POV: It’s a Monday night in mid-October and you’ve just entered the Folkore venue in Hoxton to watch Mon Rovîa’s sold-out show bringing African Appalachia to East London. Plants hang everywhere, and there’s a skeleton in the window. The red lights and purple hues feel like a womb that you are safe in, a savvy unplanned allusion to the melodic serenity to come.
Mon Rovîa, also known as JanJay Lowe, was born in Liberia, West Africa before fleeing the civil war and moving to Los Angeles as a baby. Now in his mid-to-late twenties (his age he won't reveal), is based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in the foothills of Appalachia -where folk music was made famous by white settlers, piggybacking on the tales of freedom and tribulation sung by enslaved Africans down South.
Like other genres of music, this African influence has largely been left out of the conversation. “I’m one of the few Black singers in the folk space. There isn’t really a representation like that right now,” said Mon Rovîa. “I think I’ve stripped down a lot, you know, I’ve tried to bring back a sense of honesty and vulnerability to this genre.”
That honesty and vulnerability is felt in his lyrics and smooth-as-honey sound, which soothes your soul with the understood delicacy of humanity. It’s special, what he has. With lyrics like ‘Big love ahead, mountain tops, you’re scared’, he reaches the core of emotion for many.
Modern Marketing
Talent alone is hardly enough in the music industry, especially in today’s branded world. While big artists have the luxury to be mysterious and tease fans with high-budgeted productions, Rovîa, as an independent artist, and his team of two close friends use the resources they can.
They've refused to join labels to maintain their independence. Social media is their form of exposure, a double-edged sword: a good platform for artists, but for fans and followers, it's oversaturated, removing the mystery. With an ever-increasing amount of time -l-o-s-t- spent on social platforms weekly in the UK, it seems this is the new norm for musicians to get the exposure they crave.
And for mostly better but sometimes worse, Mon Rovîa and his team absolutely hacked it. The African folk artist, who has gone viral with upwards of 750,000 followers across Tiktok and Instagram, says that he sings because it’s a way for him to spread his message, about his mixed identity and strong sense of community.
Lowe’s identity has been a source of inspiration for him. “I think I battled that a lot growing up, not really knowing who I was,” he says. “Being adopted, I think a lot of adopted people have that issue; for me, I never really knew my parents during the war in my country. I'd love to know who I got what traits from and [more about] certain aspects of myself, but you know, I’ll never know. It’s always going to be an ongoing thing, the search for identity. I hope that my music gives space for people to maybe find theirs in it.”
Through social media marketing techniques, he’s earned himself the same number of monthly listeners on Spotify, a figure doubled in just a few months. Rovîa’s manager, Eric Cromartie, says there is a special recipe to acing the algo. “Finding the shape that you have to form the content in is what I dedicated this whole year to, and now I’ve kind of created a ‘viral bible’ of like, these are the formats we see regularly that show up on our ‘For you’ page. So like, how do we recreate these formats in our own way, and our music, and Mon in his own world.”
pov: u whimsically scrolled into a song that is known to lower your blood pressure and mellow your heart rate and all you have to do is save this sound to help independent art on the come up.
Algorithmic words written across a video of our hero gesturing to the camera playfully; in the background, his most recent song plays out the chorus. This is the vibe, every time. As a fan myself, I discovered Mon Rovîa in this way. As it goes, I was hooked by the trendy phrases which brought the short-form video to my feed in the first place. Then, I grew annoyed, and felt it was an injustice to his own graceful sound to be succumbing to such dumb-down techniques. I sent him a DM in the summer complaining, and received a kind response which explained, in short, ‘it iz what it iz’.
Rovîa laughs about this online exchange and remarks honestly, “I tell my manager all the time, it’s hard for me to be posting stuff to catch people.” He speaks of the fine line between keeping the people that have found his music while reaching new lsiteners, without annoying his current fans and followers, “We’re still in the very big discovery stage and it’s a lot of the pov and stuff like that. It works for now. [But, in] trying to find that balance, in the new year there will be a switch of content.”
Across Screen Borders
Back at Folklore on stage, Rovîa's voice hums out as a lullaby, exquisite. From the front row, a pair of friends sang along softly, wiping away tears with a tissue. Behind them, a girl wraps her arm around her partner with a rainbow-colored bleach-base buzz. In the centre of the room, another couple kiss, revelling in the sunshine of Mon Rovîa's ukulele strings.
“So if you’re stuck watching TV, wishing you were not… ‘Cause everything that you’re feeling, you wish you forgot…” Rovîa sings to a seated crowd. A seated crowd that largely gathered from spotting him on the TV of today. Isn’t there some irony in the connectedness found from isolated hours behind individual LCD screens?
After the show, Mon Rovîa reposted all the stories from appreciative audience members, adding a loving emoji or thank you note. This is nothing new. It is a rare day that he doesn’t respond to fans on social media, and though there are some questions about today’s world of repetition marketing and the age old tale of cop-out story selling -- maybe there is a true community in the making.
At the end of the day, it's a safe place to submit to, virtually or otherwise, a place where sceptics can lay down their swords to grieve and love with others who have similarly had their guard up for far too long.
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