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The first words of the hit song “Go!AMIGO” are sung in three languages: English, Spanish and Chinese. Its music video shows the three teenage members of TFBoys – China’s hottest boy band – gathering friends for a game of baseball.

It all seems pretty innocent. But there are calculated reasons behind the song’s linguistic flair, the video’s focus on baseball and even the band itself: “This video is proof that Communist Party propaganda is evolving,” says cultural critic Zhu Dake, who teaches at Shanghai’s Tongji University.

He says the TFBoys are the latest example of a pop group engineered by a company whose aim is to champion the values of China’s Communist Party. The “TF” in the band’s name shares an acronym with Time Fengjun, a Beijing entertainment company that selected the boys for the group, writes its songs and produces its videos.

“This video is interesting,” says Zhu as he watches the video for “Go!AMIGO.” “It features baseball, a sport we don’t play. It’s American, so it’s aspirational. But the song’s message is about teamwork and serving the collective — communist values. Usually, China’s state propaganda is filled with dreary platitudes concocted by government workers with low IQs. But this is very clever.”

“We rely on each other,” the TFBoys sing in “Go!AMIGO.” “It’s so magical to have you along the way. We’ll soon reach our glittering dreams.”

TFBoys fan Ren Jiaying, a 16-year-old high school junior, says the song speaks to her. Attending Chinese high school is full of pressure, she says, and the band’s music reminds her that she’s not alone.

“They’re the same age as me, and I feel like they’re with me no matter what I do,” she says of the members of TFBoys. “I’m not good at chemistry, but then one day I saw a video of them reciting periodic tables between photo shoots. I feel like we’re making progress together.”

Ren is among tens of millions of young fans who follow the TFBoys’ social media feed religiously. It’s an enormously popular feed: When bandleader Wang Junkai posted a note to fans on his 15^th birthday to Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, it was shared more than 355 million times – the most of any Weibo post ever.

Zhu says most of these fans live in the hundreds of cities that make up rural China. “Kids in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai dream of leaving China for America or Europe — they don’t care about this kind of band,” says Zhu. “But rural kids won’t ever get that chance, so this song provides them with dreams of playing a foreign sport in a modern, fashionable China. But who’s going to play baseball with them?”

Zhu points out that other TFBoys songs — including a modern revamp of the 1960s communist classic “We Are The Heirs Of Communism” — show how the band is being used to promote the government’s agenda.

Gao Ling, the 31-year-old manager of the TFBoys’ Shanghai fan club, admits the band is promoting communist values to young people in a new, fashionable way. “But Chinese society is like this,” Gao says. “We need to support our government, and these boys have been taught to be patriotic in school, so they naturally promote communist ideals. There’s nothing wrong with going with the flow – that’s perfectly normal. They’re showing a positive and bright path. They would never criticize society or government.”

That’s because, Gao points out matter-of-factly, “China doesn’t yet have freedom of speech.”

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The best-selling Aboriginal musician in Australian history has died. Dr. G. Yunupingu had a sweet tenor voice and a gentle guitar style that took him far beyond his homeland. He was just 46 years old when he died on Tuesday in Darwin, Australia. His record label, Skinnyfish, announced his passing, but did not disclose its exact cause, citing only a “long battle with illness.”

When he first started touring internationally, Yunupingu toured under his first name only — Gurrumul. (Out of sensitivity to Aboriginal custom, most Australian media are dropping his given names when referring to him, and Skinnyfish and the artist’s family have requested that no photos of his face be used.) He was extremely shy and uncertain in English; profiled on All Things Considered in 2014, he preferred to have a friend, the bass player and producer Michael Hohnen, be interviewed on his behalf.

Musically, however, Yunupingu became a lion. His debut album, Gurrumul, went triple platinum in Australia and silver in the UK. He played for Queen Elizabeth and President Barack Obama — and when he made his U.S. debut at New York’s SubCulture club in 2015, it was in a concert co-presented by none other than Quincy Jones, who gave his imprimatur to the Australian artist.

Blind from birth, Yunupingu possessed a sweet tenor voice with which he sang primarily in his native language, Yolngu, and had a gentle guitar style, played left-handed and upside-down.

