by Beza Fekade
Hip-Hop can be fundamentally understood as a resistive cultural production fusing new and old, past and future; merging artforms widely known as sealed off from one another. It foregrounds the necessity for retrieval and repurposing in order to sustain itself. And through Hip-Hop’s constant alterations yields emergent challenges to its style. Santigold, born Santi White, journeys a defiant road that cements her as an initiate of fusion and originality. Without the familiarity of lyricism and word play, she evades Hip-Hop’s customary structure of rhyme, dispositioning her from the women who we deem instrumental in the artform’s expansion. However, with a closer listen and a stretch of time spanning twelve years, we can hear her more clearly in the sounds that have surfaced, post her exalting debut album. On the surface, we find her at the margins of our understanding of Hip-Hop, however as we begin to dig deeper, she seamlessly melds into the very fabric of its innovation.
In the 2003 text Theorizing Diaspora, Stuart Hall states that cultural identity is a matter of becoming and being, and is not intrinsically defined nor something that already exists; it adheres to critical points of deep and significant difference in order to map the “unstable points of identification, or suture.” For decades, Hip-Hop music has been a global site of cultural formation amongst African-descendant communities to engage in the state of “becoming” and “being.” Santi White is a testament to this cultural ecosystem, molded within Hip-Hop’s reach, and at large the African diaspora. What ensues is an intimate process of cultural identity that equips her to tap into new and unpredictable points of becoming.
Born in Philadelphia, White grew privy to a variety of genres as a child, such as reggae, jazz, the legendary Fela Kuti, the great soul singers Aretha Franklin and James Brown, and punk artists such as Devo and Siouxsie and the Banshees. In a 2012 interview with Spin Magazine, writer Caryn Ganz shared that White had a dream of becoming a professional musician at the age of 15, but it wasn’t realized until a decade later. Throughout her adolescence she roamed between an all-black school to an all-white girls school, and later, public school to prep academy. Parsing through her early life, she realized the ease of her mobility; she understood that she remained as a constant, the bridge to multiple localities. “I was a connector, because all these different people would never hang out together, but they’d be together with me…That’s what my music does. And that’s what I realized" (Spin Magazine, 2012). Just as Hip-Hop engages in the process of joining two or more things to form a single entity, so did White’s construction of her artistic performance.
White spent most of her summers working at her father’s law office in downtown Philadelphia where she discovered “fly girls,” the dance troupe on the sketch comedy In Living Color. The ladies would perform hard-hitting choreography to notable hip-hop and R&B records during intermissions and before commercial breaks. White immediately found herself emulating their wardrobe and demeanor. Here, she engages in Hip-Hop’s production of cultural and aesthetic performance by re-inscribing the appeal of “fly girls.” Although small, it points to a series of sutures in her ever-evolving artistic form.
After the completion of high school, White attended Wesleyan University and double majored in music and African American studies. She eventually began her musical career as an A&R representative for Epic Records. In 1999, White collaborated with GZA of the Wu-Tang Clan on the titled track of his album Beneath the Surface. The following year she made another collaboration with GZA with “Stay in Line,” featured on the album Legend of the Liquid Sword. Her musical influence began to find footing with Philly rock-soul singer Res, as she co-wrote and produced her debut studio album How I Do. Res’ debut album stands as an early indication of White’s refusal to be categorized, with the project merging pop, Hip-Hop, Rock, and R&B.
As lead singer of the Philadelphia-based punk rock band Stiffed, White and her bandmembers released the ep Sex Sells (2003) and album Burned Again (2005), incorporating new wave and no wave musical elements. The group soon disbanded leading to White and former bandmate, John Hill, joining forces to begin working on her solo self-titled debut, Santogold (later changed to Santigold due to a lawsuit dispute). Like her work with Stiffed, the album blends sounds of new wave, as well as reggae, dub, punk, electro, Hip-Hop, grime, indie, and more. White’s aim was to create a genre-defying album that blurred sounds and artforms deemed frictional in relation to one another. What culminated was a gaudy no-skip assemblage that positioned her as a spearhead toward dismantling rigid musical genres.
Ironically, her music became easy pickings for commercialization and pop culture. Santigold’s songs could be heard in Bud Light ads and television shows like Grey’s Anatomy. Conversely, White collaborated with Jay-Z and Kanye West for the record “Brooklyn Go Hard,” which sampled “Shove It” from her album and included an additional verse from the artist. Although White denounced, in 2008, that her music is solely Hip-Hop, the collaboration reinstates the essence of Hip-Hop’s re-mixing while highlighting the dexterity of White’s sound and rebellion
Dating back twelve years to its release, Santigold still proves as a pivotal shift in Black women’s contributions to performance and music. Subsequent to White’s 2008 release, the ensuing decade brimmed with new, adventurous talent. The likes of Tierra Whack, Rico Nasty, Kari Faux, Leikeli47, and others, altered standards of sound and rhyme. Although listeners may not label her within Hip-Hop’s pantheon, her proclamation of connector reigns true, as evident by the ladies she precedes and comes after. Without realizing, White’s emergence as a rioter of category and sound, cloaks her with intersecting musical styles that inform the interrogation of Hip-Hop music. Her subversion unsettles normative identifiers of genre and challenges the idealistic players that occupy its arena. Like her predecessors, White challenges the implications that race, sexuality, and gender often present in the realm of Hip-Hop and its misogynoiristic habits. She runs from definitive labels and shares in a tradition of deviation; she is as just a part of the past as she is bound to its future. Santi White’s musical entrance created and continues to create a breeding ground for hybridity, rupture, and infinite becoming.
Sources:
Ganz, C. (2012, May 17). Santigold's Killah Instinct. Retrieved August 02, 2020, from https://www.spin.com/2012/05/santigolds-killah-instinct/
Hall, S. (2003) Cultural Identity and Diaspora. Theorizing Diaspora, Blackwell Publishing.