Photography / michael donovan
Stylist / alison st germain
Makeup/Devra Kinnery @art department
For Baal/Yusef Paul Labrecque Salon @ factory downtown
The future is here and the path to it has been paved Sleep
Music expert Santi White, who records centigoldOne of the hottest and most inventive artists in the music world currently. A self-taught singer, writer and producer, she has collaborated and toured with a prolific list of music industry luminaries: Pharrell, Diplo, Beastie Boys, Kanye West, MIA, Björk, Coldplay and most recently the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The esteemed talents he has worked with are as diverse as the infectious tunes he creates. To say that Santigold is ahead of the curve would be an understatement. Four years have passed since their self-titled debut and Sentai has finally returned, and with a contemporary vengeance.
Santigold’s sophomore album, “Master of My Make-Believe”, It was recorded on Jay-Z’s label Roc-Nation and its collaged beats are a mix of hip-hop, robo-dance, electropop, new-wave reggae, 80’s synth, Jamaican beats, Indian rhythms and Afro drums. Santi puts things together in a way that cross-pollinates so many genres that it’s a genreless sound that unites soft ballad blues and protest songs with distant vocals. This work is an invigorating bucket of worms that together create a completely different genre, a brilliantly saturated new genre, post-Internet, post-everything.
Brooklyn-based Santee White, 35, spent her childhood in Northwest Philadelphia, where she attended an all-black kindergarten, a predominantly all-white grade school, an exclusive Quaker high school (Germantown Friends School), and then later attended college at the elite Wesleyan University. His mixed education helped him become who he dared to be.
“As a kid, I was a jack of all trades,” says Santigold. “I dabbled in everything under the sun for about five minutes: ice skating, karate, violin, guitar, field hockey, lacrosse, gymnastics, tap dancing, etc. Music was the only thing that remained constant the whole way.”
listen again and again ““Master of My Make-Believe” can make you feel like you’ve come to another world – Santee’s World: a handmade, perfectly cooked feast of tunes that can not only be danced to, but felt, stepped on, marched to or simply walked to. “Master of My Make-Believe” is excellent because it is both reptilian and cerebral. It moves back and forth between those tunes. Between bounces that captivate your mind and melodies that stick to your bones.
Santigold describes the album as knowing that you can create whatever you dare to see for yourself or for the world. About being the ruler of your reality. It’s like being on the edge of something dangerous but peaceful, teetering on the brink of madness. It is a genre-bending ode to youthful defiance, freedom and confusion. Everywhere there is a primal experience of ferocity mixed with calm conservatism. The yin and yang of the album work together toward a broader whole, an idiosyncratic tour of its ringmaster’s multicultural musical language.
The songs are not bound by any thematic or conceptual whole, allowing Santigold to do what she does best: invent. She says, “My songs are always personal, even if the way I write the lyrics sometimes makes the meaning ambiguous. So the songs are left open enough for the listener to interpret in a way that has personal meaning for them.” “My songs almost always start with a melody rather than lyrics. The lyrics actually usually come out of the melody. They’re all individual (invention) in their own way.”
Santi’s reluctance to follow his precept led to the decision to drive the horse himself this time. She says, “Making this album was a challenge for me. This time I was taking charge of the project alone.” “Although I worked with several producers, I was the only constant, so there was no one else to share any doubts I had, or the struggles I had trying to pull things together on any given day. I really had to dig deep and find the confidence I needed to believe in my vision and see it through to the end. It was definitely a growth process for me, and a testament to the power of creativity. It will lead you if you let it.”
Her voice retains a charming roughness – which is reflected in the visual world – and her attitude, a welcome simplicity. Unlike their first album, “Make-Believe” developed organically without any roadmap. “[I had]no blueprint. I just jumped in without any game plan. When I first started the writing process I was really unusually clear because I had just come back from climbing Kilimanjaro, and I flew straight to Los Angeles from Ethiopia (where we went to visit a UN refugee camp after Tanzania, which supplied water to an area where it was scarce) to work with Switch,” Santi says. “It was quite ambitious to think that I would actually be able to do anything. I think I felt excited and thought I would explode with new life experiences. Instead, I mostly slept on his couch and we cooked on the grill. But we brought drums that would later be used in the song ‘The Riots Gone,’ so in the end it was worth it,” she says.
