taking on 'lo-fi'
Some loosely organized thoughts follow; read on for me nerding out about 'lo-fi beats to chill to'
Current controversy notwithstanding, I’m utterly uninterested in TikTok; maybe uninterested isn’t right, but something about the endless loop of content turns me off and infects me with brain worms. However, I’m still an online dopamine fiend, so the one-minute-long videos I do end up seeing are usually Reels (often of extant TikTok trends and interviews, which sort of defeats my uppityness here. So it goes). A content creator by the name of Shan Rizwan (@rizwanonyt on IG, @shanrizwan on TikTok) caught my eye on Instagram by making his name on the bitlin’ circuit via a standard format he popularized: “What are you listening to right now?” videos shot all over New York, often in Washington Square Park.
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One of his most popular clips is of two women organizing a post-friendly photoshoot; the woman he micro-interviews tells him she’s listening to MF DOOM’s Operation: Doomsday, a classic independent-rap work released on Bobbito Garcia’s Fondle Em’ Records in 1999 which re-introduced Daniel Dumile as the Masked Man. When asked why she’s got the album on, she replies that it’s ‘easy listening’; this gave me extreme pause for concern. Easy listening? DOOM? The long-play recording lurches across tempos and genres of sample, while DOOM himself offers some of the most off-kilter rhymes, deliveries, and vocal interstitials as he conceptualizes the scope of his villainry in 58 minutes. “Easy listening” as a qualifier or descriptor is typically applied to smooth jazz’s reined-in instrumentals, or to quiet storm’s tempered love ballads. Operation: Doomsday has neither of these; however, the album does contain chops and loops of both quiet storm and smooth jazz records alike (from Quincy Jones to Sade, inclusive of Alexander O’Neal of course), and has been ascribed in recent years to belonging amongst a new and unending basket of music categorization, known popularly as: lo-fi/low fidelity/low fi beats to chill to/lo_fi chill hip hop beats to study to/low-fi jazzy hip hop for sleep aesthetic/ad infinitum.
The album actually might have laid out the textbook formula for the newly established genre, which now enjoys dedicated YouTube channels with millions of viewers and followers tuning in. It was genuinely produced in analog fashion, and in low fidelity (ergo lo-fi) via recordings made + mixed in New York college radio personalities’ home studios; and it layered samples that were both firmly commercial and firmly non-commital, pulling from the stulted emotionality and sentimentality of subgenres which had capitalized themselves via middle-class audiences. Recording in low fidelity simply means that the original audio recording contains less clarity, separation, and detail; this low fidelity can be attributed to low-quality/old recording equipment, or to a low-tech mixing process, and generally occurred when music was made and produced outside of a recording studio setting. This low fidelity presents itself as tape hiss or stereo crackle, indeterminate or muffled vocals, possibly a muted or stunted low-end (e.g. muddled kicks and basslines).
We could quibble about origin stories, and there are certainly earlier hip-hop albums that were recorded similarly (from Binary Star to Ultra-Magnetic MCs) or recorded using the ethos of a ‘rough mix’ as pioneered by Bob Power and Russ Elevado (who engineered albums from A Tribe Called Quest’s Midnight Marauders to D’Angelo’s Voodoo), but the production bed is what sets Doomsday apart here as the originator. However, what passes as lofi now differs from DOOM’s Doomsday (and other template recordings pressed by the likes of Madlib, Hi-Tek, Shawn J. Period, Nujabees, etc) in one key aspect: it’s not actually recorded in low fidelity, nor recorded in analog. The aesthetic is more than intentional; it’s falsified. No one records on tape anymore; their recordings are thus lossless and often quite high fidelity, and their recording equipment is cheaper (price-wise) and of higher quality than ever. The aforementioned tape hisses or scrambled vocals are sonic artefacts now added post-facto in the mixing process, auditory skeuomorphs to make the songs sound cheaper (quality-wise) and/or older than they are. The aesthetic is a mimicry of what we know as “boom-bap”: traditionally produced rap, with its looped/chopped/pitched/slowed/fucked samples. In fact, ‘lofi hiphop beats’ is to boom bap what smooth jazz was to jazz and what quiet storm was to R&B. The shared basic idea is this: copying a popular or familiar genre, distilling it, smoothing it out, and asserting a bland and vaguely nostalgic aesthetic over not just the music itself but also the performance and the branding.
I don’t say any of this to ‘problematize’ lo-fi, or to come down on it; I love quiet storm and smooth jazz both, and I have a fondness in my heart towards the Youtube channels/livestreams and new producers that push lo-fi. However, it’s important (to me at least) to dig into the underlying sonics that make it popular, especially because I like it. And the other part of this story is the producers and members of the beat culture scene who have been working over the past thirty years to build out instrumental hip-hop recordings as their own standalone recording space: Dibiase, DJ Shadow, Dilla and Madlib, Knxwledge, Karriem Riggins, and many more built beats and breaks into careers, shows, and a vibrant internet/real-life subculture. Moreover, the oldhead hyper-emphasis on the ‘90s rap sound has found its seed flowered in the youthful drum-machine production proliferation. Think about how familiar we are with random remixes and filters of songs, often repurposed for virality on TikTok, and the resurgence of DJ culture and mix shows; it makes sense that low-passing, looping, and crackling a chune has become such a large part of how we listen to music. As it were, I’m just happy TikTokers are listening to Mr. Dumile; maybe the kids aren’t DOOMed after all.
For more reading:
MTV News on lofi’s nostalgia and soothe-fulness
Kennedy Morganfield’s brilliant essay on the “lo-fi girl” and gender performance/presentation
Vox Earworm’s Estelle Caswell on the brilliance behind Quiet Storm