Who among us has remained immune to lofi hip-hop? The genre is an infectious mix of retro-anime aesthetics and slow, introspective beats sampled mainly from jazz and golden-era hip-hop. It is designed to keep you in the zone of whatever you choose to be doing as you listen to it. Itt matches the vibe, no matter what the vibe really is. It is college-student fodder, as essential to the experience as ramen noodles for breakfast and unpaid internships for dinner. It acknowledges the chaos and uncertainness of the present, and muffles it gently with the rose-tinted tranquility of the past.
In 2020, it reigned supreme.
Amidst the anxiety and isolation of the pandemic, lofi hip-hop became the unofficial soundtrack of the year. The genre is prevalent on Youtube, which offers listeners a shared space through live chat rooms, invoking a sense of community through difficult times. It serves as an effective backdrop to encourage productivity, which many people struggled with as they began to work from home. The wordless music is peppered with nostalgic sounds (familiar television dialogue, the scratch of a vinyl record, or a stripped refrain from a pop song) and is neither so slow it makes you sleepy, nor so fast it makes you anxious. Soft and predictable, the tracks provide an oasis of calm in the middle of chaos.
Despite its popularity, the genre is notoriously difficult to define in traditional terms. Lofi refers to low-fidelity music, which gained popularity as the sound of dream pop and shoegaze in the early 80s. These genres share lofi hip-hop’s dedication to creating music that sounds distinctly home-made and otherworldly.
Lofi hip-hop also draws from downtempo. Originating from the rave culture of the early 90s, downtempo was constructed specifically to help with the comedown of party drugs used in nightclubs. It is characterized by slower tempos and with a large focus on beats, resulting in a mellow, ambient sound–a defining trait that it shares with lofi hip-hop today.
Most significantly, lofi hip-hop shares much of its sound with the tongue-in-cheek genre Vaporwave of the early 2010s. Vaporvave began as a parody of late twentieth century consumer culture and capitalism. As counterculture, vaporwave sought to manufacture nostalgia by mixing pop songs of the 80s and 90s with jazz, lounge, and elevator music reminiscent of shopping malls of the era (also known as Muzak). Lofi hip-hop utilizes these same elements, but is distinctly sincere in its sound, rather than ironic. There is an emphasis on thoughtful imperfection and a mellow production which is absent in vaporwave. Lofi hip-hop acknowledges the lechery of the industry and world within which it operates and softly counters with existentialist optimism: things are bad, but the inside of your head doesn’t have to be.
The visual aesthetics of the genre are derived from nostalgia for Cartoon Network's Adult Swim and Toonami, both of which became known in the late 90s and early 2000s for introducing anime to America. While Adult Swim also engineered the crossover success with the revered MF DOOM (Madvillainy remains one of the most iconic source material for most lofi hip-hop edits), Toonami aired the English dubs of Shinichiro Watanabe’s Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. Cowboy Bebop’s introspective, dreamy dialogues often serve as spoken-word preludes, or interlace lofi hip-hop works. Meanwhile, Samurai Champoo’s soundtrack was composed by Nujabes, one of lofi hip-hop’s most prominent pioneers.
No matter what lofi hip-hop may or may not be, there is a clear consensus that it is a mood. The feelings and emotions invoked by the music are more telling than its individual elements. It transcends any jabs at particularity and instead relies on an innocent feeling of optimism paired with self-aware nostalgia, a characteristic that further embodies its relevance in a world that has evolved past irony and returned to a genuine yearning for the romantic. Whether you’re riding its wave or still a skeptic, lofi hip-hop undoubtedly captures the spirit of the post-pandemic world.
Illustration by Adela Hua