Songfacts®:

• Santigold is New Yorker Santi White, who was originally nicknamed "Santogold" by a classmate back in the 1980s because of her sister-girl style. She changed the spelling of her name in 2011 and started going by "Santigold."
• This was a double-A-sided single along with "Creator ." It was Santigold's debut single.
• In this song Santagold addresses the way people tend to front like they're something they're not. The New Yorker explained to Fader magazine: "I'm an old school artist. I don't care about looking the part all the time, and in the modern entertainer world it's all about looking the part. In fact, you don't even have to have anything beyond that. If you look the part then you are the part. I just can't be bothered half the time."
• Santigold told Pop Justice about this song: "It's 'L-E-S Artistes' and it stands for Lower East Side. It's not a French thing, it is playing on the fact that everyone tries to make things fancy and it's really pretentious. The song is about me moving back to New York, feeling really vulnerable, wanting to be an artist soaking up all simulation creatively but at the same time staying introverted and in my own mind. At the same time, it's 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."
• Santigold was not in the best of health when she shot the song's video. She told Pop Justice about it: "I was fine while I was filming the video because I took allergy medicine, so the medicine did work, but then the next day it aggravated my cold and became a crazy chest cough. Then I couldn't sleep all night and I was up from 2.30 in the morning until 1am the following morning and was outside from six in the morning until 11 at night shooting my video with a T-shirt on, sat on a horse. I wasn't in the best of ways."