Page 160 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - PS

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Summer rages as SAINt JHN and i for Beyoncé, and its viral release in 2016. To get to this SAINt,
speak, coasts apart, but you’d hardly know it.
Summer is always ablaze, by definition ephemeral, a
collective 3 month exhalation before the temperature plung- es and renders breath into fog. But that decadence is never supposed to feel as deadly as it does today, a misplaced visitor to a global pandemic with racial injustice protests raging like groundfires. There was a brief moment where one might’ve been forgiven for squinting into the distance and envisaging normalcy, but 3 days after California’s re-instatement of state- wide lockdown, it is clear that this moment has passed. The apocalypse is insistent, and so today, the sun beats down on emptied Los Angeles streets.
SAINt JHN–his meditations delivered from a balcony 60 floors up, the air beginning to thin–feels to me like one of the only men alive unfazed. Despite having beaten a forced retreat from his IGNORANt FOREVER international tour to his Los Angeles outpost (the longest stretch of his life he’s ever been in California) the aura he exudes is Zen. He tells me, calmly, “I was always right where I am, here, today. That’s the honest truth. I was always going to be this.” I can almost visualize the infinite Los Angeles skyline rolling out behind him, a testimony. The effect is a bit surreal.
The unshakability of that faith would be striking for any- one but it feels particularly salient for SAINt given that, had the world not been imploding, he would likely be detonating stadiums on a nightly basis. At the time of our conversation, the Imanbek remix of his 2016 single “Roses” is continuing its march to heaven, a top 5 Billboard hit with a full EP troop of remixes (Future, J Balvin, and others) being deployed as rein- forcements. Listen closely, and you might be able to hear our next generation of teenage cinematographers rehearsing their TikTok routines to the song, a jittery, kinetic reimagining of the original’s slinking menace. Take 5, cut.
But there’s a bit of irony here. Would the remix have placed Gen Z in a headlock if the world hadn’t fallen apart? When I
ask him how he originally saw his summer playing out, I’m
met with a sharp rebuke: “Why are you even speculating on a version of life you’d never get to possibly see?”
So maybe we are telling the wrong story. SAINt will talk “Roses” but only with disclaimers. To get to “Roses (Imanbek Remix)”, you have to touch its birth in 2015 as a failed concept
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you have to navigate to the SAINt as the songwriter who had too much to say, the SAINt that conquered FADER-core with
a string of sneering runway-ready slow-burners in 2017, the SAINt that stared down the camera for Gucci Guilty in 2018. “It’d be dissatisfying the people that have been following by journey for five years to tell them about just ‘Roses’ –and those thousands of peoples in those hundreds of rooms, they know what really happened,” he tells me. “If you call the book ‘Roses,’ you’d be lying.”
Right. Maybe you start at the beginning, before SAINt JHN was SAINt JHN. Back then, he was Carlos St. John, the kid from Bushwick who criss-crossed between Brooklyn and Guyana all throughout his childhood before finding himself flown out to Los Angeles to write songs for Rihanna. He found his groove eventually with a minor hit for Hoodie Allen, but the process was arduous and stilted, and ultimately ill-fated. He calls it, wry- ly, his “gladiator school”. The confession is offered up without prompting: “I’m awful at writing songs for other people,” SAINt tells me. “Every time I tried to write a song from someone else’s perspective, that didn’t work. I can’t tell you where they went to high school and when they dyed their hair, and I can’t tell you the first time they tripped on a four inch pair of heels.”
This is an unsurprising stance. As far back as his solo mate- rial stretches, each song with his trademark vocals (a permanent lilt that was Don Toliver before Don Toliver, melodrama flexed and refined into something serrated) drips with his own affec- tations. Sometimes that vision aligns with others–after Hoodie Allen, Kiesza, Jidenna, and ultimately Usher (“Crash”)–but that’s only coincidence, separate from the SAINt JHN creative process. When I ask him what the process of writing for both his reality and someone else’s was, he shrugs verbally: “Some people sung the songs with me. Some people sung the songs in- stead of me. When they connect, they just happen to connect.”
It is no surprise that the matches eventually struck fire. Even as SAINt continued writing, he began to sneak out a with a series of singles throughout 2016 and 2017, including the original “Roses”. The vision was sharp and enticing even then, the rare coherent aesthetic of that era that wasn’t crip- plingly reliant on mystery. Turns out that when you can write songs for Usher, the rest of the pop culture machine’s not much harder to navigate.