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Santogold: Silver & Gold :: The ups and downs of bad outfits and worse parking spots

By Si Hawkins   Photography by James Pearson Howe

06/26/07 :: URB 154

It ain’t easy being a fashion icon. Just ask Santi White, better known as Santogold, who’s becoming further aware of this awkward facet of the female fame business with every passing week, wherever she may roam.

A few days ago, the Philly-born artist was trudging around the less-than-sexy English city of Birmingham during a well-earned break from her relentless touring-and-talking schedule, and trying to look as inconspicuous as possible in an “extra horrible” sweatpant and sweatshirt combo. She still got recognized, which is usually cool, but not when you’re sporting extra horrible sweats and the general public is looking to you as a trendsetter. Worse, it’s starting to happen on a daily basis back home in Brooklyn, too.

“They have this stupid alternate-side parking rule, so four days a week I have to get up at 8:45 AM and find another parking spot,” groans White, as she lounges wearily on a hotel couch. “So I roll out with a scarf, huge glasses, the worst random outfit, seriously whatever’s on my floor, then I go outside and move my car. No-one used to care, they’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s just another crackhead.’ But lately I’ve been hearing stuff like, ‘Oh, my friend says he’s your neighbor.’ I mean, I have a neighbor? So they’ve been watching me do this and thinking, ‘There goes Santogold,’ every morning.”

It’s an occupational hazard, of course, as hers is a name on a diverse array of lips right now. In Britain, where White has decamped for a month to launch her self-titled debut album, she initially touched down under a cloud of scepticism. As a good friend of fellow Brooklyn resident M.I.A., and with Switch and Diplo both helping out in the production booth, it seemed Santi might be little more than a U.S.-constructed copycat of the Tamil Tigress. Not really a great selling point, seeing as Britain never really fell for M.I.A. in the first place.

White soon won them over though, partly due to her unaffected and affable personality, but mostly because of the tunes, which are tough not to love. Accessible hook-filled pop with enough jagged, experimental edges to keep hard-to-please music critics happy; it’s an intoxicating and very commercially viable combination. Was it stumbled across, though, or carefully planned? Organically farmed or factory-built? That’s the Santogold conundrum.

URB first meets White at London’s fashionable and often celebrity-filled K-West hotel, a few weeks before the full-on promotional blitz kicks in. The prospective pop-star seems anything but calculating. Dressed for comfort rather than cameras, she’s mightily relieved that we don’t have a film crew, and has already carried out one of her patented getting-spotted-while-looking-your-worst maneuvers. “I’d been trying to order food all day, it’s 3 PM and I was like, ‘Ugh!’ and I went down in my pajamas and slippers and Mark Ronson’s there in the lobby and he shouts out ‘Santi! Come over here! I’m doing an interview!’ So, he’s introducing me and the writer’s like, ‘I don’t care, can we finish this?’”

White was one of the lower-profile contributors to Ronson’s now omnipresent (in the UK) album, Version, but until 2004, she was counting on a relatively low-profile career. Performing had been off the agenda since her mid-teens, when she made a solo attempt at a gospel spiritual and stank the place out. “It was horrible and I sucked and my parents were like, ‘How did you get the solo?’ It’s amazing I ever performed again.”

Music was in her blood though, and her intriguingly varied style—ska-pop, dub, ’80s indie—can be readily traced back to her family’s record buying tastes. While Santi’s open-eared older sister introduced her to The Smiths, Bad Brains and Led Zeppelin, their musicobsessed father snuck her into gigs by everyone from Nina Simone to Fela Kuti, “and his 27 topless wives. I was seven. He took me to see James Brown. I’d say, ‘What’s wrong with his leg?’ And he’d say, ‘He’s got soul’ and I’d say, ‘Cooool!’”

White’s father was a well-connected lawyer, and when Santi was in her late-teens he secured her an internship with Kenny Gamble, of godlike Philly soul producers Gamble and Huff. One thing led to another and the aspiring suit eventually ended up as an A&R executive at the mighty Epic Records, on an urban tip. Her marquee signing was the alt-soul act Res but, struggling to find the right songwriter, White ended up writing the tunes herself, which went so well that she gave up the label work to do the creative stuff full time. Songwriting led to singing, and the performance phobia was set firmly aside as she formed a ska-punk band, Stiffed, while also sneaking out a couple of songs for Ashlee Simpson and Lily Allen on the side.

Song: I'm A Lady