L.E.S. Artistes
single
"L.E.S. Artistes" is the second single by American artist Santigold (known then as Santogold), and along with "Creator", the first to be taken from her self-titled debut Santogold (see 2008 in music).
Background
"L.E.S. Artistes" was written after Santi White moved to New York City. The song "is playing on the fact that everyone tries to make things fancy and it's really pretentious" and "about being accosted by the New York scene and the scenesters and hipsters, who are really not artists and are just pretending to be. They're all about just being seen." The title stands for New York's Lower East Side. "It's not a French thing," White stated in an interview with PopJustice. On MTV's FNMTV, Santigold stated that the title literally meant Lower East Side Artists.
A custom edit of the XXXChange Mix appears in "Grid", a Mark Romanek directed computer-animated commercial for Ford Flex that began running nationally in June 2008.
Curtis Santiago recently did a remix of this song featuring Kevvy Mental of the band Fake Shark - Real Zombie! for a mix tape produced by Mickey Fax.
The song also appears in the video games Band Hero and EA Sports' NHL 08.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q735432. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “L.E.S. Artistes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.