When Paul Simon released his album “Graceland” in 1986, he introduced America to Ladysmith Black Mambazo and their South African vernacular singing style isicathimiya. Tonight, that band takes the stage at Carnegie Hall in support of its new album,”Long Walk to Freedom.”It’s an occasion that calls for reflection: In the 20 years since “Graceland” whetted America’s appetite for world music, the genre has exploded across the international musical landscape, in step with advancements in technology and deepening geopolitical intricacies. Yet this country’s taste for it continues to rely largely on syntheses of “world” sounds with familiar Western styles and stars.

“Graceland” came at the right time for Mr. Simon; his previous work, “Hearts and Bones” (1983), was a commercial flop, whereas “Graceland” would go on to sell 14 million copies. It also came at the right time for the public. The album’s ecumenical, globe-trotting sophistication appealed to the listener who had grown up parallel to Mr. Simon’s career — and who, six years into the Reagan presidency and the 1980’s pop music black hole, was hungry for a sound so warm, organic, and fresh.

Due to an awakening American awareness of apartheid in South Africa, Black Mambazo seemed to do good in addition to sound good. It was accepted by audiences as Bob Marley had been several years earlier — an unlikely breed of easy listening rebel music.The popularity of “Graceland,”however, was more effective in inspiring an agreement among music industry marketers to settle on a sellable genre: “world music” was born.

Like the “race” and “hillbilly” categories of America’s early phonograph days, world music was a huge tent into which different genres from disparate locations could be crammed.A dearth of knowledge — from the boardroom to the stockroom to the living room — of the massive dimensions of the world’s music made a more nuanced denomination unfeasible. Albums of Zululand singers and groups such as Mahlathini and the Mahotella Queens began to appear in record shops across the country, filed with other “world”albums like “Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares,” the surprisingly brisk-selling recordings of Bulgarian State Television’s female vocal choir.Pop stars like Peter Gabriel — who in 1988 started his own international imprint, Real World (featuring Pakistan’s hugely popular qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) — used their visibility and influence to exploit the genre.

While international pop and folk music had long been available, Western popular artists had seldom hitched them to their wagons in the mainstream marketplace (Robert Mitchum’s calypso misadventures of the late 1950s notwithstanding). Doing so gave those artists a sort of world citizenship that was increasingly attractive and comforting to audiences. Sharing the cultural sensitivity and demographic of “Graceland,” public radio and television began airing programs devoted to world music on record and in live concerts. NPR’s Afropop (now Afropop Worldwide) was launched in 1988; Spike Lee’s “Do It A Capella,” a live concert in which American doo-woppers the Mint Juleps performed with Ladysmith Black Mambazo a version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight”(a song with an epic world-music history all its own), aired on PBS in 1990.

But like many foreign imports — yoga especially comes to mind — world music has been changed by or, some would argue, for American acceptance. Marketed for their exotic qualities, world albums have nevertheless subsisted predominantly as best-ofs and introductions-to, tending to leave off more complex and less Westernized artists, performances, and genres.

Putumayo, the most visible of American world music labels, states its purpose on its Website: “[Putumayo’s] upbeat and melodic compilations of great international music [are] characterized by the company’s motto: ‘guaranteed to make you feel good!'”

The success of Putumayo’s brand illustrates the preferred usage of world music among mainstream audiences (and record companies) despite a deepening of familiarity and interest elsewhere. World music as a genre has grown to include not only the specific music of township, ethnic group, or religious denomination, but a myriad of trans-cultural syntheses that owe more to the Internet and the cheap worldwide dissemination of digital music than they do to “Graceland.”

Bhangra, the traditional dance music of the Punjab regions of Pakistan and India, has become a staple in hip-hop production, and in turn has adopted hip hop’s use of the DJ and the MC. Afrobeat, the fusion of American funk and jazz with West African highlife, founded by Nigerian bandleader Fela Kuti, has been taken up by scores of interracial bands in America and Europe. And groups like Tinariwen (Malian Tuareg bedouin playing sublime psychedelic blues) and Refugee All-Stars (a Sierra Leonean reggae band) make international splashes due not only to their recordings but also to the turbulent political circumstances that spawned them.

What becomes most popular in America, however, tends to be the cross-pollination efforts of individual artists, á la Mr. Simon.Ry Cooder scored big with his Buena Vista Social Club project. American guitarist Corey Harris’s visit to the ancestral homeland of the blues — among the griots of West Africa — became Martin Scorsese’s much-lauded film “Feel Like Going Home.”

And 20 years after “Graceland,” Ladysmith Black Mambazo returns to that album’s multi-platinum collaborative formula by featuring a long list of guest stars on “Long Walk to Freedom.”Some on the record are known for their genre-bending, like Taj Mahal or the Belgian group Zap Mama. Other guests offer a more specific Americanness — here are Emmylou Harris, Natalie Merchant, Sarah McLachlan, and Melissa Etheridge. The band even goes so far as to re-record “Graceland”‘s biggest hit,”Diamonds On the Soles of Her Shoes,” with Etheridge in place of Paul Simon. The album may not break any new ground for world music or deepen Americans’ taste for it, but in an era marked by hand-wringing over clashes of culture, it can’t hurt.