Santigold

santigoldfrontcoverrgb-loresSantigold tore it up at First Ave last night! She TORE! IT! UP! This girl is blazing hot hot hot! She’s a chica who slinks and jumps and pumps and thrashes her way through genres, yet manages to make it all hang together and groove and swell until she rips the roof OFF the place!

She’s this totally beautiful black woman with a giant voice and I found my mind racing to pin her somehow. A creature of musical mythology, she defies classification, definition, description, even. I feel like I can talk circles all around her, wrapping her in a web of useless strings, without really being able to convey the IT - the her.  

If you took Tina Turner and Blondie and Patty Smyth with a smidge of Gwen Stefani and Venus Williams and M.I.A., you might be able to approach the righteous show-womanship that is Santigold. I love her when she’s eighties rock and synthesizer voice, I love her when she’s pumping out a little hip hop, I love her when she looks like she’s doing aerobics – ONJ style, I love her when she’s thrashing her silky black shag and then pulling out a little Flash Dance-fast-run-in-place and then flips to deep, dark, African beats – chanting like a medicine woman and then all of a sudden you freeze and think: punk – of course. She’s a punk, hiphop, ska, electronica princess who had Minneapolis eating out of the palm of her hand last night. She was sweet and gracious and loved us up bigtime. An earthy diva she reads as retro and futuristic both – but street and glam too. I am smitten. Totally gone.

She was wearing a white leather jump suit that had a drapey, animal print cloth pelt over it which was cut in a vaguely eighties leotard sillouette. Amazing. And of course, the huge ghetto fabulous gold hoops. If her earlobes are intact, I would consider it a miracle. 

As a testament to how bad-ass she is, how sure she is that we won’t take our eyes off her, she’s flanked by two phenomenal, beautiful and freaky deaky dancer/back-up singers. These chicks go from being mimes to marionettes, to humpin’ flygirls, their faces blank behind white glasses. Ultra cool and totally mesmerizing.

Opening acts, Amanda Blank and Trouble Andrew, both reentered the scene at different points and I’m glad they did, since we had missed them. Amanda is a skinny white chick with a Demi Moore scratchy voice who can rap like a mean mad mo’ fo’ – her lungs are ridiculous and as she flailed around, all pale and skinny in her sexy black romper, I thought to myself: I”m not quite sure what to make of this chick, but it’s working! And Trouble Andrew, I wish we hadn’t missed him, because he slipped on stage, swooped around and sang in his beautiful guy voice and then he vanished on me. Put him on your radars.

I kept turning back to Doctor Dash- ear to ear grin – and shrieking “It’s a SPECTACLE!” And it was! A rockin’, thumpin’, spectacular spectacle of gold – Santigold.

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