In Her Words: Santigold on Evolving, Collective Exhaustion, and High Hopes for Africa’s Future

On Her ‘Noble Champions’ Podcast

Santigold: I just finished the second season of my podcast Noble Champions, and I love it. But logistically, it’s a lot. I love the conversations so much. I love the guests. It's really nice to be able to talk about things in a way that you don't often get to. Sometimes it takes five months to schedule one, and then the day of, somebody will be like, ‘I missed my flight. Sorry.’ And then the other guest will be like, ‘Well I’m not available again for two more months.’ You don't want all the same type of people on there. Have Vince Staples talking with Kiese Laymon about patriarchy. That’s what makes it fun.

I had Seun Kuti and my friend Adesuwa [Aighewi], who are both Nigerian, on the last episode. We talked about the relationship between Africa and its diaspora globally — about how hard it is to get to a certain level in Nigeria and to stay there, to grow businesses, and how we could work together across the globe to help Africa step into its amazing future — and all of us as Africans around the world step into our amazing future.

Africa is poised to win. It has the youngest population, it has all the resources, but many of the same systemic problems we do as African Americans living here in the States.

Discovering Music As A Platform For Expression

From a very young age, my dad used to take me, my brother and my sister to the record store every weekend and let us pick out whatever we wanted. He just wanted us to like music.

I don’t remember a weekend when there wasn’t music playing in our house. It was all about Black music from my dad — jazz, reggae, African music, revolutionary music. My sister, who’s three years older, was the one who brought in all the other influences — punk, classic rock, Joni Mitchell, folk music. But my dad was playing topical music, because that’s what people made back then. All the songs had messages, all of them. Whether it was Steel Pulse, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye, Fela Kuti. Everybody was singing about liberation.

My dad made me read The Autobiography of Malcolm Xas a kid. Like, ‘You can read? Here – read this.’ So I came up thinking that music was just the platform for talking about this stuff. I started finding my own music and listening to my sister’s stuff. I loved The Smiths, and I loved Morrissey’s lyrics and Joni Mitchell’s lyrics and Jimi Hendrix’s lyrics. I even loved Nirvana and Kurt Cobain’s lyrics because these were personal lyrics. These were not necessarily about global community, but it was like, ‘How am I feeling?’ This is my journal, I can say anything I want.

Economic Resistance As The Path Forward

I just played shows in Texas and Florida, and I guarantee you some people who have completely different views than I do were at my shows. So am I going to start saying things that are going to alienate those people at my shows? Or am I going to sing my songs, which by nature are helping get some of my beliefs across while they’re vibing?

There are certain human needs that transcend all of that stuff. And if we can start relating on that level, we might actually find a way through this.

I think it’s hard because back in the day they would organize a boycott forever. It would be nationwide, like ‘We’re all going to do this and it’s going to go on for this amount of time.’ But now, it’s on Instagram and you don’t even get the feed until three days later.

Our freedom is tied up in their money. Freedom, humanity, civil rights, none of that matters because that gets in the way of making the most money possible for a few people and as long as they keep us fighting they can just keep with that agenda.

I do believe in this day and age, the only way to have impact is through economics. Money is the only thing that talks in this government. They don’t care about the protests, they don’t care about what we post online. They care about money.

The Myth of “Having It All”

The current pace of life is unsustainable for everyone. And when you throw being a mother into the mix, being a creative, or just being a sentient being in this world, it’s like things are stacked against us.

Doing shows is like being an athlete; being on the road you have to have enough sleep, you have to be eating properly, to make sure you don’t lose your voice. You can’t get sick. You have to have enough energy every night. You’re flying, so you’re on these dirty, germy planes and you’re changing time zones. Your sleep is off as you’re dealing with all that. You’re in front of all these people, managing all this energy, then come home, and it’s straight into mom mode — taking out braids, making dinner, managing schedules. There’s no exhale.

I remember I got dropped by my business manager when I was pregnant with twins because I wasn’t making as much money. That should be illegal, but it still happens all the time.

I really believe that every change starts with the individual and our own beliefs and things we subscribe to – we really need to start changing those definitions to fit where we want to get to.

Redefining What Success Looks Like As A Black Woman

I started out recognizing myself as an artist through visual art. In high school, I painted a lot and I ended up winning the Senior Studio Art Award. In college, the problem was, I was painting, I was making music and I was writing and I was having a hard time figuring out how to merge all of them. You get a creative impulse, then you get stuck because you’re like, ‘Which one do I do?’ Then you kind of freeze. I put painting aside, because I realized I could merge writing with music and so I did that.

What I learned is that I’m an artist across many mediums, so I can do art all the time, even if I’m not painting. Everything I think of is from a creative perspective, whether it’s creating my stage show, which I’ve always curated – from the dancers to the costumes, the choreography to the visuals, extending to the merch. Or videos. I started directing my own videos a while back and realized music to me is visual, all I have to do is close my eyes and the whole thing just paints itself before me. It’s all right there in the music. That’s why I want to take this into film. I wrote a movie partially so I could make the costumes and do the music for it.

Then there’s the book I’m writing. My book is a memoir, but it goes back four generations of women in my family, to my great-grandmother, my grandmother, my mother and me. There’s a lot in there about being a survivor and a Black woman and having the Strong Black Woman schema to contend with and stepping out of survival mode into a place where we feel we have permission to need support or rest or self-care.

That is something I’m trying to work on because I feel as a Black woman artist, there’s so much that needs to be unpacked – like even stepping outside of the oversexed persona Black women have always had as performers. It’s still so prevalent. Every new artist, they come out and the first thing you see is their ass. That shouldn’t be what you feel like you have to do.

Walking this less trodden path where I’m not doing that and I’m leading with my art, and then with me having the tendency of working myself to death like all Black women — it’s definitely a harder path when you’re not doing what everyone else is doing — not just leading with sexuality but also making a certain kind of music that’s easily digestible or stays in the little Black Music box that you’re supposed to fit in.

I’ve chosen a challenging road for myself. And what is success? Are you going to subscribe to other people’s versions of success that has you killing yourself and never having enough? These are things that I’ve been working through and figuring out that I don’t have to live by other people’s rules of beauty or femininity or success. I’m starting to redefine what all those things mean for myself.