Wow! First of all, this is just such beautiful wri...

2008-06-15T19:47:54.634-07:00

Wow! First of all, this is just such beautiful writing. I'm over-whelmed by how articulately you've explained Santogold's appeal.

I was going to post a lengthy response to this entry, including a number of friendly disagreements (I happen to recognize the merits of the "genre-transgressor" perspective, in spite of its obvious limits), but I don't think I can wrap my head around it, all at once.

I generally share your enthusiasm for Santogold (the performer AND the album), and the "radical uplift" factor (excellent term, by the way) is definitely one of the main reasons why.

But I'm also skeptical of the idea that White's "smudged eyeliner anthems" (as you put it) represent anything beyond her own unique, specific experiences; that her voice channels the "few things" she alone has "seen and heard".

Maybe i'm talking out of my pwet here, but to claim White's vocal stylings as a *model* for radical uplift involves assuming cultural solidarity among totally heterogeneous people. It creates a kind of mythology (in the Derrida sense of the word), based on life experiences (late night shifts, rain walking, and so forth) that are waaaay too subjective, and bound to a sense to place, to qualify as a shared cultural trope. To suggest that it taps into some imagined liminal space common to the experiences of a teenage punk girl, an androgynous English loner, and the frontwoman of a Motown vocal group strikes me as dangerously romanticized. (Although that's clearly not your intention.)

I don't think i'm expressing this as well as I can, right now. (It doesn't help that this comes at the end of a "late night shift" of my own.) So i'll probably end up writing about it, in my own blog, at some point.

I'll definitely let you know, if I come up with a more extensive response. But thanks for posting this, just the same. It's given me plenty to chew on, and forced me to reevaluate why exactly I'm so fascinated with Santogold, as a text.

Comments on OH! INDUSTRY: SOTW: Santogold and Bangers & Cash

Wow! First of all, this is just such beautiful wri...