“L.E.S. Artistes”
from the album Santogold
2008
Beautiful, musically innovative and with genuine charm, it’s no surprise that Santi White, aka Santogold, is hot – except she isn’t, not right now. “Hold on while I close these windows,” she says down the phone from New York. “It’s freezing in here.”
Santi is taking a break from a remix she’s working on in the home of her friend Alex “Armani XXXchange” Epton, just one of the many uber-cool producers willing to tweak the Santogold knobs over a brew and a garibaldi. She recently performed with Mark Ronson at the BBC Electric Proms, has supported Björk, and her forthcoming debut album boasts collaborations with Switch, Spank Rock, Diplo, Disco D and FreQ Nasty.
So why has she got them queuing up? From the tribal intro of the Switch-produced Creator, her debut 12″, Santogold sends all the right signals, combining a punk-raw ethic with pin-sharp programming. Les Artistes, meanwhile, its B-side by physical location only, is Class A pop, complete with 24-carat plating.
Switch describes Santi to Collective as “probably most innovative artist coming out of New York at the moment.” Before they worked together, though, she was not so convinced herself. “I put it off for, like, five days. I was thinking ‘I’ve got to rap and they’re going to hate it’. But the energy in the studio was amazing. Everybody got so excited and they were jumping up and down and doing that thing that British people do when they snap their fingers.”
Indeed, it’s difficult to understand what White was so worried about. Having written the album How I Do by US R&B singer Res, while she was still an unknown music student, she subsequently fronted the Philadelphia-based ska-punk band Stiffed, so has plenty of experience of the spotlight currently pointing in her direction.
Hers hasn’t been an entirely charmed life, though. The Santogold project followed the death of her father, a prominent Philadelphia lawyer who died in 2003 while embroiled in an FBI investigation into municipal corruption in the city. “I watched all this crazy shit go down that you just hear about in movies. What the Government does to get what it wants. Watching them tear families apart, tear my family apart. Seeing the newspapers with their tasteless coverage.”
So is she ready for what 2008 is destined to bring? “I don’t think I could be more ready. I guess I’m just one of those people who just jumps in and figures out whether they were ready or not later.”