Santogold - "Santogold"

Santogold - Unstoppable (Removed by request) (Downtown 2008)

Santogold - Santogold / Downtown

"Santogold? Isn't that the one that's just like MIA?" Michael quipped as we went over the records we'd be reviewing for the coming weeks. "I'm pretty sure she sounds just like MIA." The sun's glow was fading behind Halas Sports Center and youthful Loyola students were out flinging frisbees, laying in the lush grass, enjoying the wonderfully warm weather. I wasn't in a mood to argue.

Except that Santi White is worth arguing over. Here is a woman who has worked as an A&R rep for Epic, fronted a smartly delivered pop-punk band (in Stiffed), tried to start her own imprint, and is now enjoying her greatest success as an art-damaged diva in waiting. So her sense of style is similarly bright and (dis)tasteful. So she had producer du jour Switch and worldly cohort Diplo doing some tweaks to the final mixes of the songs for her self-titled debut. So she knows a little something about international instrumentation. So "Creator" is uncomfortably close to the Sri Lankan culture assassin Santogold is most often mistaken for.

So what? As Mark Ronson has said, White can actually "sing a song properly." This may sound like a presumptuous declaration, but when you think of MIA, you don't think of her singing because, in fact, there isn't much of it to be found on Arular or Kala. For all of her streetwise hoodies and post-millennial charm, Mathangi Arulpragasm is essentially a one-trick pony. No amount of sampling or collage camouflaging can disguise it.

Santi White comes from a completely different perspective. Armed with a musical background (rather than a visual art background), White is less naive about the music business and about her approach to it. References to her disenchantment with the status quo are littered all over the place (perhaps most prominently on the chorus to "Shove It"), but even when she sounds like she's preaching, you can at least sing along to it. You can sing along to almost anything here.

That's the great bit about this record, for Santogold is a stubbornly bipolar album that never resolves whether it wants to go in a dance club-oriented direction or a rock club-oriented direction. Though it's the fundamental fissure, it's also what makes her music so unpredictably engaging... Because at the heart of it all is one woman with a big enough heart to go in a direction that she wanted to go with the music. It's a disjointed record because Santi White is disjointed; we as people are rarely whole. So many albums are lauded for being uniformly brilliant (and you could list anyone from Led Zeppelin to the Wu-Tang to Kraftwerk to Interpol here), but Santogold falls under the imperfect masterpieces, the records that are great because they have no cohesion at all.

Depending on what you're looking for, on any given day you'll be listening to the instantly affable "Lights Out" or "I'm a Lady." The next day you'll be listening to floor-shaking anthems such as "Creator" or "Unstoppable." Posting just one song does not begin to describe the picture; there is something for everyone here. In that sense at least, Santi White will be unable to avoid comparisons to MIA. The critical difference is that while Maya collects every color of the rainbow to put in the blender of enlightened universality, Santogold splinters the influences with a prism. It's not nearly as challenging, but it's also not nearly as annoying.

Without sounding too self-congratulatory, I'd like to think that we at Audiversity appreciate artists who are challenging the divides of modern subculture (even if we don't like listening to them). It is my hope that by year's end Santogold will have done more than established herself as simply "the one who sounds just like MIA." Honestly, we already have enough of those. Here is something both distinct and familiar. Here is the culmination of one woman's years in pursuit of herself. Here is that woman's self-belief rewarded. As much as Triclops!, I believe in Santogold. That's my argument. What's yours?