Growing up in Philadelphia, Santi White wasn’t always like this. In fact, she says she used to be quite the late-night party girl. “I made it my business to know everyone and everything in Philly. I was always trying to meet people in different scenes. I was definitely known as someone that, if you wanted to know where parties were, I knew,” she proclaims, “which is completely different than I am now.”
     When White moved to Connecticut’s Wesleyan College, she experienced a change. “I started thinking of myself as an artist. I didn’t drink. I didn’t feel like wasting my time,” she says. “I decided I would rather be productive at home, writing and painting and working on production stuff. The people who are always out are the people not really doing anything.” This party-productivity dialectic figures most prominently on Santogold’s breakout song “LES Artistes.”
     The word Santogold comes from a line of jewelry (and its bizarre infomercials) from the 1980s that somehow is related to a “science-fiction wrestling” movie Blood Circus. White’s childhood friends appropriated the name to honor the “huge gold earrings” she sported as a twelve-year-old. But despite her pseudonym’s basis in bling, think twice before situating her self-titled debut in the hip-hop scene or even comparing her work to that of M.I.A., a close friend of White and burgeoning star whose grimy raps have become a popular reference point for the press.