How Santigold channeled religious ecstasy to create Spirituals

Santigold didn’t go to church as a kid without a fight.

The musician born Santi White recalls hiding under the bed covers from her mom every Sunday to try to get out of the “boring and not cool” Christian services they attended in Philadelphia.

But the church in Baltimore her great-grandmother helped run was a different story. Ushers stood in the aisles clad in white, holding and fanning members as they convulsed in religious ecstasy.

Read more: How Sudan Archives reclaimed the concept of prom with Natural Brown Prom Queen

Looking back, the theatrics of it all remind her of the traditional Haitian Vodou drumming she studied as an undergrad at Wesleyan University. Drumbeat-synced dances “beat the spirit” into a person.

The visual influence of those early Baltimore church memories is strong on White’s fourth album, Spirituals

In the video for the SBTRKT-produced single “Shake,” White trades dainty usher gloves for plush cat ears and sneakers while jiving on the street with a tambourine. She channels peaceful civil rights protesters who kept their heads held high as they endured physical abuse from authorities. 

“In my vision, I’m the person that’s doing the falling out, but I’m also the ushers catching me,” she tells Alternative Press. “That’s how I envisioned what this record was.”

A cheeky lyric about speaking in tongues also appears on the track entitled “High Priestess,” and on “Shake,” White’s voice echoes gospel church choir backup vocals, but, ultimately, the artist’s latest album isn’t about that kind of old-time religion. Rather, the title is evocative of the transformative power songwriting had for her during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how it reminded her of the Negro spirituals that carried Black people toward freedom.

“It’s very much this visceral experience of a spirit taking over,” White says. “That’s the type of spirituality I’m talking about. People can experience that in so many different ways.”

Church and meditation can also bring people to that state, but it exists in performing a range of activities from playing music, dancing or painting, she explains. She’s tapped into it at the ocean or while snowboarding, too.

The musician who pioneered the indie genre-crossing sound of the mid-aughts with hit singles “L.E.S. Artistes” and “Shove It” (sampled on Jay-Z’s “Brooklyn Go Hard”) continues to play by her own rules on Spirituals. She shares her journey to ascension and invites us to participate with tropical rhythms that simultaneously haunt and uplift, weaving supernatural electronic beats through in-your-face lyrics that capture the malaise of quarantine while actively fighting against it to rise above. 

After over two decades in the music industry — with a career that began in A&R and segued into solo success with her 2008 debut album Santogold — White didn’t want to force herself to crank out new music until she was ready.

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[Photo by Frank Ockenfels]

“I don’t think it was as much of a hiatus as much as just life happening in between, you know?” she says of the six-year lapse since her last album 99¢, released in 2016.

An old interview with folk icon Joni Mitchell, in which she explains her process as only creating music when she has something to say, resonates with White, who took a beat after having twins in 2018.

“It’s like allowing for a fallow field to reenrich itself by giving it a break,” she says. “And it’s the same thing with me — I just feel like sometimes it’s not time for me to be making new songs.”

Overwhelmed with the round-the-clock duties of mothering three children that left her constantly changing diapers and sleep-deprived, White craved creative space. The idea for a new album started percolating a month before the pandemic, but it was the need to allot sacred time for self-expression that accelerated momentum for Spirituals.

“I didn’t feel free because I was locked in the house,” she says. “But I also didn’t feel free to be myself to exist outside of this tiny little part of me that’s being a mother.”

Mostly recorded at home on Zoom during 2020 lockdown with a list of buzzy producers and contributors that includes names like Rostam and Boys Noize, the album was a cathartic and healing undertaking for White. Songwriting provided a reprieve from the demands of parenting three young children without help, the reality of climate change in her backyard as California burned from wildfires, a public health crisis nobody knew much about and racial reckoning in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

When White wasn’t writing songs to stay sane, she leaned into new grounding techniques like color and nature visualization meditations. 

An artist whose breadth of work includes collaborations with visual artists Kehinde Wiley and Wangechi Mutu, as well as acting stints on the shows The Office to Adult Swim’s NTSF:SD:SUV, White’s juggling act amassed street cred that earned her a shoutout on Beyoncé’s “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix)” alongside a roster of influential Black women. But building her stacked resume also took a toll on her body. She reached a point of chronic exhaustion and overtaxed adrenal glands manifested in stress-induced chest pains. 

