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

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.