FEATURE:
Revisiting...
Santigold - Spirituals
__________
FOR the last Revisiting…
PHOTO CREDIT: Frank W. Ockenfels III
features of 2022, I am looking back at albums from this year that didn’t get the complete positivity and love that they deserved. One is Santigold’s exceptional fourth studio album, Spirituals. The album was recorded largely throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, between 2020 and 2021 with lyrics inspired in part by the present time in the U.S. Santigold described the writing as a cathartic process, as she was creating light so that she could move forward. An album about human resilience, it moves through various genres stunningly. One of the best releases from the Philadelphia-born artist, Spirituals is an album that warranted more spotlight and respect than it got I think. There are a couple of Spirituals reviews I want to get to, as it is a magnificent album that is among the best from this year. I will get into some interviews first. Santigold gave a selection of interviews to promote Spirituals. In this one from W Magazine, they revisit her 2008 debut album, Santigold, and put focus on the brilliant Spirituals:
“The musician Santi White, known by her artist moniker, Santigold, was sitting on a deck in Jamaica when her phone started blowing up. Beyoncé had just released “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix),” which revamps the verse full of name drops from “Vogue,” replacing Madonna’s creative heroes with her own. Instead of “Greta Garbo and Monroe/ Dietrich and DiMaggio,” Beyoncé opens with “Rosetta Tharpe, Santigold/ Bessie Smith, Nina Simone.” In the following lines, Santigold is revealed to be in the company of other legends, including Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross and Grace Jones. I asked White how it feels to win the pop cultural equivalent of a Lifetime Achievement Award. “I was obviously honored to be among those names!” she told me over the phone earlier this month. “The coolest thing about it to me is that Beyoncé is using her platform to educate people. Often, Black musicians—particularly Black women musicians—never get the recognition they deserve.”
Conversations about White’s icon status have been building for the last year. Thanks, in part, to the launch of the Instagram account @Indiesleaze, the internet has been brewing with nostalgia for the "alt" sounds and styles of the mid-to-late aughts—many of which were cultivated in New York’s Lower East Side and Brooklyn. While there is a great deal of silliness (think: shutter shades) and smuttiness (American Apparel) associated with this chapter in history, among the most meaningful and impactful cultural products of this era is Santigold’s music.
In 2008, the Philadelphia native’s debut album, the critically acclaimed Santigold, hit the indie music scene like a meteor. In a recent podcast for The Fader, Mark Ronson described himself as “gobsmacked” after listening to the record. “It felt as if she had dropped down to earth a fully formed, genre-spanning superstar,” he said. Building off of her foundations as a punk musician, White’s solo work fused the best of new wave and post-punk with dancehall, Tropicália and trip-hop. She engineered an edgy new sound, punctuated by sassy lyrics and enhanced by the flexibility of her piercing, inimitable vocals.
While White’s earliest music chronicles her coming of age in a creative utopia, her most recent body of work narrates the harrowing realities of life in a political dystopia, with the same gripping lucidity. On September 9th, Santigold will release her fourth studio album, Spirituals—the title of which references the genre of Christian music sung by enslaved people in America. Created mostly during the lockdown periods of the pandemic, the production of Spirituals allowed Santigold to find “transcendental freedom” in the absence of physical freedom. Sonically speaking, the record is a strong nod back to her first—it's uplifting, danceable and ferocious in a good way. Lyrically, it's moving. White is grappling with the most pressing issues of our time, with the intimacy and nuance she's well known for. “California was on fire, we were hiding from a plague, the social justice protests were unfolding. I’d never written lyrics faster in my life,” White shared.
The record is attuned to a new zeitgeist, one largely shaped by Black Lives Matter. The empowering messaging in tracks about the Black experience, such as “High Priestess,” “No Paradise,” and “Ain’t Ready” bring to mind Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise.” In a short video promoting the single “Shake,” White plays the tambourine while being sprayed with a water hose, referencing the Birmingham riot of 1963. “I talk a lot about personal power on the record,” she said. “It’s about being able to create change by going inward, and then upward.”
For White, music and social commentary have always gone hand in hand. “Growing up, the music I was exposed to at home was all topical music. Everyone that my Dad was listening to was singing about change.” She rattled off a list of household favorites (Burning Spear, Joni Mitchell, Public Enemy) before revealing that she wrote her first song, “City Streets," at age nine. Between belly laughs, she recited her first-ever lyric: “People need our help out there/ and there’s no one to listen!” In the wake of Trump, the pandemic and BLM, White lamented that popular music nowadays is overwhelmingly apolitical. “I think of the job of an artist as being a bridge to the future, to progress. Maybe by being a mirror to society and allowing people to take a real look at themselves, we help find a way forward”.
