Representing the 613
The viral success of 20-year-old Nepean-born rapper Night Lovell is turning Ottawa’s drab reputation on its head.
An independent artist only three years into his career, Lovell has amassed more than 66 million total plays on music streaming site SoundCloud, 22 million views on his YouTube channel and more than 700,000 monthly listeners on Spotify.
This past year has, by far, been his most successful to date, nearly selling out his second European tour — his biggest yet — and releasing three new singles. Another highlight was his performance at Bluesfest this summer.
2017 “was the best year of my life,” Lovell said in a recent interview. And he’s capping it off with a New Year’s Eve event at PRVT PRPRTY in the ByWard Market.
Ottawa is no stranger to hip-hop success — rapper Belly has written for Beyoncé and The Weeknd — but Lovell is the first successful hip-hop artist from Ottawa to remain based in the city after becoming popular, giving regular shout outs to Ottawa in his music and interviews. He even sports a “613” tattoo across three knuckles.
“I just wanna be the guy who chose to represent Ottawa,” he says.
Lovell’s sound is dark and brooding, splashed with heavy bass and rattling percussions pierced by his deep, resonant voice. It embodies the feel of the city, whose long winters are cold and dark, and whose streets at night are often empty.
“It’s a weird place,” he says of Ottawa. “There’s two extremes — it can be a really busy and packed city, but it can all change in a second. It can just be really dead.”
But Lovell enjoys the isolation Ottawa provides, noting that he can’t stay in cities like Toronto or New York for long. “I like living around forests and trees,” he says. And those settings are frequent backdrops in his music videos.
Central to hip-hop’s ethos is representing your hometown, the result of which has tethered different sounds to their respective communities: from East Coast hip hop in New York, to West Coast rap in California, as well as the now-popular Memphis and Atlanta-based trap music. But Canada’s smaller scale means the conventional model for success here requires artists to move to larger cities like Toronto or Montreal. With Ottawa being square in the middle of these two bigger cities, it’s challenging for a local scene to thrive.
But Lovell has proven otherwise. The global reach of the internet helped him sidestep the limitations of living in a smaller city without needing the help of music labels and other industry gatekeepers, effectively creating a worldwide following on his own. He even learned to produce his own beats watching YouTube tutorials. To Lovell, “the internet is everything.”
After his first and biggest single, Dark Light, went viral on YouTube in 2014, he dropped his first album, Concept Vague. He’s since converted online virality into reallife success, with a string of tours through the U.S. and Europe, and the release of his second album, Red Teenage Melody, in 2016.
Beyond the New Year’s show, Lovell is keeping his plans for 2018 under wraps, hinting only that next year will be “everything that happened in this year, times two. That’s all I’m gonna say.”