If an artist changes the spelling of her stage name shortly after releasing her self-titled debut, does the spelling of the album title also change? This is the problem with Santigold, a.k.a. Santi White, the artist formerly known as Santogold, and her almost-year-old eponymous debut—see, music critics aren't necessarily the sharpest bulbs in the tool shed, and minor discrepancies in vowel placement send our peanut-sized brains reeling. How are we supposed to come up with 80 different ways to say awesome with such monumental tidal shifts swirling around us? Do you guys smell burnin' wood?
To be fair, the name change wasn't a Sean Combs-style Diddy/Daddy vanity curve ball. Like with so many successful albums, the Santogold LP and its near ubiquity last summer brought the litigious crazies out of the woodwork—specifically Santo Rigatuso, a basic-cable nut job and infomercial huckster. See, Mr. Rigatuso used to hock fake gold necklaces and his monumental failure of a wrasslin' film, Blood Circus, under the name "Santo Gold," and has gained a small cult audience for his nonsensical, sub-moronic sales pitches. Having an incredibly smart woman making intelligent art that people actually want to buy is going to damage his reputation and hurt his earning potential—obviously. And it's not like making a film that makes Cap'n Lou Albano's Body Slam seem like Citizen Kane would damage one's esteem in the eyes of the American public.
This speaks to White's genius in maneuvering through our post-meta world—nothing says "zeitgeist" like pimping Bud Lime with a pseudonym swiped from a faux-gold salesman. Much of the industry might be loathe to admit it, but in order to make money off of music these days you need some of that ShamWow spirit. (Not the punching-prostitutes-in-the-face part, though.) The act of creation no longer stops at the studio. Moving music into the public consciousness is as much a performance as playing onstage. The age of artists in a gilded cage of aesthetic integrity removed from the teeming masses and the toil of commerce is long gone. While Santi White may not be the first troubadour to travel down this road, she certainly has done so with an easy confidence that makes her peers look like desperate attention whores.
Which brings us back to Katy Perry. (Incidentally, my month of trying to listen to her music has left me scarred.) Perry and White have had similar career trajectories. They released their debuts within weeks of each other, both enjoyed a degree of mainstream media omnipresence last summer and both have been knocking around the music industry for a while. Perry took the traditional mega-producer-and-major-label-moneybags route while White got all new model on a motherfucker and placed forward-thinking songs in beer commercials that—if my calculations are correct—played during every inning of every televised game for the entire 2008 season of Major League Baseball.
Both were ubiquitous and both artists will see a nice paycheck, but I'm pretty sure that the number of folks in line to strangle Santigold is far shorter than the line for Ms. Perry. Media overexposure is inevitable, but the folks that come out of it with their dignity intact are truly something special—and not "special" like the president's bowling score. Where Perry has been fueling her flash in the pan by acting like a troglodyte, White has played it savvy and smooth, supplanting cheap 20th century shock tactics with a respect for the art form and her audience's intelligence.
Santogold is a brilliant pop record, a dub-punk conflagration that captures the heady excitement of The Year America Realized Being Smart Isn't a Bad Thing and clearly delineates an end to the cultural knuckle-dragging of the Bush era. It captures a transformative moment in art and culture not unlike London Calling or The Who Sell Out, culling a huge range of influences while separating the wheat from the chaff and creating a new sound in the process. It's a record for everyone who ever thought a collaboration between Yellowman and The Pixies or Shabba Ranks and Siouxsie Sioux would have been a good idea. Santogold is modern music for people who embrace the modern idea that maybe being worldly and wise isn't such a bad thing after all. That, and she nicked her (now retired) stage name from one of the craziest dudes in the history of basic cable, which is pretty frickin' clever.