Mark Grose, the managing director of Yunupingu’s record label, Skinnyfish, told the New York Times that the artist’s death was related to longtime health issues rooted in a childhood illness — but also systemic lack of treatment and health care for Aboriginal people in Australia.

In April 2016, Grose asserted that Yunupingu was mistreated during a health crisis related to his liver problems. After being rushed to the emergency room at Royal Darwin Hospital in northern Australia, the same medical facility where the musician died on Tuesday, he was reportedly left without treatment for eight hours while he bled internally. Grose also claimed that hospital staff assumed Yunupingu was “a drinker” due to his race. (Instead, Grose said, Yunupingu’s health issue was the result of having suffered hepatitis B during childhood.)

One of Yunupingu’s physicians, a kidney specialist named Dr. Paul Lawton, told Australia’s ABC radio at the time that Grose’s racial-profiling allegations were “reasonable,” and added, “We know that racial profiling happens at RDH (Royal Darwin Hospital) because of nationally published data … We know it happens right around Australia.” Lawton also stated to ABC that the musician’s chronic problems were “wholly related” to hepatitis B, and not to alcohol abuse.

The hospital categorically denied all allegations of maltreatment, and told the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper that “care provided at RDH was timely and appropriate” and that “claims of poor treatment due to a patient’s race have never been raised at the hospital.”

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Last year, the band Mashrou’ Leila from Beirut, Lebanon, slayed us with an unforgettable Tiny Desk Concert. Their potent mix of sweet sounds and heady lyrics are beguiling; it’s no wonder that superfans call themselves “Leila Holics.” And to accompany their current U.S. tour, the group has released a thought-provoking video for “Roman.”

Working with an emerging female director from Lebanon named Jessy Moussallem, the all-male members of the band (singer and lyricist Hamed Sinno, violinist Haig Papazian, keyboardist and guitarist Firas Abou Fakher, bassist Ibrahim Badr on bass and Carl Gerges on drums) take a back seat — quite literally — to a group of women.

With dark-hued beats and gorgeous falsetto harmonies haloing Sinno’s ardent tenor, this song will be a welcome find for casual listeners. But as ever with Mashrou’ Leila, there’s a lot of subtlety in both the text and the visuals to “Roman” that challenges stereotypes — from all comers. As the band explains, the women in the video are “styled to over-articulate their ethnic background, in a manner more typically employed by Western media to victimize them. This seeks to disturb the dominant global narrative of hyper-secularized (white) feminism, which increasingly positions itself as incompatible with Islam and the Arab world, celebrating the various modalities of Middle Eastern feminism.”

The women are dressed in an array of figure-hiding Middle Eastern clothing like caftans and abayas, and with many wearing various kinds of veils, from headscarves to the face-covering niqab — these are especially stereotypical outfits, given Lebanon’s diversity and what women there actually wear. While Sinno’s lyrics tend towards the elliptical, the song’s title might also be playing with the idea of cultural divides: Rum is the classical Arabic word for Romans, or Byzantines — i.e., non-Muslims — and later became associated with Christians and Europeans more broadly.

The thrust of the video, however, is one word from the song’s refrain: ‘Aleihum — “Charge!” It’s a cry for self-realization, as Mashrou’ Leila explains: a way of “treating oppression not as a source of victimhood, but as the fertile ground from which resistance can be weaponized.”

“Roman” is included on the deluxe version of Ibn El Leil, due July 21 via Shoop! Shoop!

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Roland Cazimero, a guitarist and singer who helped define the nobly mellifluous sound of contemporary Hawaiian music, primarily as one-half of The Brothers Cazimero, died in Honolulu on Sunday at 66 years old, his twin sister, Kanoe, confirmed. No cause of death was given, though the artist suffered in recent years from congestive heart issues, diabetes and carpal tunnel syndrome.

The Brothers Cazimero, with Robert on upright bass and Roland on 12-string acoustic guitar, had been a cornerstone of the Hawaiian music scene for the last 40 years, and arguably its singlemost influential group during that time. The duo’s trademark sound, liltingly sweet but rhythmically strong, was always distinguished by a full-bodied vocal blend: Robert, an exceptionally gifted singer, sang lead, while Roland handled the high harmonies, often in an imploring Hawaiian falsetto.