“Being in survival mode, you don’t really allow yourself to experience your feelings that much because you think maybe if you do feel, then you won’t make it through,” she says. “And I think that’s where I was.”

Per the recommendation of her meditation guide, she stepped away from transcendental meditation — a mantra-style modality beloved by the stars — and focused instead on how to listen, let feelings flow.

“I was learning to be in my body in a different way than I’ve ever been,” she says. “I learned that I was running on willpower; I was running on adrenaline in my life. I had taught myself to shut down my recognition of my body’s limits.”

In the early stages of writing Spirituals, she also revisited timeless musicians from Fela Kuti and Bob Marley to Nina Simone and John Coltrane for guidance. Contemporary music felt too difficult to digest.

“I was listening to music that fed my spirit at the time and that was talking about real stuff about humanity and change and revolution,” she says.

Reflecting on her own position within the music industry, White finds there is still a ceiling for Black female artists who don’t neatly fit into the boxes of mainstream R&B and hip-hop.

“If you look, the biggest artists are still the ones who are mostly naked and shaking their butt,” White says. “And those are the ones who are the most successful. That’s been like that forever. To be a Black female artist, who’s still trying to talk about real, topical stuff in my songs and who’s not oversexualized, it’s still hard.”

The double standard that rewards white artists who make music in Black genres and pushes back against Black artists who enter white-dominated genres is fully intact, she explains. She’s struggled to protect her own work against the hold white privilege has on the industry.

White even claims pop mogul Taylor Swift plagiarized her on the 2019 single “London Boy.” 

“It’s a blatant ripoff of my song ‘Disparate Youth,’ blatant. And it was not cleared with me,” she says. “For an artist at that level to need to take advantage of a Black female artist, where it’s already so hard.”

White reached out to musicologists and a lawyer who couldn’t offer assistance on the issue, citing a conflict of interest. She interpreted their response to mean Swift’s team beat her to it and altered the song just enough that it’d be too expensive for White to carry out a lawsuit.

Despite the lack of significant progress and challenges for Black women in the mainstream, White welcomes the new avenues the internet has opened up for musicians.

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[Photo by Frank Ockenfels]

“You can immediately [go directly] to your fanbase and step around the people telling you what you can and cannot do and who you can and cannot be as a Black artist,” White says. “So that’s better. But there’s a lot of changes that still need to happen.”

Once White brought on more help for her children and travel restrictions halted tours, after wrapping up the album, she gave herself permission to pour the extra time into other projects in unfamiliar territory. She has plans to build a multisensory experience out of Spirituals by venturing into teas and body products and is exploring a podcast, film and a book. 

“If I just allowed myself to take in all the crazy heavy stuff that was happening around me, I could just sit there and just be so weighed down that I just couldn’t move by all that,” she says. “Or I could just focus on creating light and beauty for us to move towards.”

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Things We Saw Today: The ‘Futurama’ & ‘Yu-Gi-Oh!’ Crossover You Didn’t Know You Needed

Bender challenges Fry to a Yu-Gi-Oh duel. Image: LowHP on YouTube.

Sometimes even teammates and friends need to duke it out, but violence is never the answer, so we must look for alternatives. When you’re not ready to talk it out, the best way to relieve (or exacerbate) this tension can be in a 1v1 match in games like like Halo, basketball, Beyblades, or (one of my favorites) a good old fashion TCG like Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, or Yu-Gi-Oh! London graphic designer and artist Jordan Snowden’s latest animation does just that by having Fry and Bender from Matt Groening’s Futurama get in a D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D-D DUEL!

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One of the best things about this is that it perfectly matches the chaotic energy of the show. Like we really had three Blue Eyes Dragons out on the field with a whole Exodia the Forbidden One on the field at the same time. I watched Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up, but when I finally got cards and looked to play with others, I was utterly confused by how many rules there were. So much stuff differs from the show that it’s essentially another game.

On their channel, Snowden does a mix of animation and geeky mash-ups like Wanda versus the Illunimati in Doctor Strange in The Multiverse of Maddess. Here, Snowden cleverly edited it to make it look like a Final Fantasy V RPG battle. Occasionally, they’ll include pop culture news, and while I don’t care for all of those, I do love their first video where Naruto punches Richard Spencer. Check out more of Snowden’s art on their website and YouTube channel.

