In comparison, Santigold was one of those ’00s artists who helped set the stage for a sort of post-poptimism, no guilty pleasure, globalized type of listenership. These days, we’re used to a certain kind of genre agnosticism, artists who have grown up listening to everything without discrimination and are pushing towards aesthetics that smear the old dividing lines to the point that you can’t always pinpoint where one sound begins and another ends. Santigold was a creature of the late ’00s through and through. She was 31 when Santogold came out she knew what she was doing, and emerged a fully-formed artist. There were various other directions White’s life could’ve taken from those older origin points, but this was different. Anyone who dug into Mark Ronson’s sophomore album Version in 2007 would’ve found her there, singing the Jam’s “ Pretty Green.” Then, her own singles started to build the path to her official solo debut Santogold, released 10 years ago yesterday. To do that, she had to strike out on her own as Santogold, a moniker she later tweaked to Santigold. And it left her with ideas: about the state of pop music in the early days of the 21st century, about how she could manipulate it, inject her own vision into it. She’d been around, and she knew how this world worked.

She’d already worked the music industry from both sides, doing A&R for Epic and fronting the Philly-based punk band Stiffed, who released two albums in the first half of the ’00s.

Santagold starstruck