Philly-born alternative dance icon Santigold is headed to the Hinterland stage this Saturday at 5 p.m. Her cross-genre ingenuity has produced hits such as 2008’s "L.E.S. Artistes" and 2012’s “Disparate Youth,” as well as four critically acclaimed studio albums.
Santi White, who performs as Santigold, has worked with a plethora of the music industry’s brightest stars, including David Byrne, Karen O, the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z and Mark Ronson. One of her latest collaborations landed on last year’s Hinterland headliner Tyler, the Creator’s 2024 album, Chromakopia — “Thought I Was Dead,” which also features ScHoolboy Q.
“I love Tyler, and I love the work that he does. I love his creative approach. I love how everything he does is like art,” White said.
In 2022, White broke her four-year musical hiatus with her own spin on the pandemic record — her fourth studio album, Spirituals.
“My goal in making that record was just to make it through [the pandemic], and for me, what I needed maybe more than ever during that time was making art in general. They're like a sort of nutrient for my soul,” White said. “‘Spiritual’ means something that resonates with my spirit [...] and that could be anything, a bird outside my window. It could be snowboarding. It could be [...] anything that makes us feel like the best version of who we are, the highest version of who we are, and makes that part of ourselves resonate.”
Santigold’s dub-inspired new-wave indie pop often has a sociopolitical edge, neatly nestled within an infectious dance beat. Her 2016 album 99¢ challenged the evils of self-absorption, personal branding and commodification, a warning Santigold said the social media-obsessed public did not heed in the past decade.
“People just didn't take the warning!” White said. “We’ve walked further into the belly of the beast at this point, and really, culture has just gone in that direction.”
Despite the ever-rising popularity of selling one’s self-image online, White does see a silver lining in the influencer age — the public’s renewed desire to seek out art and community.
“What's interesting is, I feel like the further we go in that direction, and the further we lose touch with valuing things with substance, I feel like there’s going to be a backlash where smaller groups of people start to value things more,” White said. “Vinyl is selling more than it ever did, right? When you look at why stuff like that happens is because when you never get to have a tactile experience, it becomes a novelty; it becomes a more special experience.”
“I think it's going to happen with a lot of things. Even with my shows sometimes, when you get all those people together in a room, sharing energy and sharing space and sharing a frequency together, especially with some of my songs where the messages are so important, so relevant to right now, It's something that you can't get in any other environment. [...] It’s something that becomes more rare nowadays. So, I think that the more we move away from that as a mass culture, the more there's going to be subcultures that value those even more.”
White does have new music in the works, which she plans to release as singles rather than a full record. These days, she’s been juggling songwriting with the composition of a book and a movie.
“I just walk along life, right? I’m not necessarily looking for inspiration most of the time, especially these past few years, [but] music is something that I need to do and I’ll always do,” White said. “I love coming up with melody. It's so quick. It's so easy. It could be like, 12:30 at night and I'm so tired, and I hear something and I'm like, ‘I gotta do this right now.’”
“And then I'll just quickly do a couple run-throughs where I just spill melody, spill melody, and if that goes great, then the song’s mostly done already. And, the thing is, I sing in gibberish, there’s not real words when I do it. Then, if I like it, [...] then I write down everything it sounds like I said, all the gibberish. Some of them aren't real words, some of them are, and I write it down exactly like it sounds. [...] It's like a puzzle because then I have to put the real words in, and I want them to be exactly the same sounds as the gibberish. [....] You have to be able to put together words that have great meaning, but in the confines of this puzzle that you just made.”
White does not recall ever playing Iowa before, so this Saturday’s Hinterland set is bound to be special. She likes to bring her audience into the action.
“My show is pretty interactive, I think. We’ve got dancing, we’ve got a dance contest, we’ve got moments when the crowd comes up,” White said. “I love an interactive show. I love to see how excited people get to come up and for people to have their moment to shine [...] I think it’s really kind of special for the audience and for me.”
A quarter-century into her career and counting, Santigold is truly living and creating as her authentic self, and she hopes her audience takes that message of liberation home with them, too.
“A real thing that I’ve been thinking about, and writing about and living myself, is just the experience of freedom in the truest form. Not just sociopolitical freedom, but like, personal, spiritual freedom, which means living exactly the way you feel you need to, outside of any boxes that people try to place you in, outside of any expectations that you’ve placed on yourself,” White said. “That’s what my music is about, and that’s how I try to live, so I hope that that’s what people get from [my show].”
