Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
You’ve collaborated with Jay-Z and David Byrne. You cite influences ranging from Devo to Nina Simone. Critics say you draw from pop, ska, rap, punk, jazz, rock, soul, New Wave and Nigerian music, but above all see your work as genre busting. How do you see your music?
My music mashes up influences and may defy classification but it’s not something that I think about a lot. It’s not like I set out to take a little of this and a little of that. I draw from my musical history, which includes all the things I was exposed to as a kid. My dad took me to see James Brown and Nina Simone and Fela Kuti. My sister went to see Bad Brains and the Cure and would bring the concert home with her, coming back in combat boots, dripping sweat. From a young age I was exposed to all different kinds of music, and all that influences who I am musically. But making music is not something I do according to a formula – it’s a natural process for me.
You’ve said that you got into the music industry backwards. Please explain.
I never – as a kid, a teenager or even as a young adult – ever wanted to be a performer. I’ve written lyrics since I was nine, but no part of me wanted to sing them on stage. I loved music and I loved making music. I took guitar lessons and I got some beat-making equipment and made my own beats. When I went to college, I started interning at record companies. And then I started writing songs for other people. The songs started coming out, but not like I wanted them to sound, so I thought I’d just record them myself. Once I did that I was drawn up on stage. So I slowly became a performer, and now it feels right – it feels like what I was supposed to do all along.
You also studied music at university. How does your academic and industry background inform the music you make?
My industry background doesn’t necessarily inform the music that I make, but it informs my understanding of what to do beyond making music. The problem for a lot of artists is they make music and then they get tripped up on the business part. A lot of them don’t end up getting their music heard, especially now as the music business is falling apart. My background helps me understand how the industry works and how to manoeuvre so I get what I want artistically and get the best out of the other players on the board.
As for the music itself, I was a music major at Wesleyan and a lot of what I did there influenced me. I had to take guitar but I ended up more focused on hand drums. I studied Cuban, Haitian and West African traditional drumming styles and techniques while I was at Wesleyan. I grew up listening to a lot of reggae and other world music, but at Wesleyan I learned to actually play different rhythms. A lot of how I write music, even the way that I choose my melodies, is based on rhythm. I’m really interested, compositionally, in how the bass and the drums interact; I think that’s something I picked up while drumming. I had to take experimental music classes and classical music classes. It was a formative time for me, so all that stuff definitely made its way into my music.
Let’s turn to the five books you’ve named, beginning with a book that roots the story of rhythm in antiquity. Tell us about When the Drummers Were Women by Layne Redmond.
This book is not just about drumming, it’s also about gender, history and spirituality. It tells the story of the relationship between women, music, religion and power. Thousands of years before Christ, women played hand drums, specifically the frame drum, in religious ceremonies, as we can see in surviving images of goddesses. Music and rhythm are intrinsically a part of spirituality, but originally women set the beat. But with the advent of Christianity, ceremonial drumming, which was associated with paganism, stops. Drums were silenced and so were women.
I ended up writing a senior essay about women drummers because my experience in school was that it was always men on top of music. There were certain drums that women weren’t supposed to play; superstitions were attached to them, like they’d mess up your fertility. I tried to write my paper about that – that’s when I got this book.
Music is a very male-dominated career. Women who don’t just sing but also write and produce are rare. As a modern woman musician, the alienation of women from rhythm, which Redmond describes, had a lot of resonance for me. So it’s just a really interesting book, and at the time that I read it, it gave me the courage to pursue my music.
So the book is also about how music affects and conveys consciousness. What inspiration did you draw from it?
Rhythm can carry us away. If you just look at how people respond to music throughout the world, it’s one of the things that bring people together. At a concert, people move and sing and breathe together. It can also be a tremendously cathartic experience, a communal cathartic experience.
Santigold is a singer-songwriter and music producer. Her eponymous first album was named one of the top 10 of the year by Rolling Stone. A graduate of Wesleyan University, Santigold was previously the lead singer of Stiffed. She has opened for M.I.A., Björk and Coldplay, and collaborated on songs with Jay-Z, Karen O and the Beastie Boys. Santigold’s next album is due out in spring 2012
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