Saint Jhn – ‘Roses’

6 March 2020

You can still see them here and there: old decal signage and path markings asking us to keep two metres apart. Other effects from March 2020 onwards have also endured. The Covid pandemic changed lives, upended lives, and took lives. Lockdown and social distancing brought an almost instant move for millions to online learning and remote working, or no working at all. Grandparents and grandchildren saw each other through windows. Some family members didn’t get the opportunity to spend valuable final moments with dying relatives. News programmes carried a daily death toll. Most people wore their face masks; some still must and do. Vaccine development and rollout gave hope and delivered progress, but public health measures fired up a new wave of performative cranks. The times brought out the best in some people, the worst in others.

There may be grim irony, if you’re looking for it, in the fact that Ireland’s number one single at the onset of the Covid pandemic and lockdown was the sort of communal floor-filler which wouldn’t be filling floors communally for some time to come. Bars were ordered to close on 15 March; Saint Patrick’s Day festivities around the country were cancelled. That same week, however, thousands of Irish people returned home from the Cheltenham racing festival that had now come to look like, in another phrase of the time, a super-spreader event.

It would be hard to claim that the Covid pandemic and lockdown had any real impact on the minor matter of the Irish charts. TV chat shows went ahead in empty studios, football matches were played behind closed doors, but music was already now mostly being consumed digitally, individually, and privately. No charity singles or thematically-resonant oldies appeared in our top ten. That said, there was some musical solace available online if you wanted it. (Over in Brexit Britain, the lockdown UK top spot alternated between ‘Roses’ and ‘Blinding Lights’, but by the end of April 2020 they had given way to a charity cover of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ featuring local fundraising hero Captain Tom, making him at 100 the oldest person ever to have a UK number one. Proceeds from that single went to NHS charities, not to the later Captain Tom Memorial Family Indoor Pool.)

The ‘Roses’ we get at number one in March 2020 is a remix by Kazahk DJ Imanbek. Much like the makeover for late-2019 chart-topper ‘Ride It’, Guyanese rapper Saint Jhn’s 2016 trap-flavoured hip-hop original is radically different, with Imanbek speeding, warping and disembodying the vocals while also putting in a chassis-shaking, head-nodding beat. I think it slaps – and what do you know? Apparently it belongs to a genre called slap house. Taxonomy aside, ‘Roses’ is a smashing track. If it helped ease someone’s mood and get them through difficult times, even better.

Pop music has a power like nothing else to remind us of a past time and place. In March 2020 I was exceedingly fortunate: working remotely from home, in good health, and filling my time by watching chart shows on the music channels of the now-gone MTV UK. It happened to coincide with a fine period in commercial pop, and re-energised my love of chart music. Nonetheless, I was still bored, plus I felt I needed a writing project to keep in practice until the communications side of my job picked up again. So, like those fresh chart hits and faded public health stickers, another enduring effect from the time of Covid pandemic and lockdown is Irish Number Ones.