Seven years ago, Santi White was writing songs for RES on How I Do. After that one album, RES dropped off the face of the major label scene. Too bad. RES still performs here and there (most recently at Club Midway in NYC) but a new album isn’t on the horizon.

Meanwhile, Santi White has continued to write songs for other artists - like Lily Allen’s “Littlest Things.” She was also part of a punk rock group called Spank Rock. Last year, she retagged herself Santogold and entered the new year as a buzz artist.

The Santogold songs I heard last year didn’t impress at all.

Among friends, I waved the flag hard for M.I.A.‘s first album Arular. To my ears Santogold was just a cocoa puffed up version of the spicy chick from Sri Lanka.

Well, they are friends.

Maybe the style jack is justifed by the closeness of their orbits. Still, like ice cream, you want New and Fresh Spanktastic Vanilla, to be something more than the New and Fresh Vanilla you had stacked in your refrigerator for weeks.

“L.E.S. Artistes” is the first song I’ve heard that strays from that ‘fantastic’ analogy. 😛

Santogold - “L.E.S Artistes”

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Musically, it’s reminiscent of her RES work. Visually, it’s said to draw on the psychedelics of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain.
(Trace ref.)

MTV has a quick 1 minute zoom on Santogold.

You’ll need this quote to put her Beyonce smack in context.

“I think somewhere along the lines someone decided that pop songs had to be disposable cheap songs with no real substance. So, I guess I’m trying to bring art back to pop music. I think artists like Blondie, Prince, and The Police were all pop artists, but they wrote brilliant creative music as well. All that said, it does take an entirely different mindset to try to write stupid pop songs, which is what I think most of the “pop” music on the radio is today. I don’t wear that cap too well.

I do want to be a pop artist in the sense that I want the most people possible to know my music. But I want to take pop music back from the wasteland it currently resides in.

Being an artist is as much about developing your mind as it is about skill.
It’s really important to know yourself, what’s important to you, and what you have to say.”