Santigold: Complex as the Faces of a Packed Subway Car

"The best inspiration for creating anything is just to experience life."
— Santigold

Of the four advocates who designed T-shirts for "Friends of MOCA," Levi's and Intel's collaboration to bring awareness and support to the educational programs at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Santigold is unique. She's a musician, but even though her primary medium for connecting with audiences is music, she incorporates different styles of dance, visual arts, and music to create what she calls a collage.

Technology has helped change the way Santigold makes music, assembles her collage style performances, and how she listens to music. It helps her propel culture forward. As she told The Ultrabook™ Experience team, "If I don't like what I see, then I am going to stand up and do something about it and change it."

Here's a deeper look at Santigold's career and influences. Along with Intel and Levi's, Santigold is working to support and encourage arts education.

Santigold is an artist whose perseverance relies on invention, and a champion who survives off her own skill and faith. She is a major muse watched by the inspired world, an in-categorical performer who collapses time and genre. Santigold is neither calm nor mayhem, but from her lungs burst every color in between.

After four years of hide and seek, in which blogs blew up at any release of a track with her name attached to it, Santigold returns in a moment of global aggression and vulnerability. Honing in on the hyper-media cult of personality, in her unmistakable voice she asks the listener: Into what fantasy do you hurl yourself as you gaze into the glow of your machine? The answer to this question is central to what drives Master of My Make-Believe, her latest work to be released this spring on Atlantic Records.

As an antidote against self-celebratory status updates, in a climate where the focus on fame outweighs a day's emotions, Master of My Make-Believe summons pop culture zombies back to life. This is sound proof of an artist on a diligent journey, measuring the power of individual mood against social clamor. Sifting through a wondrous wreckage of airplay, upload, and anguish, Santigold's talent lies in filtering reality through freakdom, to find in desire a timeless spark of raw magic.

Anyone caught referring to Master of My Make-Believe as a sophomore effort is only half right. Though relatively fresh as Santigold, Santi White's history of writing, production, and performance stretch beyond the century's flip. Her collaboration with the industry's most recognized and respected talent is something continuous and wide reaching, making her musical lineage all the much richer. Declared Best Breakthrough Artist by NME in 2008 and Pop Music Vanguard by ASCAP in 2009, the voice that defines Santigold is as complex as the faces that pack a subway car, as intimate and honest as conversation on a weathered stoop.

Through chopped pianos, the clink of glass bottles, and the peaking blast of motorcycle engines, Master of My Make-Believe accounts for 21st century details of life from the heart's center to the mind's periphery. In her pen and in her voice, the breadth of substance presented in Santigold's newest songs is immediate and complex. There are valleys wherein the drudge of daily living is met with caution and confronted by mortality, but underneath it all there is the celebration of each person's power and vision to fight toward what they believe. Consider this your invitation.