The Brothers Cazimero took flight precisely in step with, and at the center of, a cultural movement called the Hawaiian Renaissance, propelled by musicians, artisans and custodians of ancient hula and chant. In cadence and repertoire, the group honored the root sources of Hawaiian music. But Roland and Robert also had an instinct for pop songcraft, creating music that combined traditional materials with the earnest gleam of mainland folk-rockers like Crosby, Stills & Nash.

The self-titled debut album by The Brothers Cazimero was released in 1975; its most recent, Destiny, was released in 2008.

The duo was a perennial favorite at the Na Hoku Hanohano Awards, Hawaii’s version of the Grammys, winning enough “Song of the Year” honors to stock a compilation album, 20 Years of Hoku Award Winning Songs. As a live act, The Brothers Cazimero presented a study in contrasts; while Robert struck a tone of elegant precision, Roland played the part of a rascal and a wiseacre, which wasn’t a stretch.

Roland Kanoelani Cazimero was born 15 minutes after his sister Kanoe, in 1950, the youngest in a large family of 12 children, counting half-siblings. Their parents, William Ka`aihue Cazimero, Sr., and Elizabeth Kapeka Meheula, were local entertainers, and music was a constant presence around their house in the working-class Honolulu neighborhood of Kalihi.

Roland graduated from Kamehameha High School in 1968, one year after Robert. Soon afterward they joined Peter Moon, a ukulele player and slack-key guitarist, in a group called The Sunday Manoa. Its 1969 album Guava Jam quickly became a bedrock document of the Hawaiian Renaissance, its declarative subtitle making plain their artistic intentions: “Contemporary Hawaiian Folk Music.”

Robert and Roland broke away from Sunday Manoa to form The Brothers Cazimero in 1974, becoming both torchbearers and cultural ambassadors. For a dozen years, beginning in the early ’80s, they held a residency at the posh Monarch Room at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, performing mainly to delighted tourists. They also toured widely, appearing at Carnegie Hall.

Politically motivated civil disobedience was a key subtext of the Hawaiian Renaissance, and Roland counted himself an enthusiastic member of the resistance. “I’ve been supporting sovereignty from day one,” he once told the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, recalling his efforts to house and supply the protesters who occupied the tiny island of Kaho`olawe in 1976.

The following year, Roland collaborated with songwriter and chanter Keli`i Tau`a on an album called Hokule`a — The Musical Saga, paying tribute to the eponymous Polynesian voyaging canoe that traversed the oceans using only ancient navigation techniques. (The H?k?le`a, a symbol of the Hawaiian renaissance, has remained active, completing a three-year circumnavigation of the globe just weeks ago.)

Roland’s first true solo effort was Pele, a 1979 concept album about the Hawaiian goddess of fire, complete with expository voiceover. The songs framed a mythological story in often personal terms, forming a clear narrative arc. The sound of the album combined pastoral folk with something approaching prog, as on a track called “A Promise Forgotten.”

Along with Robert and twin sister Kanoe, known as Tootsie, Roland is survived by his wife, Lauwa`e Cazimero; another brother, Rodney; and his children Hawai’iki Cazimero, John Devin Kumau C. McWilliams, Jonah Cazimero, Jordan Malama Cazimero-Chinen, and Justin Pono Cazimero-Chinen.

The Brothers Cazimero played their last proper concert on Maui in 2014. Roland had to interrupt the performance, and was treated in a local hospital for walking pneumonia.

During a recent interview with Leslie Wilcox for the PBS Hawaii program Long Story Short, Roland was asked whether Robert knew their playing days as The Brothers Cazimero were probably over. “I think he knows,” he said. “I tell him that I’m very proud of him doing what he’s doing, and that I want him to continue.”

He paused. “I miss playing with him a lot. I would love to play with him again, if possible.”

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One of Mali’s most celebrated singers, Oumou Sangaré began her career as an outspoken champion for the rights of women. On her 1989 debut, Moussolou, she offered sharp critiques of practices such as arranged marriages and polygamy, drawing on her own experiences growing up in a polygamous household.

