Santogold, M.I.A. and the pitfalls of music marketing

The new Santogold album is quickly becoming a personal favorite. Nowadays, I listen to a lot of hip-hop, electronic, and even classical music, but I grew up on hair- and then grunge-rock, so rock music lies at the foundation of my musical tastes. Funny, then, that I was drawn to Santogold by my more recently-developed tastes for eccentric neu-musics, but she's staying in my headphones largely due to my rarely-quenched desire for new, good rock music.

As well as I recall, the first image that I saw of Santogold depicted her in some large hipster sunglasses, possibly with a big afro-like hairstyle, with the photograph tinted by that edgy-gritty color effect you see on a lot of party photo websites. So, obviously (and by design, no doubt), the image led me to expect pure hipster-dom: dance beats, world music sounds, and ironic sonic references to early Southern hip-hop. You know, something like M.I.A. And if you just listened to tracks like "Creator" or the Switch remix of "Shove," you might be left with the impression that this pigeonhole is a fitting one.

However, the album is typified by guitar- and hook-heavy rock-pop tracks, albeit with an occasional reggae undertone (which perhaps suggests "world"?). The album's big single, "L.E.S. Artistes," is positively pop, and, with its conservative mixing and compellingly catchy chorus, it could easily find itself on top-40 radio, along with Gnarles Barkley's "Crazy" or any slightly-interesting Timbaland hit. So the M.I.A.-style marketing is misleading at best, annoying at worst. What's more, I've noticed a trend in reviews of the album that, even though most of the reviews seek to distinguish Santogold from M.I.A., they nearly always begin with the premise that there is something presumptively similar about the two artists, such that noting differences between the two warrants at least a paragraph. (See here and here for a couple of random examples). No doubt, this has to do with more than just marketing, and is affected also by the fact that the two artists share common producers and collaborators. However, it makes one wonder: if Santogold's sound was unchanged, but she was a blonde girl from Southern California, and appeared in photographs with a guitarist and a drummer, would M.I.A. continue to be a constant reference point?

I'm reminded of a recent New York Times piece on emerging pop singer Ingrid Michaelson, who balked at music pundits' constant comparison of her music to that of Lisa Loeb, based principally on a similar wardrobe choice. Said Michaelson, "Apparently my glasses make me sound just like Lisa Loeb.” To be fair, those marketing music have the difficult task of efficiently describing to the music-listening public something as nuanced and difficult to pin down as the essence of a new artist's sound, and "this thing is like that thing" is, more often than not, the best way to achieve this goal. And those marketers are, in many cases correct: those who like M.I.A. probably will enjoy Santogold, just as those who enjoy the quirk-pop stylings of Lisa Loeb will probably enjoy Michaelson's coffee-shop folk-pop. It's just that, oftentimes, these comparisons are based primarily on superficial fashion indicators, rather than an attempt to accurately compare two artists' sonic qualities. As a result, those who listen to music primarily as a fashion choice gain the power to control the demand for music, and those looking for something sonically and artistically rewarding may be inadvertantly guided away from something that might actually be right up their alley. This is probably inevitable in a world in which music is a commodity, but its something at least worth thinking about.