(via LowHP)

Here are some other bits of news out there:

  • Icon James Earl Jones becomes the second Black artist (the first being August Wilson) to have a Broadway Theater named after him. (via Variety)
  • Semi-truck crash results in hundreds of sex toys and bottles of lube strewn on the road, but the broadcasters can’t/won’t see it. (via The Lost Ogle)
  • Many are hailing King Charles as a champion of climate science, but his history of pushing for public funding of bad science shows otherwise. (via Skepchick a.k.a. Rebecca Watson)
  • Because Drake missed a joke video from a music critic with the best teeth in the game (Anthony Fantano), he leaked DMs to millions of fans showing him left on read. (via Variety)

Happy Friday, Mary Suevians!

 —The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

Have a tip we should know? [email protected]

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James Beard award-winner Michael Twitty offers a history lesson on African American foodways in ‘Koshersoul’

By Kharisma McIlwaine

Michael Twitty, a Black and Jewish chef, culinary historian and writer has been teaching the masses about the food that we eat and its history for quite some time. Twitty’s passion for our connection to food through tradition, culture and its global  impact earned him a James Beard award for his book “The Cooking Gene.” 

He now continues to share the wealth of knowledge he’s acquired from years of research with his newest book, “Koshersoul.” Twitty will be sharing in detail the inspiration behind “Koshersoul” and the 50 plus recipes within during a book signing and conversation with Joan Nathan at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia on September 22 at 7:00 p.m. Twitty spoke with the SUN about his culinary journey and the knowledge he hopes to continue to share about African American foodways.

Twitty’s love for food and the kitchen began early.

“The kitchen was an important place for me,” Twitty said. “It was a good place to hang out… it was a good place to get in trouble. It was also a place to be of service. I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t want to do any other chores.”

Although his passion for food was always present, Twitty’s path to becoming the multihyphenate and respected voice in the culinary world was anything but conventional.

 “I told my parents when I was six years old, [that] I wanted to be a writer, a teacher, a chef and a preacher, and that kind of actually happened,” he said. “I don’t have the traditional food trajectory. A lot of people get started in the kitchen or restaurant and they work their way up, they have a business plan or restaurant. People always ask me, ‘do you have a restaurant?’ No, I don’t have a restaurant — not everybody in food has a restaurant, and not everybody who writes about food is a food critic. There are so many other opportunities in the food world.”

Twitty began studying culinary history at a young age. His mother, father, grandparents and uncles instilled the values and knowledge that Black people were part of history and the present and are capable of doing anything. Those ideas ignited a passion that led him to his path.

“There were a lot of trivia books back in the 80s,” Twitty said. “I was really fascinated with who ate the first raisin and who did what. The thing that got me was this piece on Thomas Jefferson. It was this picture of Thomas Jefferson made to look as tall, handsome and effortless as possible. It was a picture of him in an apron with a silver, belled [and] domed tray. I looked at this picture and was confused. I said ‘he did what now?’ I went to my grandmother and said, ‘look at this picture’ and my grandmother said something that amounts to ‘ain’t no way in hell… that was Black folks doing that work.’ That was the first time for me at 7 or 8 years old that I realized there was a whole other story to tell. I started seeing these old pictures of Black people from the antebellum and post antebellum period cooking or in kitchens, and said ‘we were there, too.’ I really wanted to tell those stories.”

After visiting multiple countries in Africa, Twitty was able to see and feel firsthand the connection to our culture. He has taken this knowledge and shares it as a method to reconnect those that are part of the African diaspora with our traditions, recipes and connections to our ancestry that were lost or stolen.

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 “I think that there’s a difference between going to Europe and going to Africa,” Twitty said. “ [In]Europe, you might understand a few things a little bit better, but Africa… it’s like you start to miss the part of yourself that you did not know that you were missing. The undergirding behavior, thought and spirit around you is really what makes you Black. Some people have the idea that Black is just a phenotype, and it is not. It’s definitely our history [and] culture — it’s the circumstances we’ve found ourselves in. The minute you step foot in West Africa, you start to understand the parts of yourself that you were never taught to respect in America. There’s a certain vibe and a certain way, and then you look around and it’s, like, ‘ oh, that’s where that comes from.’ We may not always have the language or the timeline to communicate that this is who we are.”

In addition to sharing information on African and African American foodways, Twitty also strongly advocates for there to be more representation of Black people in all aspects of the culinary world.

