Never one to fall in line with today’s parade of identikit female stars, singer/songwriter and producer Santi White aka Santigold is any major label head’s worst nightmare. Genre-defying, innovative and most definitely the captain of her own ship, Pride’s Gloria Ogunbambo caught up with the singer ahead of the release of her new album, Master of My Make-Believe.
It’s just as I suspected. Santi White –the woman known to most of the world as Santigold –is officially too cool for school. In her case though, it’s no bad thing. After first bursting into public consciousness in 2008 with her rabble-rousing, singjaying, monster of a debut single ‘Creator’, (who didn’t try to nail that opening strain?) it was clear that she was far from your average pop star. Her music for one, a frenetic melding of electro, synth-pop, indie rock and continental beats continues to leave music industry tastemakers scratching their heads over how to define it –a pretty savvy move on Santi’s part– and not much has changed in that respect on her sophomore release Master of My Make-Believe. As a woman, Santi is equally as difficult to pigeonhole. Clad casually in colourful paint spattered skinnys and a denim shirt, she’s poles apart from the aloof, pretentious New York hipster you might expect her to be. Instead she’s warm, forthcoming and relaxed –tucking into a small bowl of french fries in between questions. She becomes animated when we discuss her early life growing up in Philadelphia (she’s an East coast girl through and through) as one of the few black kids in a predominantly white neighbourhood. “I once went to a friend’s birthday party at this cricket club and the black maids working there were just staring at me thinking ‘how did you get here?’” Refreshingly, Santi isn’t part of the media-trained-to-the-point-of-ineptitude brigade –the ones trying so hard not to say anything inflammatory that they end up saying nothing at all. Far from offering up stock, innocuous responses, she isn’t afraid to let rip and tell me how she really feels on a variety of topics ranging from feeling misunderstood as an artist, being comfortable in her own skin and the oversexualisation of women in the music industry.
Discovering her own identity
“I went to an all girls private school when I was five or six. Imagine coming from an all black kindergarten to being the only black kid in the class. After that I went to a really academically intense Quaker high school and we had these worship meetings once a week where you sat in silence and if you had something to say you stood up and said it while everybody reflected on what you’d said. At that point I had a little identity crisis where I was just like, ‘f*** this sh*t!’ I started wearing big gold earrings, got a fly-girl haircut and decided to go to public school. There were all these different crews there and I met so many cool people. My social game was on! Because I wasn’t in a white school I felt less pressured to define who I was and I had a really easy time relating to and jumping between social groups.”
Not making typically ‘black music’
“I used to be in a rock band called Stiffed and people were so shocked to see a black girl playing that music. I remember reading a journal entry of mine at 17 saying, “I feel like there is music inside me but I feel like the kind of music that I’m going to make doesn’t exist yet.” I went to white schools so when black kids at my public school were listening to Hip-Hop and R&B, I was into Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure and U2. My older sister was a huge musical influence –she had crates of records by The Smiths, Joni Mitchell, Jimi Hendrix, Bananarama. My dad had us listening to James Brown, Nina Simone and Fela Kuti –I had so much coming at me from all different angles. I’ve learned so much about the industry having made the transition from A&R to artist. When a woman knows exactly what she wants she gets branded as ‘difficult’ or ‘crazy’. I really don’t give a f***! You have to have confidence in your vision. Producers move on to their next project but I’m the one who has to sing my music, live with it and have it represent me forever.”
On females using sex to sell records
“I don’t do anything that I don’t believe in. I get being proud of your body but sometimes it’s like, ‘Really? Is that all we got going for ourselves?’ It’s not who I am. Don’t get me wrong, I love a nice bathing suit and I’m not afraid to wear one but getting naked on the cover of every magazine? It makes me sad in the same way that strippers make me sad. I get that people are doing what they have to do but it sucks that it’s expected; it sucks that women feel that’s what they have to do to succeed. It sucks even more because it actually works. If I ever got naked it wouldn’t be because somebody told me, ‘you need to take this off.’ Of course there’s beauty in nudity, I’m not like, ‘women hide your bodies!’ But I just feel if you are going to get naked, you better be doing it to say something.”
Santigold’s Master of My Make-Believe is out now on Downtown/Atlantic Records.