Sangaré’s irresistible voice enhances her music’s power to disarm critics and make defenders of outmoded traditions think twice. She is often referred to as the Songbird of Wassoulou — the name of a region in Mali’s forested south and also the name of a musical style Sangaré has helped define.

But she chose to take stylistic liberties on her new album, Mogoya (which means “Today’s People”). Sangaré enlisted young producers in Sweden and France to create a more contemporary sound, rejuvenating her music and aiming her pointed messages at a younger audience.

Over the course of Mogoya, Sangaré briskly covers important ground: Malians who lose hope in their country and risk their lives trying to reach Europe by sea, the dangers of gossip and rumors, the breakdown of trust between people in the wake of Mali’s recent political crises. And in the song “Yere Faga,” which features Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, she takes on the sensitive subject of suicide.

Mogoya is Sangaré’s first album in eight years, and only her fifth studio album in some 30 years. That’s partly because Sangaré also owns a hotel in Mali and runs other businesses, remaining unencumbered by the normal rigors of a pop music career. She makes a new album only when she’s good and ready, which shows in the work: Though Mali undoubtedly punches far above its weight in producing great and innovative music, Mogoya is still a landmark release.

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In the fall of 1974, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali met in the country of Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of Congo, for the legendary boxing match known as “The Rumble in the Jungle.” Although the Rumble had to be postponed until later that autumn, a related promotional event went on as scheduled and turned out to be similarly momentous: Zaire 74, a music festival where some of America’s greatest black artists played alongside Africa’s leading talent to an audience of tens of thousands.

Documentaries and albums chronicling that festival have concentrated on the American performers, such as James Brown and B.B. King. The African artists have not received the same shine — and disputes over money and control, which kept a tight lid on concert footage, have not helped. Except for the South African legend Miriam Makeba, these musicians were all Congolese, including rumba maestros Franco and Tabu Ley Rochereau.

But now their performances can be heard, many of them in full, on a new live album titled Zaire 74: The African Artists. It was produced by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and American record producer Stewart Levine — the same men who organized that festival in Kinshasa more than 40 years ago with the aim of making the world more conscious of African music.

Read on for highlights from Ari Shapiro’s interview with Masekela and Levine, and listen at the audio link to hear the full conversation and snippets of music from Zaire 74: The African Artists.

Interview Highlights

On what organizing the festival was like

Hugh Masekela: From the time we started to organize the festival, until after the festival, it was very hard work. I think we both lost about 20 pounds each. … It was the first thing of its kind and it was very exciting, the artists were excited. The Congolese audience had never been to anything like it. And actually nobody had ever been to anything like it.

Stewart Levine: You must remember one thing: The African artists had never played in front of such a large audience. So they were incredibly inspired. And the audience knew them better than they did James Brown, and they were out to cut James Brown. [Laughter.]

On rediscovering the recordings that would become Zaire 74: The African Artists

Levine: I refer to it as musical archaeology because we in fact had never heard these performances. They were recorded while, like Hugh says, we were running around trying to help get this thing organized and put up onstage. So when we opened these tapes up about a year and a half ago, we were stunned. We were mesmerized. Because with all due respect to the American artists, who were great, these guys were out to do it in front of their own people. You have to realize this was a big moment for this country, and a big moment for these performers. So you really do have this music being played at its highest level. We were lucky to have had these tapes. When we opened them, we just decided maybe after 42 years, we should remember the plot, which was to introduce this music to the world. So it’s never too late, I guess.

On the poignancy of these performances seeing the light of day only after the musicians’ deaths

Masekela:Louis Armstrong has been dead for a long time, but people still listen to his music. One thing that is great about the music is that you can be dead and [it can] become popular. You can get known whether you are alive or not. Music lasts forever.

Levine: If we didn’t think that these things were relevant and vibrant, then we wouldn’t have released it, period. If they sounded like field recordings from the ’20s, we wouldn’t go near it. But they’re hot! They’re energized. We caught it. It was the golden age of multi-track recording, it was 16-track recording. They hold up, and besides just being a piece of history, it’s a great piece of recording. I don’t mean technically, I mean the recording is great when it captures the moment, and there you have it. These artists become alive when you put the needle down. Here they are!

