F  L  A  U  N  T

Summer rages as SAINt JHN and I speak, coasts apart, but you’d hardly know it.

Summer is always a blaze, by definition ephemeral, a collective 3 month exhalation before the temperature plunges 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 statewide 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 anyone 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 reinforcements. 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 for Beyoncé, and its viral release in 2016. To get to this SAINt, 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, wryly, 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 material 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 affectations. 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 instead 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 cripplingly 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.

The story from then is familiar, one we’ve seen told countless times since then. The buzzy Internet singles became the independent debut (Collection One), and the festival appearances began to mount. He launched a fashion line, provocatively named “Christian Sex Club,” and signed to L.A. Reid and Charles Goldstuck’s newly-formed Hitco Entertainment. Last year’s follow-up album, Ghetto Lenny’s Love Songs, was the right refinement. His voice was still the same, unmistakable, but everything around it coalesced into something sharper, no longer mired in post-Weeknd. It was a world recognizable enough for Lil Baby, A Boogie, and Meek Mill to inhabit, but accessibly post-apocalyptic.

But in retrospect, SAINt was close to being caught between generations, one of the last rap-adjacent artists to be closely indebted to online tastemakers like Pigeons & Planes and The FADER, arriving on the scene maybe half-a-beat too early to be Rap Caviar-native. The vision was powerfully vivid, maybe too vivid to be an easy playlist home-run. But then, as we all know - a 19-year-old DJ from Kazakhstan changed everything.

The premise there, though, is that the Career is rectilinear. Sometimes the trajectory rips sharply upwards, near-exponential, and sometimes the slope flattens - but we are used to careers progressing roughly in lockstep with time. Single, single, project, tour, single again, and each time around the merry-go-round you rack up a few more streams. But what does it mean when a Career becomes recursive, circular?

Because for SAINt JHN, that’s what the apocalypse hath wrought: a rebirth. His reflection on that turn of fate is tinged with both acknowledgement and pride in that poetic irony: “In the midst of the world having its combined joint breakdown, the sun shined in my direction. I broke through when nothing else was breaking through, on a song that was five years old.”

My two cents, if we want to get real literary - it’s a bit fitting. The man whose vision burned so fierce it could barely exist within the realms of another’s voice, uplifted by a radical re-envisioning of the very contours of his voice by a DJ he’d never met. Backdrop: skyscrapers crumble. “I don’t got nothing sexy and attractive to say about it,” says SAINt. “I mean, there’s a Porsche downstairs in the basement if you want to clap for that. But the truth is, I don’t know what’s supposed to happen next. I managed to still keep some silk around me when everything else was burning.” So maybe, reverse that linearity. Perhaps SAINt is so unfazed because his read is different; where some might see luck, he instead sees the long, wide curve of fate coming full-circle. Hence, the preternatural calm.

And after all - SAINt’s greatest and most transcendent skill is geolocation. Future and so many others mined real, revolutionary depth in the past decade by exploring every facet of the rise and fall from grace. There is a Future song every single step on that 2-sided staircase, for every single intermediate step from hell to heaven and back down to hell. It does not particularly appear as if that cartographic exercise holds any interest to SAINt. His real achievement has always been sustaining the unsustainable, holding eternal the moment before the first rays of sun rip into the night.

A few months before the release of Ghetto Lenny, SAINt said to Fuse that “if me and a stripper got married, you’d have to play this at our wedding reception, the whole project.” That’s about right, because SAINt’s music has always been less about duality and more about synonymity, the wedding day writ vicious. His back catalog is tightly-curated, a marbled Grecian portrayal of the Apex.

So just remember: this is where he was always headed. For the man of the hour, the imprint he has left is now indelible. “Roses” has now unmistakably become the type of hit artists chase their whole careers. A time that has redefined two generations’ conception of tumult has instead been a dual affirmation for SAINt, both of the world as he perceived it and his place within it. “I didn’t need to know the world was ending to know the world was burning,” he tells me, forcefully. “They just threw the scripts away and showed us what it really looks like behind the scenes. But I’ve been feeling like this for a long time, so nothing has changed for me.”

So the only question is what lies next - what we haven’t seen yet - and SAINt has an answer for me. When I ask him whether his artistic vision has changed, the denial is vehement, telling me, “12 year old me’s intact. He's still writing the songs. He’s driving the Porsche today.” The response is rapid and passionate before he talks himself into a laugh (“That’s crazy, I'm talking about myself in third person, don't do that”).

But it strikes me towards the end of our conversation that I may have a different answer. I think he reminds me of the summer, and but especially this one: an unwavering symbol of immortality, the interminable, a refusal to fade into the crispness of fall. His music, all sinister arpeggios slinking behind triumphant horns, is serviceable as a soundtrack to the dawn but most at home in the moments before the sunset, a rhythmic accompaniment to the sun exploding into red glow. SAINt as much as handed us the manual himself on “Borders”. “Top off, hands in the sky,” he murmurs. “Pray don’t nobody violate.” This summer might be beyond saving, but we can count on SAINt to keep the torch blazing until the next.

Photographed by Lowfield

Styled by Zoe Costello

Styling Assistant: Brandon Yamada

Written by Sun-Ui Yum

Groomer: Courtney Housner at Exclusive Artists using Tarte Cosmetics.

Flaunt Film Director: Sam Roberts

Film Director of Photography: Michael Jennings