A tremendously innovative artists who has undoubtably inspired so many others, I am looking forward to seeing what the future holds for Santigold. Rolling Stone asked Santigold about releasing Spirituals on her own label, and what the future held for her and her music:
“Spirituals is the first release from your own label, Little Jerk Records. What’s the story behind the title
Santigold: Spirituals is a nod to the traditional Negro spirituals. These contained songs that when sung and performed got Black people through the “un-get-through-able”. That’s what this record did for me. I wrote it in survival mode in LA and produced it in a little studio in the middle of the forest in western Canada during Covid. Social justice protests were unfolding, fires were burning up California, and people were being shot by the police. I had little kids and had to be a mom, wife, human and artist. There wasn’t time to feel. It wasn’t until I made the space to create that I realised these songs were a lifeline and a way to connect to a higher version of myself and go deeper. I’ve never written lyrics faster in my life; they were pouring out of me.
Is there a track that stands out over the rest?
Santigold: This album is a celebration of human resilience. Each song holds a similar place in my heart. ‘Ain’t Ready’ is my battle cry. It’s about internal struggle, picking yourself up when you get knocked down, and trusting that you’re going to get to where you need to get too. It’s about perseverance and stepping into your own power. When I first sang the lyrics, I was alone in that studio in the woods and started crying. I collaborated with Canadian producer Illangelo, and I wanted the production to sound tough and mirror the grit of the battle many of us were going through.
You’ve continually blazed your own path in the world of pop music and beyond for others to follow. Have you seen change for the better in the industry, and what still needs to evolve?
Santigold: I started out in the 90s. I worked as an A&R at Epic Records in 2000. Business and technology-wise, the music world is 100 per cent different. But honestly, if you ask me whats changed for the better as a female in this industry, my answer would be, still not nearly enough. I don’t think we’ve made that much progress on that tip. There’s this tiny little box, that if you want to be a pop star you have to fit into. Lazy comparisons like myself and M.I.A., or Lauryn and Erykah or Jill Scott, are still being made.
As far as major players in the studio, I know that technology has made it so much more accessible for women to hone their skills and become producers and engineers at home. But I’m looking forward to when those up and coming women step forward and come into the limelight. Because at the moment it’s still not on the scale that it should be.
Throughout your career, you’ve been fiercely innovative. Your music has appeared on car commercials with Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, you sang background vocals for Tyler, the Creator’s IGOR and you’ve acted on The Office. What does the future hold?
Santigold: I’m really excited to let my music take me to new places. I want to continue branching out into all forms of art. I created Spirituals as a multi-sensory experience. I have a small batch of natural skincare products and a tea collection coming out bearing the same name. I’m writing a book tracing back four generations of phenomenal women in my family in Mississippi as well as my own journey. I’m working on a film. I’m releasing a new podcast series interviewing other artists and brilliant thinkers. Currently, in London, I’m also in a video installation as part of the exhibition, In the Black Fantastic, at the Hayward Gallery.
When I was making Spirituals, there was so much that I wanted to express. When you put out a new project, sometimes your message gets condensed to “Santigold is finding her power”, but for me, it’s so much deeper than that. I’m only getting started”.
