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Celebrating Santigold: A singular voice that helped define the 2000s

Santigold
Frank Ockenfels
/
Courtesy of the artist
Santigold

February is Black History Month — and each week, all month, World Cafe correspondent John Morrison is here to talk about a different trailblazer and maverick of Black music.

These musicians took risks and pushed boundaries. So far, we've talked about Sun Ra, Betty Davis and Sylvester. For the final week, Morrison is looking at a contemporary artist who is still making music — and still finding ways to make music that sounds like no one else: Santigold.

"The songs get better and weirder as she goes on," he says. "That ain't always an easy thing to pull off, to grow and make better music that's also more forward thinking, more experimental."

In this session, we take a tour through Santigold's career: how she started, how her music helped define the early 2000s, and how she continues to pioneer and inspire.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. The web story was created by Miguel Perez. Our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Copyright 2025 XPN

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
John Morrison
John Morrison is a writer, DJ, and sample-flipper from Philadelphia. As a writer, his work has appeared in NPR Music, Bandcamp Daily, Jazz Tokyo, Grammy.com, and more. He is also the host of Culture Cypher Radio, a hip-hop radio show on NPR member station WXPN. [Copyright 2024 XPN]
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).