Interview: Santogold

Pressing the flesh is all well and good, but give me a phone interview over a face-to-face any day of the week. Sit opposite your subject and you’re expected to gaze reverently into their eyes while they’re talking, forcing you to either memorise your questions or risk flipping rudely through papers while they relate the tragic stories that defined their lives.

Ensure that your interviewee is safely ensconced on the far side of the Atlantic, however, and not only are you able to do pretty much what you like while they’re chatting away (scrutinise your questions, wash the dishes, crack one out), but you’re also insulated against the body language that would ordinarily give you away as a fraud and a failure. Like when the lovely, ludicrously talented Santogold asks me how many of her tracks I’ve actually heard, and I pretend a pizza delivery guy has just turned up to avoid the question. I could never have done that if she was in the same room.

Anyway, what does it matter how many tracks I’ve listened to? Santogold is more of an elemental force than a numerical quantity; the sort of musician whose records people will buy based only on half-arsed journalistic descriptions (“Blondie meets Salt-n-Pepa in an Asian opium den”) and a couple of pixelated YouTube snatches of the lady herself lurching gloriously around the stage at Fabric. The name Santogold may have been awarded to Brooklyn’s Santi White due to her affection for giant hoop earrings during her eighties school days, but it’s also come to embody the alchemic effect this Little Miss Midas is having on everything she touches right now.

Behold, for example, her kudos by creative association: her relationship with tropically hot electro producer Switch, who served up the massive single ‘Creator’, a wobbling romp currently reducing dancefloors to atoms the world over; her friendship and close musical affinity with M.I.A.; and her collaborations with iconic ass-music monsters Spank Rock. Hell, even Björk, Icelandic barometer of all things ice cool, asked the relatively unheard of singer to open her Madison Square Garden gig in September (on Santi’s birthday, no less), an event so mind-blowing that it made supporting the Beasties alongside Spank Rock at Brixton Academy seem humdrum by comparison. All of which is rather ironic, considering Santi never wanted to be a performer in the first place.

“I’ve been writing songs since the age of nine,” she says, “but for a long time I was only ever interested in writing raps, and even then only in the same way that I wrote poetry. It was more about personal expression – I never saw myself getting up on stage and performing that stuff. The same thing happened with instruments: when I was 15 I started messing around with keyboards and guitars, but I never had any aspirations to be a straight-up musician.”

Despite this, Santi found herself majoring in music at college, where she was exposed to a huge range of styles that began turning her own musical palette into a kaleidoscopic mash-up of international influences. At the same time, she began dabbling in the business end of the industry through a series of A&R internships with major labels, one of which even led to Santi signing up the young singer Res and then helping write and produce her billboard-charting debut for MCA, How I Do. All of which meant that when Santi finally did get her big break, she was well aware of the skull beneath the skin of this most superficial industrial beast.

“I’m definitely not coming into this as some green girl, fainting with excitement at the thought of seeing my name in lights,” she says. “I know what I want out of this – I know what sacrifices have to be made and I know the pitfalls and the possibility of things not working out. I’m strong-willed and I insist on being hands-on at all stages of the process – songwriting, mixing, mastering. If they don’t let me do it my way then we do it fighting from the word go, and that’s no fun for anyone.”

Fair point. It’s hard to imagine a lily-livered suit-and-tie squaring up to a woman capable of the caterwauling war cries that open ‘Creator’, yet the stupidity of music industry executives is as bottomless as their bank accounts, and even Santi was initially paired with all manner of inappropriate producers before she took the reigns of her first album (the loose ends of which she’s tying up right now). Even today, she says, label bosses are struggling to pigeonhole her as some kind of beatific voodoo vocalist, all crazy clothing and insane electro outpourings – something that understandably rubs her up the wrong way.

“I’ve been doing a lot of photoshoots lately,” she says, “and most of these photographers set their shit up and then tell me: ‘Okay, now go wild!’ And that really freaks me out, because there are so many different sides to my personality, and that’s true of my music too: it crosses the borders of so many different genres. The industry is constantly trying to tell you what you are to make their own lives easier when it comes to marketing you, but it’s just not that easy for me. I’m not a one-dimensional musician, and they won’t get that out of me however hard they try.”

The fact that they’re trying at all seems unfeasibly pointless, if only because Santogold is one of those rare acts that defies classification and dares industry executives to swallow their pride, put up the money and hold on for the ride. Santi attributes the popularity of cross-pollinating, genre-busting artists like herself to a little something she calls ‘the internet’ – digital dry-nurse to a generation no longer limited by the constraints of airplay or what is deemed acceptable by their peers.

“These days you have kids who listen to Lil’ Wayne one minute and Gang Gang Dance the next,” she explains. “Things just aren’t that separate anymore – people aren’t segregated in their musical tastes like they once were, so why should artists feel compelled to limit themselves when it comes to writing or performing music?”
She may be destroying as many boundaries as she is dancefloors, but Santogold is making pitch-perfect pop music, as the deliriously addictive ‘L.E.S Artistes’, with its power-punk choruses and Police-style verse plucks goes to prove.

“I feel as though my songs are pretty easy to digest – verse, chorus, verse, chorus. I think that makes it easier for me to grab people’s attention, because they’re dealing with something they feel instantly comfortable with, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be cerebral or take that shit to another level. It’s like writing haikus: the challenge is boiling things down to their bare essentials, and that’s something I have a lot of fun with.”

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