‘The Keepers’: The Santigold song inspired by the Occupy movement
She might have put an original and artful spin on pop, but Santigold has always been a punk at heart. Emerging from the furious anti-establishment genre means that despite her work’s heady grooves and sometimes profoundly touching aspects, the Philadelphia native isn’t afraid to fuse some of her most arresting sonic moments with vital political messaging.
One of her most potent and best-loved tracks, ‘The Keepers’, is brimming with political sentiment, which offers an intriguing and effective counterbalance to the rumbling, Kate Bush-evoking groove and catchy, electronics-laden chorus. As a punk through and through, the track – taken from her 2012 second solo effort, Master of My Make-Believe – taps into one of the era’s most significant political movements: Occupy.
Active between 2011 and 2016, the Occupy movement was an internationalist socio-political movement that expressed widespread opposition to social and economic inequality and the lack of genuine democracy worldwide. Aiming to advance social and economic justice, the movement took on many forms, from local to international levels, with an array of related targets. However, underlying issues for the movement included the operations of large corporations and the global financial systems that sustain the status quo, disproportionately benefitting a minority, subverting democracy, and causing widespread instability.
Taking partial inspiration from the Arab Spring, the Iranian Green Movement, the anti-austerity protests of 2010, and more, Occupy was the most concerted effort against the global economic and political order we’ve seen to date. The first and most famous protest it produced was Occupy Wall Street, held in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park on September 17th, 2011. By October 9th, Occupy protests were happening across 82 countries, and despite being most active in the US, almost every major city worldwide felt its presence.
Revealing the Occupy metaphor behind ‘The Keepers’, Santigold explained to NME. “The song ‘The Keepers’ is about that,” she said. “It’s about being able to sit and watch these shows and think, ‘This is awful,’ but not do anything about it. But people are starting to question things. You can see it in the riots and the Occupy movement. That’s the spirit of the album. I want people to think about why they are doing what they are doing.”
Santigold directed the music video for ‘The Keepers’, which clearly brought the song’s sentiment to life. In it, the musician plays a member of the typical 1950s American family, donning a blonde wig, in a video that also features GZA of Wu-Tang Clan, Kick Kennedy – the granddaughter of the late Robert F. Kennedy – and Santigold’s husband, the snowboarder Trevor Andrew.
Santigold revealed that the concept behind the video is that people have to take responsibility for what’s happening to the world, again, a point that has never been so vital. We can’t turn a blind eye to life falling apart, she maintained, and we have to stand up and be accountable for our roles in it. Whether this be the rivers being toxic from illegal dumping by the water companies, oil in the seas due to spillages or the general everyday violence that is frighteningly prominent, we act like these things are normal and are willingly desensitized to them.
If only the world had woken up over a decade ago when the writing was on the wall and people like Santigold were telling us to wake up from our modern stupor. We are still hurtling ever near into oblivion.
