Santigold is a survivor of a half century worth of living along musical evolution’s most cutting edges. The only live act that can boast of having out-aged Barbara Bush, having outlived Mr. Miyagi and out styled Liberace, Santigold is here with future flavor.
Already receiving weighty club rotation and airplay in urban Afghanistan and downtown Beirut, Santigold is the first act of the century to boast a post-war following on the International Space Station Mir. Following a live performance broadcast from three thousand miles off the Cape of Good Hope last June, inmates at Leavenworth Penitentiary received Santigold with a celebratory confetti parade. Just another first for the modern super group that knows no bound.
Composed of absolutely no members, Santigold is also the first musical outfit capable of claiming the planet’s broiling collective consciousness as their front woman. Longtime collaborator, singer and songwriter Santi White says of her work with Santigold, “We began trying to write pop songs to sell, which made us depressed, so we started writing songs for ourselves instead.” The results of that self centered conceit is the songwriting work heard for the first time on the full length self-titled Santigold album, released in 2008 on Downtown/Lizard King (US) and Atlantic (UK).
As unmastered tracks leaked over the internet this past November, the request lines of radio stations from Miami to Hanoi began freezing with a flood of calls from listeners eager to hear the new Santigold sound over their frequencies. From his radio show in the United Arab Emirates capital city of Abu Dhabi, Michael Jackson (the King of Pop) played what Santigold snippets he had been able to pirate from a bootleg MySpace page dedicated to the group. Days later, BBC Radio One reported that the unreleased Santigold debut was heard blasting from the iPod shuffle of Libyan ruler Moammar Qaddafi as he entered an international summit in the Nigerian capital of Abuja. Recognizing the urgent need to address the uproarious buzz, Santigold released the following statement through their label reps : “The response to our unmastered songs has been both premature and phenomenal! We were happy to hear that the children of Darfur have found hope in our melodic interpretation of life on the battlefield of love! We’re hoping that each and every 20-something from downtown San Francisco to central Mumbai will also learn something from our work! And to the people dropping no-knock fire on old ladies in Atlanta: shame on you! Santigold ain’t with that shit!”
The trajectory of such early successes leading to newfound political clout is nothing new for Santigold, whose debut album, though half a century in the making, is sure to rock glass pipes from the Lincoln Memorial to Buckingham palace. The flavor of the gold is guaranteed: Santigold!
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