of global culture; the second, framing the first, concerning the implications of theories of global culture for cultural theory itself. My discussion will focus on a form of cultural production that has been prominent in recent debates about global culture, the popular-music industry, and within this form, the phenomenon now commonly known in the English-speaking world as “world music.” My purpose is both to try to make sense of the world-music phenomenon itself by considering it in relation to several models of global culture and to use world music as a means of reflecting back on the theoretical models used in its interpretation and evaluation.