An album that was not necessarily overlooked, I do think that it was underrated. A phenomenal album that moves through genres and sounds expertly and charts rage, loneliness and triumph, Spirituals is a revelation that definitely proudly stands alongside the finest of this year. Santigold is someone who is in a league of her own. This is what AllMusic said of a staggering album:
“Motherhood, writer's block, and the COVID-19 global pandemic all contributed to Santi White taking a longer hiatus from music than she expected. Spirituals, her fourth album as Santigold, also upends expectations. Instead of the playful cultural critique of 99 Cents or the sunny vibes of I Don't Want: The Gold Fire Sessions, this time Santigold offers music made in and for difficult times. She brings her focus inward, crafting hypnotic, often moody songs about building and showing resilience; as always, they're expertly crafted, with ear-catching production choices aplenty. With its warping, metallic synth tones, "Witness" is equally melancholy and mechanical, while the tantalizingly brief SBTRKT collaboration "Shake" provides Spirituals' clearest connection to its namesake with a nervy, soulful pulse that feels like a 21st century update on the galvanizing traditional songs of the Black community. Santigold also excels at bridging the past, present, and future of her own music. "High Priestess" taps into the searching, hard-to-pin-down energy that made Santogold songs like "L.E.S. Artistes" and "Creator," but on this track and the rest of the album, there's a world-weary undercurrent that adds depth and urgency. White delivers a bona fide anthem in "No Paradise," a lilting command to seize the moment that culminates in an empowering chant, and steels herself for whatever her comes her way on "Ain't Ready," which features assists from SBTRKT and Illangelo. On songs like this and "Fall First," a punky collaboration with Rostam Batmanglij, she sounds indomitable, but more importantly, she lets listeners know what it's like when she doesn't feel that way. She shares her worries as freely on Spirituals as she shared her joy on her earlier albums, and it's just as compelling. "My Horror," a deceptively sweet lullaby of stasis that unleashes its dread slowly, is one of the album's greatest creative achievements, as is the haunting desperation of "The Lasty." Spirituals pushes Santigold's music forward while shoring up its strengths -- and for perhaps the first time since her debut, it feels like art that she had to make for herself”.
I will wrap it up with a review form CLASH. They gave a positive review to an album with so many highlights and songs that linger in the memory. A hypnotising listen (as some reviewers have noted), this is what CLASH observed in their review:
“It’s been far too long since we got an album proper from Santigold. While 2018’s warmly received ‘I Don’t Want’ mixtape gave fans some energetic bangers to tide us over, it’s been a whole six years since ’99¢’ lit up stereos. In her absence, the genre-mashing of indie and rock with dub, reggae, dancehall, and everything in between has almost become the norm. In this pick and mixafaction age of streaming, it’s sometimes hard to remember what impact the arrival of the likes of Santigold and M.I.A made. Now fourteen years from her debut, Santigold stands in a (thankfully) more inclusive and exciting music scene, filled with many artists who owe her and her peers a debt of gratitude. So what does this restorative lockdown album have to say?
We can happily report that the same level of energy and urgency that Santigold always brings to her work remains shining bright. ‘Spirituals’ is a bold and sometimes brooding beast, crammed full of first-class beats and sonic textures. Ever the collaborator queen, this fourth full-length sees old hands Rostam, and Nick Zimmer get involved in the fun, in addition to Doc McKinney, SBTRK, and P2J, to name just a few. The result is a slick and modern-sounding record that still keeps some of the grit of old. It’s as perfect sounding a Santigold record as you could want for 2022.
Openers such as ‘My Horror’ see Rostam bring that old Vampire Weekend whimsical energy to Santogold’s claustrophobic tale of pandemic anxiety. It’s a classic contrast of dark lyrics and bouncing beats to create something danceable yet memorable. ‘High Priestess’ can comfortably join ‘Disparate Youth’ and ‘L.E.S Artistes’ as a certified BADASS tune, all swagger, and spiritual empowerment layered over electro synths and pissed-off drums. Exploring the other end of the spectrum is the joyous ‘Shake.’ With the album’s title referring to the use of song to help the black community get through unimaginable hardships, the song drips with an almost manic joy while still containing a palpable sense of resilience.
While ‘Spirituals’ boasts many bold flavours over its ten tracks, it still feels slight. At just thirty minutes in length, the album is the shortest of Santigold’s career, and while it’d be a push to describe any of the songwriting as lightweight, it does feel as if too much fat was trimmed. Half of the album’s numbers don’t even hit the three-minute mark, often pulling the plug just as you’re ready for more. Digesting the album in one setting is like repeatedly snacking on something sweet but not substantial. Pleasurable, sure, but you never feel full. In this day and age of short attention spans and TikTok-friendly runtimes, these succinct snapshots might be good business sense but seem slightly scattershot when presented as a whole.
Still, wanting more of something is hardly the worst criticism to be leveled at an album. With this long-awaited release, Santigold has once more shown the world she’s one of the game’s most unique, imaginative, and fun creators. It’s good to have her back.
7/10”.
Go and listen to the wonderful Spirituals. Always sensational and different, Santigold is an artist I have respected and followed for a long time. I hope that she gets to put a tour together next year to promote Spirituals. Go and listen to an album from an artist that is…
SIMPLY amazing.