SAINt JHN's Gorgeous 'Borders' Video Is A Celebration Of Bodies And Lenny Kravitz

you may know Brooklyn rapper and singer SAINt JHN from his full-throated appearance alongside Blue Ivy Carter (and, oh yeah, her mother) on "Brown Skin Girl" from this year's The Lion King: The Gift movie companion album. Nevertheless a couple of months later, he was the one providing a music legend a spot on a song. It's the reason he named his second variety of music Ghetto Lenny's Love Songs: He counts Lenny Kravitz as a massive inspiration.


That's what makes "Borders," the duo's silken R&B team-up, so momentous. It finds Ghetto Lenny trading croons with his idol, culminating in a volcanic guitar solo from the elder Lenny. The pair shot its accompanying steamy, black-and-white, especially striking video in Paris, the same city where they met and laid down the music. However SAINt JHN joked that his contributions to the clip were mostly appearance-based. "I was just a mannequin," told Adut Akech Bior for MTV News. "They just used me for my abs."


In an age of multi-part blockbuster visuals hyped and coordinated and filmed on as grand a scale as that of motion photos, "Borders" is intimate and lean, allowing its two leads to take center stage any time the frame isn't occupied by gorgeously lit bodies. The full enterprise feels like a tête-à-tête between you and whichever snug scene lies on the other side of director Mathieu Cesar's lens. SAINt JHN praised the "raw" intentionality of Cesar's vision.


"I like once there's no excuse for once something's cute or whenever it's not cute and it's flawed," he mentioned. "There's nothing else in the picture and also you need to be really focused on whichever that's in front of you. It was a lot of that. You can visualize it — it's me and Lenny. If it ain't sexy, I don't know what it is."


SAINt JHN mentioned he didn't grow up around other artists, so he had to calculate his own creativity by himself. Yet working with an inspiration like Lenny — "the only black guy in music being sexy and being aggressive all at the same time," he mentioned — helped him visualize other techniques of working. The real Lenny taught him that "it's cool to have be specific and have an eye and attention for detail."


That sort of specificity runs through Ghetto Lenny's Love Songs, whether self-taught or not, because the sonic emotionality bounds from the booming trap beats of the Meek Mill group effort "Anything Can Happen" and "Who Do You Blame" to the tender A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie team-up "Monica Lewinsky" and, certainly, the pin-drop quiet intimacy of "Borders."


One aspect Kravitz was specific as hell about is that wispy guitar solo at the end of the song — especially the way it plays out in the video, with Kravitz wailing through his trademark Flying V as SAINt JHN pantomimes on air guitar. There's a viral tweet making the rounds right now that posits the 55-year-old musician's fame in 2019 is mostly sustained by memes, and that right now, more people know about that scarf than, mention, "Are You Gonna Go My Way." What's cool about "Borders" is that it's a genuine reminder of Kravitz's immense ability, right as he uses it to highlight the likewise lustrous talents of a descendant like SAINt JHN.


"Imagine your hero taps you on the shoulder and passes you the baton to keep running," SAINt JHN mentioned. "That's what it felt like." Watch that dynamic on full display in the evocative "Borders" video above.