Soundtracks: Santogold

I wanted to be able to write a huge old beautifully-articulated magnum opus about Santogold and her debut record, so it is with great regret that I'm so crazed and manic these days with Life Outside the Blog that I'm reduced to reviewing her record in five paragraphs or less. Which sucks, because it's not often you come across a woman (of color) in the current musical landscape making genuinely interesting, insanely catchy pop music that's so good and smart, it deserves every bit of name-drop, blog-hype, tv-placement and boutique-wallpaper it gets. With her seductive, adroitly confident mix of everything from New Wave to dub to 80s British melancholy to pure pop id, she's revelation wrapped up in hooks and brutally infectious melodies. She's going to take over and your whole summer will be permeated with her music everywhere you go, and you know what? That's why your summer will rock.

("But what about M.I.A.?!" some people will say on the lady pop auteur tip. Let's just put this to bed: they're worked with some of the same people and they're workout buddies or something like that, but Santogold's approach is all about smart pop pleasure, whereas M.I.A.'s about collisions and confrontations -- of sounds, of politics and of First/Third Worlds. "And what about Gwen Stefani?" Listen, I love Gwen and Gwen is totes fun and hooky, but Santogold's an artist, not a corporation in the guise of a pop diva. Not to mention something tells me she'd actually get the complicated cultural dynamics involved in the co-opting of Harajuku culture and the like.)

Now that we've got that stuff out of the way, we can now go into why this record is totally love at first listen, at least for a certain demographic raised on equal amounts of 1980s power pop radio format and "120 Minutes." Santogold definitely hits that late 80s/early 90s sweet spot -- not in any literal way, but definitely in the range of influences she draws upon and mixes up. We're at a particular cultural moment, I think: after years of paying dues, serving time and digging trenches, serious cultural producers and arbiters are starting to shape pop culture now, and it's a set of people who came of age when "alternative culture" was still underground-ish and radio was not so segmented you'd still be able to hear Ratt next to Expose. Record label owners, DJs, producers, gallery owners, musicians, filmmakers -- it's Generation Mixtape in the control seat. And of course, the heart of pop is all about teenage nostalgia, those years being probably the most emotionally to-the-bone and the most attuned to possibility. Perhaps it's a condition of fractured post-modernity that we still wish the master texts of our youth continued, even long after their originators got jaded, broke up or simply started to suck: we still want to live in a world of brittle New Wave glamour and we want to experience the epic melancholy of the Smiths even though Morrissey and Marr totes hate each other or something now and have gotten grizzled and jowly. But echoes of those secret worlds are evoked when contemporary artists take the sounds of them and rework them into new structures and shapes, and it's the best of these artists that incorporate something new and unexpected into this mix to make it all seem shiny and new. It's a winning combination: the structure of familiarity with the gloss of the right-now.

This is all just a fancy way of saying that Santogold's influences are fantastic and varied, but she brings totally her own elements to make a record that's totally of the moment -- but whose craft and strength of songwriting will make sure it transcends its timeliness. Santogold starts off with front-loading the party tunes, beginning with anthemic "L.E.S. Artistes," and the record is at its straight-up raddest and au courant when it wears its dub and rocksteady influences on its sleeve, particularly on "Shove It" and "Say Aha." The second half, though, veers into moodier territory, beginning with "My Superman," where Santi White nearly out-Siouxs Siouxsie herself over a ominously sinuous rhythm that stalks like the best Bauhaus song ever. But it's a mark of Santogold's pop fluency that the track is followed by Cars-like "Lights Out," and then goes on to explore progressively darker corners till it reaches the twilight of album closer "Anne." (It's not the closer proper -- there's a remix tagged on the end, but we all know how that goes.) It's all tied together with Santogold's trickster of a voice, which can shape-shift with all the stylistic changes but always retains its daring and blithe audacity. (I don't think it's too much within an act of critical enterprise to speculate on how Santogold's ability to take on and master the many guises of pop is related to being a person of color and a woman, especially in an industry not known for its inclusiveness -- but it may be enough to bring up the thought and continue the dance, no?) It's Santogold's ability to make the familiar new and the new deeply familiar that's her genius in the age of transience, homogeneity and atomization: the sound of beautiful outsiders, eternally wondering how soon is now and realizing that now is forever, nowhere and everywhere at once.

Posted by Kat in Soundtracks
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