Web intern Karen Gwee contributed to this story.

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Nearly three years ago, the twin artists Lisa-Kaindé and Naomi Díaz burst onto the music scene with their haunting songs “Oya” and “River,” which were soon followed by remarkable eponymous debut. That first album was lovely, aching, and suffused with a melancholy spirit and Afro-Cuban plays of shade and light.

However, for the first single from the 22-year-old sisters’ highly anticipated sophomore album, expected later this year on XL, the duo has spun away from brooding into unbridled happiness.

“Away Away” still bears the hallmarks of their sound: Lisa-Kaindé’s sweet vocals laid atop Naomi’s deeper voice and percussion; haunting electronics; and English lyrics eventually giving way to Yoruba chant.

But “Away Away” is a song about joy, through and through. The audio version of the song begins with the sound of wailing sirens — a tragically commonplace harbinger of chaos in 2017 — before the buoyant beats kick in; it’s a conscious turn away from grief and worry. By contrast, those warning notes are barely audible in the video; instead, it’s all sweetness and sunshine.

Directed by Christian Beuchet, the “Away Away” video has a loose, spontaneous and intimate feel, with the artists simply dancing and goofing around in the studio; it’s like the best selfie footage ever. (It doesn’t hurt that the Díaz women are absolutely stunning — a fact that has not escaped the notice of Beyoncé, who had them appear on Lemonade, or the house of Chanel, who cast them in the 2016/17 cruise show.)

And yet, Ibeyi acknowledges that happiness has its own, inverted twin of sorts. As the song concludes, they shift into the Yoruba language of their Afro-Cuban heritage to sing a chant to the orisha Aggayu. Aggayu is often depicted as a ferryman, the strength-giving figure who provides support in life’s hard moments. In nature, Agayu is also the volcano — and the seething, destructive fiery lava that also provides incredibly fertile soil. And Ibeyi’s recognition of life’s dualities is part of what makes their music such a pleasure.

Ibeyi goes on a European tour starting this fall.

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David Lewiston, a seminal producer of music from around the world has died. The force behind more than two dozen recordings for the Nonesuch Explorer series, Lewiston died May 29 in Wailuku, Hawaii, at age 88, from what the Nonesuch label has described as an “extended illness”; his longtime friend and colleague, Brian Cullman, told the New York Times that his death resulted from “complications of a series of strokes.”

Cullman wrote about Lewiston’s treks in a remembrance for Nonesuch:

“Sometimes by bus; sometimes by jeep or truck or caravanserai; sometimes by donkey, though not if he could help it; and almost always on foot, it always came to that, by foot across rickety bridges and footpaths, up the sides of mountains, through valleys and hills rife with goats and wayward sheep, over rocks and fences, across streams and rivers swollen by rain or dry from drought, carrying a small—but not that small—portable tape recorder; twenty or thirty reels of 1/4″ tape; a couple of microphones; cables; a week’s supply of batteries; a few packs of Fortnum & Mason tea, and a few spare shirts.”

Born in London in 1929, Lewiston studied composition at Trinity College of Music, and went on to study with the Russian composer Thomas de Hartmann — who was in turn a student of composer, mystic and author George Ivanovich Gurdjieff. De Hartmann got Lewiston interested in the music of Central Asia — and an obsession was born. Lewiston’s first music-collecting trip was in 1966, when he visited the islands of Java and Bali; recordings from that voyage became the iconic album Music From The Morning Of The World: Gamelan And Ketjak. As Lewiston later noted, he was very much a neophyte producer at that time, chalking up early shortcomings to ineptitude rather than intentional omission: “Since I was inexperienced,” he wrote in 2002, “I failed to list the musical groups when this album was first released.”

Music From The Morning Of The World became the first of 28 albums which Lewiston produced for the Nonesuch label’s Explorer series, working with the imprint’s famed director, Teresa (“Tracey”) Sterne. Their albums were not meant as records for specific ethnic audiences (which labels like Columbia and RCA had already been churning out since well before World War II), or for academics; rather, they were squarely aimed at a general audience with adventurous musical tastes. In an often-repeated anecdote that Lewiston attributed to Sterne, late at night on New York radio station WBAI, the DJ would say “OK, light that joint, here it comes!” and then play the second side of Golden Rain, a 1969 Lewiston album of Balinese music.

