How Santigold Helped Me Claim And Keep My New York Dreams

NPR Music's Turning the Tables is a project envisioned to challenge sexist and exclusionary conversations about musical greatness. Up until now we have focused on overturning conventional, patriarchal best-of lists and histories of popular music. But this time, it's personal. For 2021, we're digging into our own relationships to the records we love, asking: How do we know as listeners when a piece of music is important to us? How do we break free of institutional pressures on our taste while still taking the lessons of history into account? What does it mean to make a truly personal canon? The essays in this series will excavate our unique relationships with the albums we love, from unimpeachable classics by major stars to subcultural gamechangers and personal revelations. Because the way that certain music comes to hold a central place in our lives isn't just a reflection of how we develop our taste, but how we come to our perspective on the world.

It's been 20 years since I first heard a song from the mind of Santi White, but at the time I fell in love with it I didn't know I had her to thank. Back then White lived not in the spotlight but mostly in liner notes and underground scenes, a Black woman grinding, like so many before her, to make a name for herself in the music industry. Her final form — , the genre-defying