As Carol Vorderman will tell you, one vowel can make a whole lot of difference. When Santogold emerged, spitting glitter and beats all over the hype machine, I was too busy solving the Countdown Conundrum to really care. Something didn’t wash, her symmetry too perfect, her alignment of then-trending genres all a little suspect. What’s changed since then? The music certainly hasn’t – her new LP, Master of My Make-Believe, is more an advancement on the template (Yeah Yeah Yeahs multiplied by lingering fibres of Diplobeat). Her image still shows influence of Grace Jones and Goldfrapp glam (and unshakeable love of horses) and polychromatic multiculturalism and her name still sounds the same when you say it out loud. No, the point when I started caring about Santigold was when she seriously pissed me off.
OK, so here’s the deal. Santi believes that, essentially, artists are failures if they can’t combine their creativity with graft, to push their work commercially, and expose it to as many eyes, ears, and Mac screens as humanly possible. What about Emily Dickinson? Franz Kafka! Henry Darger! Being a romantic when it comes to the resounding impact of all great art, whether during or after the time of its creator, my head was considerably wrecked by this. I studied Santigold with actual fervour for the first time, eager to pick holes in her world-view. And then something strange happened: I actually listened to her music. Like, properly. I found, much to my ire, that me and Santi would be pretty close neighbours on Last.FM. And I found YouTube testimonials (always a dependable source to the cocksure interviewer) relaying users’ discoveries of Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bad Brains, Missing Persons, and Augustus Pablo. Combine those four in a food blender, and you’ll probably get the new Santigold album. And then This Isn’t Our Parade got lodged in my brain, and wouldn’t shift, and I forgot about why I was mad in the first place. I still disagree with the core of her ethos, but if her distillation of her influences into this wholly new thing reaching ears its components might never make it to is a result of it then I’d be an absolute dick to try and argue her down.
So I didn’t, and we talked about Odd Future and Occupy instead.
Hello Santi.
Hey, how are you?
I just spent four minutes in Hell. The hold music for your hotel is Michael Buble’s Christmas song.
Oh God. I love Christmas music, but I don’t like that song.
#Have a holly, jolly…#
#…Christmas.#
Santi’s coming to town. You’re in Paris! What’s going on in Paris?
I’m going to catch one fashion show, and then I’m going to Berlin for more press. I missed New York fashion week, I only saw the Alexander Wang show, which was great.
He designed your Bond Girl bodysuit for the album cover, right?
I love those. I kept it, but I don’t know if I’ll be wearing it out or anything.
Twitter tells me you’re working on an Earl Sweatshirt collab… How’d that come about?
Well, it was just a conversation on Twitter that made itself around the internet. But it does sound like a really fun collaboration, I hope it comes to fruition.
Does it terrify you when you see guys as young as Odd Future getting such huge exposure? I know you’re quite cautious about how the industry works.
It is crazy, but, you know, when you’re that young you need to be grounded or it’ll really fuck you up. Actually, it’s just scary at any age. Especially when you’re a group like Odd Future, and you existed in your own world for a while. You start off with all this energy, you don’t pay attention to the outside world, it’s just you, and your group, and your art, and then… here come the vultures. They pick you apart and… well, you can even see it in Tyler’s work. All of a sudden you’re not in a crew, you’re by yourself. The most important thing is to know what your point is, why you started doing this in the first place, that’s what keeps you grounded and gives you something to come back to.
You used to work in A&R, right?
I did, for a little while.
How was that?
It was so long ago, everything’s so different now. My industry experience taught me a lot, in terms of the business of music, separate agendas and how they overlap. I’m not naive enough to be like “this is just about art!”. A lot of artists do blow their opportunities because they don’t want to engage with business at all.
Hmmm.
But… you do have to be willing to go out and do the work to make your record do well. I like doing the work, because I want the most amount of people to be able to hear my record, I want the most people to be able to connect with it. The industry is a narrow, tiny passageway to navigate. If you want to get on radio, you have to be produced by one of three super-producers, you have to have been on a TV show, OR, it has to be this tempo and the lift has to come in after this many seconds. There’s a lot of great music getting made, that’s not being heard.
I’m moving house today. Where do you live at the moment and what do you like about your home?
I live in Brooklyn, and I miss my dog. His name’s Beau. He’s a Great Dane puppy, and he can’t travel with me because he’s huge. My husband travels a lot, and sometimes he can meet me places. [Sighs]. But my dog can’t.
Do you miss Philadelphia ever?
Yeah, sometimes. Recently I bought the house in Brooklyn, before that we used to visit my mom there. But now my sister and brother live in Brooklyn too, so she comes here. I realized all of a sudden I haven’t been to Philly in a year, so I took a daytrip. As an adult the place is just too small and conservative for me. I did move back there for four years at one point, when I started my band Stiffed. I decided not to do it in New York, I didn’t want the attention before learning how to perform. Philly’s a great place to cultivate your art. It’s cheaper, it’s less pressure, it’s more laid-back, and there’s a load of musicians there. The first show we ended up playing in New York then, was actually half full of press, so thank God for Philly.
I got your new album at about 11 last night, so I haven’t had nearly enough time with it to comb through lyrics, but I know a running theme is the current unrest – lyrically, are you just documenting that, or commenting on it? I know making political statements is a nightmare for pop stars.
The thing is, I wrote all those songs before the unrest really manifested itself. I think I was feeling the same things everybody across the globe was feeling at the same time. It makes sense that we feel this transformation that’s going on. Hurricanes in New York City, all these things are pointing towards a profound change. There’s a real restlessness, a real energy, that I think is rumbling through people as we realize how irresponsible we’ve been with the Earth. Birds are falling from the sky. Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, these things are going on, and that’s the innate energy that I think drove me to write the record. It’s not a political record at all, it’s a record about being a human in this time. I mean I don’t even really watch the news, I know what’s going on because it’s impossible not to.
Did you visit Occupy in New York?
I was out of town for most of it, is yours still going?
Just about.
I like the contagiousness of that movement, one of the themes of my record is claiming the position as the ruler of my reality. In a song like Disparate Youth the point is that you shouldn’t take what’s being handed down to you as a given. If you can see the things in a new way, then you shouldn’t take this broken-down legacy, but dare to see your own way. If you can see it your way, then you can make it your way, and that’s the kind of mentality that’s contagious – it doesn’t have to be this way, I feel like I have the power to change it.
Are you a perfectionist?
Ahahahahaha. Yes. God. Yes.
But you used to be in a punk band, right?
Yeah, like a post-punk, new wave band. Hey! That doesn’t mean I don’t like to have fun anymore.
Yeah, but with that you get away with being sloppy…
Oh yeah, but that’s the STYLE, I’m not a neat freak. You should see my room. It’s like a hurricane hit it. No, I mean in art, things have to be exactly how my vision set it out to be. I mean, sometimes, I love grimy guitars. If it’s not grimy enough, I don’t want it. It has to be sloppy in the right way. I’m obsessive-compulsive, probably, but if it’s not right, I just can’t let it go. Everybody I’ve worked with will tell you I’m a perfectionist, but I think when I push it, it actually moves.
You’re not Phil Spector, then.
Nuh-uh, when it’s done, it’s done.
And it’s done, right?
It’s done.
It is Master of My Make-Believe, and it’s available from the 1st of May. And it’s pretty class.
Words: Daniel Gray