Over the ensuing decades, Lewiston’s ear took him all over the globe, capturing a scope of music that may seem unimaginably broad today. He made recordings across Asia including in Iran, Georgia, Tibet, Korea, China, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Japan; throughout Central and South America in Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil; and in Morocco.

Lewiston was always quick to separate what he did from the work of traditional ethnomusicologists, as he told writer Christina Roden in an interview for the world music magazine RootsWorld in 2000. “I prefer to be described as a ‘musical tourist,’ if a description is absolutely necessary,” he said.

It’s not that Lewiston objected to the label of “ethnomusicologist” due to concerns about bias or colonialistic thinking. Rather, as he told Roden,

“Tracey [Sterne] and I thought that most ethnomusicologists were pretty dim. We called them ‘ethnoids.’ I think of an ethnomusicologist as someone who takes wonderful music and analyzes it until all the joy has been lost. It’s as though a rather boring person who wanted to be paid for talking about music invented a teutonic-sounding, pseudo-academic title as a scam – and got away with it! Much better to just shut up and enjoy the music. I have a really hard time when I’m writing liner notes, because I feel that if a person is reading them, he isn’t enjoying the music.”

As a white visitor to these cultures, Lewiston certainly prioritized what he, and he alone, judged as the “authentic” music of a given place, rather than what the musicians themselves might want to share with foreign audiences. As he told Roden in 2000,”When I go to the Himalayas, which is an annual jaunt for me, I have to be very careful to remind the musicians: ‘Please! No film music from Bombay!'”

At the same time, Lewiston documented important traditions — and sketched out crosscurrents that might otherwise have been missed, or at least undervalued. As writer Chris Nickson has pointed out in a review of Lewiston’s South America: Black Music In Praise Of Oxala And Other Gods:

“The whole concept of strong African culture remaining among the descendants of slaves has become common currency these days, but in 1968 no one had done research into the phenomenon, making this quite groundbreaking in the way it connected the dots between continents. The scholarly work might have gone beyond this, but the music remains as vital as ever, as does its importance.”

For those interested in music whose wellspring lay somewhere besides Europe, Lewiston’s work was — and remains — an aural primer. In 2006, composer Osvaldo Golijov poetically wrote:

“David Lewiston’s recordings are among the great testimonies in sound of our time. Anyone who hears them will be struck by the mysterious yearnings, the transcendental manifestations of joy, and the fragility and impermanence that unite wildly diverse cultures in our planet: ultimately, they give us a sense of how much and how little we humans are as a species. These records continue to inspire me as much as those by Stravinsky, Miles Davis and any of the other masters of the past century. They are a treasure: life as it is truly lived and dreamed.”

One of the most mesmerizing and mysteriously beautiful recordings Lewiston made in Chiapas, Mexico, became a sample in Golijov’s own music: his 2002 pieceK’In Sventa Ch’Ul Me’Tik Kwadalupe [Festival For The Holy Mother of Guadalupe].

After Sterne was fired from Nonesuch in 1979, the label’s interest in the Explorer series dried up, and Lewiston went on to produce recordings for the Ellipsis Arts, Shanachie and Bridge labels, as well working with the BBC Sound Archives.

In the last three-plus decades of his life, Lewiston became more devoted to focusing his efforts on conserving the music and ritual traditions of Tibetan Buddhism, particularly among the communities living in exile in India. (Brian Cullman told the New York Times that Lewiston’s archive contains almost 400 hours of recorded material, with much of it dedicated to Tibetan music, and that he is currently working with the label Dust-to-Digital to make a boxed set available.)

Despite that devotion to Tibetan music, Lewiston also made return trips to Bali in 1987 and 1994, spending a total of eight months collecting more music; in the late 1990s, he also went to Morocco to record music of the Sufi Muslim brotherhoods in the city of Fes, and to the Caucasus to record the region’s polyphonic singing traditions. As ever, Lewiston just couldn’t be tied down to a particular place.

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