“It wasn’t until several months later that I started to get somewhere. I guess I just needed some time to process my life and experiences over the past few years. There was no real free time since putting out the first record to process anything. I went straight into working on the new record for two years, from touring for the first album to training and then climbing Kilimanjaro. I had no idea what I’d learned yet or what new I had to say.”
On “Master of Make-Believe”, recorded in New York, LA and Jamaica, Santigold returned to the producers who had worked with her on her debut, such as Switch, Diplo and John Hill, but found that it was not so easy to write for this time. “It was a challenge, mostly because I went in there with expectations. I thought I knew exactly what to expect, exactly what the process would be like, etc. That’s the worst way to build something new.”
He worked on the album for a year, traveling to Jamaica with Diplo and Switch and calling in new collaborators Nick Zinner (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) and Dave Sitek (of TV on the Radio). “We were all at a different place in our lives, and were in different places as artists, and everyone brought their own stuff to the table. I had an amazing time anyway. At the end of the day, being in Jamaica with friends is never a bad thing. And it gave me the break I needed to really listen to the noise inside my head and sort it out. That led to me getting a lot of writing done there, which was a real breakthrough. It was productive, which was my It was different than expected. I realized that when I was there, it’s always good to work with some new people because you get to do things different from yourself and then I ended up working with my old crew again and it was much better.
Santigold is one of the rare crop of socially conscious artists who make true, homegrown art and are somehow allowed onto the main stage, even if their sales aren’t guaranteed. For these artists, genuine content takes precedence over fanfare. Tracks like their majestically crafted “Desperate Youth” have the joyous bounce of a faraway place. The electro-balladry of “Riot’s Gone” feels like a haunted interior address to the instability of loss and uncertainty, with the lyrics both facilitating and identifying with an uncertain world: “I’m looking for a fight / All the trouble I know / Trying to lose the world inside / But it’s got no place to go.”
Santi explained, “‘Riots Gone’ was about feeling like myself again after feeling unnaturally angry after my father’s death.” “Actually, I wrote most of these songs in 2010, before all that stuff came out to fans, but I think it was driven by the same undercurrent, feelings of restlessness and frustration and a sense that we’d better start paying attention otherwise. I mean, there were a lot of things happening on Earth alone, from birds falling out of the sky, to oil spills, to nuclear explosions. I just came back from Africa where people don’t even have clean water to drink, Which is called the next thing we will fight after oil. On the other hand, just turn on the TV and you will find a celebrity-obsessed, false-reality world, this is the reality I was writing about.
The tight-lipped Santigold successfully protects her privacy while still being in the public eye. She seems to straddle the line between abhorring material excess and embracing it. She is not accustomed to mega-fame yet. Is it difficult for him to balance his desire for success and caution about fame? “It’s not that hard right now,” she replies. “I don’t think too much about fame. I mean, it’s definitely weird when you’re out somewhere minding your own business and you realize someone’s watching you and you’re like, I hope I wasn’t talking to myself or picking my nose or anything. But I just focus on perfecting my craft, and hope everyone else will do the same. I want to be successful. But I believe success is up to each individual. Is different.”
Money and sales are huge driving forces in the music industry, but Santigold creates his unique art while staying within those parameters, which gives his art more credibility. On the cusp of international stardom with a successful hit album, a lot more people will be listening to what Santigold has to say. Santi is simply not going to accept the pain of the investigation they demand. She says, “I don’t like being put under a microscope. There’s one thing about ‘fame’ that’s really weird and dangerous to the person.” “As a person in the public eye, I learned last time, you really need to protect yourself from people who are trying to scrutinize or analyze you. That’s not good.”
“I want to live more gracefully, try to be like the calm in the center of the storm,” Santigold says. On the change she wants to see in the world: “I want us to live more harmoniously.”