“We need to be advocates for more than one version of us,” he said. “There’s probably 10 or so really prominent Black culinary historians of Black foodways. Each one of those perspectives is marketed differently than what you saw in “High on the Hog.” My point is that Giada De Laurentiis, Bobby Flay, Lidia Bastianich and Stanley Tucci and about 10 other people have Italian cooking shows, but we only have one hit Black show. By the way, if you try to market these other shows, they don’t say ‘ok, let’s do our own.’ What they do is they go, ‘we’ve already got one.’ We have to militate against that and let people know, there are so many Black food stories and Black food cultures that are not documented.”

In addition to our undocumented history, Twitty helps connect the dots between the intersectionality between African American and American Jewish culture in great detail in his latest book, “Koshersoul.”

 “There are a lot of American Jews and African Americans make up a large part of the American culinary scene, so there’s a lot of family, kinfolk and mishpocha that you can draw on,” he said. “I realize that for some people in our community, there is this idea that that’s over there not in American life, but marginalized people have always found their way to each other. We’ve also become very deep part of each other’s worlds. That’s the part of the story that “Koshersoul” tells,” Twitty said. 

“Jews of African descent — which number about 150,000 people, give or take, in America — have had sort of an extraordinarily out of proportion role to the creativity we’ve brought to the scene, they brought to the world and food is part of that,” he said. “People need to stop seeing Judaism as a faith and Judaism more as the religious culture of the Jewish people. “Koshersoul” allows me to talk about the food part of it and the fact that African Americans and American Jews have shaped a lot of food culture in America from beginning to end. Old Bay is a result of that cultural collaboration. I’m influenced by the food of the entire Jewish diaspora, that goes beyond Eastern Europe and Europe.” 

To find out more information and to purchase tickets for the September 22 event, visit: www.theweitzman.org/events/koshersoul. Also be sure to visit Michael Twitty’s blog at: www.afroculinaria.com and follow him on IG @thecookinggene and @KosherSoul on Twitter. 

Grand Rapids African American Art and Music Festival returns with cultural marketplace, auction

GRAND RAPIDS – The community is encouraged to attend the Grand Rapids African American Arts and Music Festival downtown on Saturday and enjoy a variety of food, artisans and entertainment.

The event starts at 10 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 17 at Celebration Cinema Studio Park, 123 Ionia Ave. SW. Studio Park has been the site for the last three years. For more than four decades, it was held downtown on Calder Plaza or Martin Luther King Jr. Park on the city’s Southeast Side.

“We didn’t know where things were going to be with the COVID-19 pandemic, so we made the decision to book Studio Park again,” said Lisa Knight, board chair for the Grand Rapids African American Arts and Music Festival.

This year, the festival will have new activities and attractions, including highlighting a Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) Pop-Up Shop.

The pop-up shop, open from 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., will feature local BIPOC-owned vendors in the Alligator Alley next to the Van Andel Arena and on Oakes Street.

Organizers say the event creates an opportunity for diverse vendors to sell their wares to thousands of visitors traveling to Grand Rapids for ArtPrize.

“We’re excited to offer local diverse business owners the opportunity to gain exposure to visitors coming downtown for two high-traffic festivals,” said Omar Cuevas, co-chair of the Community Inclusion Group and Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce Vice President of Investor and Corporate Relations.

“We’re also thrilled to provide a variety of offerings to festival attendees to contribute to inclusivity during one of the busiest weekends of the year.”

A ribbon cutting for the BIPOC Pop-Up Shop will take place at 3 p.m. Saturday at the entry of Alligator Alley.

Besides the marketplace, festivalgoers will also have a chance to view live painters painting some of the live music acts.

The paintings will be auctioned off during the event, with all proceeds going towards the festival organization and the artists themselves.

“The event is an opportunity for people to come and engage with one another and enjoy the day,” Knight said. “Everybody is a big attraction. We want to keep that commitment going for our community.”

Other activities during the event include a kid’s area, a Virtual Reality performance, dance performances and an opportunity to register to vote.

More information about the festival can be found at facebook.com/graaamf.

More on MLive:

ArtPrize means big crowds, big business

‘It’s hustling and bustling down here:’ ArtPrize 2022 kicks off in Grand Rapids

ArtPrize 2022 artists ready to kickoff event today

Michigan Irish Music Festival returns to shore of Muskegon Lake

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