NYLON - June 2008 - (Page 108) Santogold arrived on the music scene like an apparition. From seemingly nowhere, there she was, opening for Björk, palling around with M.I.A., and having DJs such as Switch and Diplo clamoring to work with her. It looked like overnight success and it was, for Santogold. But for Santi White, the girl behind the gold, it’s just another chapter in an interesting, if somewhat hard to follow, story. As we sit in a Manhattan photo studio, nearby hammering forces White to hold the recorder up to her mouth like a microphone, and as she delivers the story of Santogold in a nearly unbroken monologue, it’s more than my linear little mind can follow. She goodnaturedly thwarts my attempts to time-stamp things because she doesn’t want to specify her age, and therefore she seems to have been in multiple places at once, doing disparate things. She also, without even pausing to breathe, drops bombs like “Well, first I had this website, and I ran up like, whew, $150,000 in debt, and I had I wanted, so I decided to write them myself,” White recalls. “Before this, I’d only written four songs, but I obviously had it in me. For some reason, it took me a while to figure out how to write a song, but once I finally realized that it was just verse/chorus, verse/chorus, I was like, ‘Oh, I get it.’” White soon left Sony to focus on writing and executive producing the Res album (it was somewhere around here when she lost all the money on a fashion website that fell through at the last minute), a convoluted process that involved going back and forth with the record company and which eventually soured White on writing songs exclusively for other people. The album, How I Do, was never a commercial success, but earned many fans amongst critics and DJs, and, when White moved back to Philadelphia, her musical dabbling continued to diversify. She formed her own punk band, Stiffed—which played with Bad Brains, X, and Ric Ocasek, and made sliding closer, and finally he was like ‘Do you have any lip gloss?’ And I was like ‘Yeah’…but I’m a total germaphobe, so he gave it back and I was like, ‘Ew.’ But within two seconds, he was like ‘Come on, I want to introduce you to someone,’ and he introduces me to Switch, and said, ‘You guys have to work together, it would be great, you guys are both great.’ And I don’t know if he’d ever even heard anything I’d done.” Even if he hadn’t, Diplo was right, and Santogold’s collaboration with Switch resulted in some of the best tracks on the album, an eponymous debut that also includes Freq Nasty, Spank Rock, Diplo, Sinden, and Trouble Andrew (White’s boyfriend, pro-snowboarder Trevor Andrew), but ultimately rests on what appears to be White’s best and most enduring talent: songwriting. Santogold has strains of the Brooklyn-Philly-Baltimore party sound, but also effortlessly transcends it; it is so versatile and unusual that it reminds you just how good music can be. “Anne” is haunting and crystalline, GOLD STANDARD invested $100,000 of my own because I had gotten hit by a car and got this money.” Wait, stop, what? Do I ask first about what it’s like to lose $150,000 or about getting hit by a car? It’s best to just start at the beginning. Wherever that may be. White grew up in Philadelphia in a musical family that made weekly trips to the record store, bringing home everything from Fela Kuti and Nina Simone to Joni Mitchell, the Doors, Bad Brains, Bauhaus, and Suicidal Tendencies. She went to college at Wesleyan, where she studied Cuban, Haitan, and African drumming, and graduated early to work at Sony in New York. While there, White hooked up with Res, an old family friend from Philly who also happened to be an aspiring R&B singer looking for help with her debut album. “I had this brilliant idea that this would be my big A&R breakthrough, but I couldn’t find anyone to write the songs that a video that features her sporting a blonde pompadour and baking dog-shit cookies for an ex-boyfriend—produced tracks for GZA’s 2002 album The Legend of the Liquid Sword and later penned Ashlee Simpson’s “Outta My Head.” She was in the studio with Mark Ronson and Lily Allen, for whom she wrote “Littlest Things,” when Stiffed, after many lineup changes, broke up. “Mark said, ‘Good, you should do your own thing,’” White recalls. Hence, Santogold. Ronson had been a fan of the Res album, as had Naeem Juwan, better known as Spank Rock, and after meeting at a party, he and White became friends and collaborators. It was a similar situation with Diplo: “So one day I was at a party—and these are like the two parties I went to in two years because I never went out,” White says, “so we’re like sitting on this couch next to each other, and didn’t know each other officially, but totally knew who each other were. We’re like With twists and turns at every corner, Santogold’s success story is a wild ride that’s about to get kicked into high gear. By Kate Williams. Photographed by Angela Boatwright “You’ll Find a Way,” sounds like something that could have been performed in 1984 at Danceteria, and “L.E.S. Artistes” is a chillinducing skewering of New York’s hipster scene: “Walking by myself down avenues that reek of time to kill/ If you see me keep going, be a pass by waver/ Build me up, bring me down, just leave me out you name dropper.” The record was a long time coming, in part because, as White says, she was constantly being asked to do shows and tended to be “off running around when I’m supposed to be finishing my record.” But now, it’s done. Tonight, White has a show in Philadelphia, and soundcheck is either at two or at four, no one seems exactly sure. Either way, it’s already two and she’s still in New York. She doesn’t seem worried, and probably shouldn’t be. Though it’s hard to predict exactly how Santi White’s story will end, it looks like it’s going to be a happy one. myspace.com : santogold / We hate to point fingers, but Santogold’s MySpace page appears to be a big web of lies. Here, one of the doozies: “Already receiving weighty club rotation and airplay in urban Afghanistan and downtown Beirut, Santogold is the first act of the century to boast a post-war following on the International Space Station Mir.” special thanks to studio 385 at k&m. http://myspace.com/santogold
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.