Santi White interview with Blender Magazine

Taken from Blender Magazine site.





Plenty of punks hate the Man, but Santi White is a punk who once was the Man. Before the 32-year-old Brooklynite devoted herself to music full time, she worked in the A&R department at Sony, scouting and signing new bands. “You had to think so narrowly,” she says, checking in with Blender from the set of a London video shoot. “I’d come in to the office and say, ‘This demo sounds really cool,’ and they’d just say, ‘Hmm. OK. What’s Puffy into these days?’ I got sick of that real fast.”

White, who performs as Santogold, stages a full-scale revolt against narrow thinking on her self-titled solo debut—recorded after stints producing, songwriting and fronting the short-lived Philadelphia punk act Stiffed. Her songs swerve from terse new-wave laments (“L.E.S. Artistes”) to cavernous electro-dub (“Shove It”) and wild digital cacophonies (“You’ll Find a Way,” coproduced by M.I.A. collaborator Switch). Meanwhile, White spends her time singing, rapping, chanting, hooting, wailing and—on, “Creator,” a frenetic single about being a home-wrecking, bomb-dropping badass—processing her voice so it resembles the mating call of a robot woodpecker. “For me,” she explains, “singing is as much about making weird sounds as it is about the words.”

Santogold’s musical sprawl befits a woman who grew up listening to Fela Kuti, the Smiths and Salt-N-Pepa—what many of her songs have in common are tricky rhythms, sleek sonics and vintage hip-hop braggadocio. “I’ve been writing rhymes since I was 9 years old,” she says. “It was a lot of ‘I’m the best,’ ‘I’m so cool’–type stuff.”

So far, she’s been given the art-pop seal of approval by Björk, who took her on tour, Mark Ronson and … Ashlee Simpson? “I helped write songs for Ashlee’s new album,” White says. So, was her return to the major-label machine disconcerting? “Nah. Even when I’m writing my own stuff, I keep pop formulas in mind. A strong chorus is a strong chorus!”


All About Me!
Song I can’t stop listening to: “‘Smalltown Boy’ by Bronski Beat. It’s got a strange vulnerability.”

Last great movie I saw: “Out of Africa. It looked beautiful; the actors were great—they don’t make movies like that anymore!”

Recommended hair dye: “You’ve gotta get it done by a pro. But I do have one tip: Don’t relax your hair and color it at the same time. The shit will fall out.”