How Lo-Fi Beats's Nostalgic Comfort Transcended The Memes

By Carson Mlnarik


There’s a whole world outdoors your bedroom window, although you’re also busy to notice. Maybe you’re nestled in bed, feeling the serenity and safety of your laptop, your succulents, and a unexhausted allocate of vinyl records and seltzer. Perhaps you’re perched at a desk and inspiration has struck; you could only take your eyes off the page for a couple of seconds to watch your cat’s tail swing. There’s a soundtrack for this sort of concerted absorption, and its most devoted fans and creators call it lo-fi hip-hop.


Lo-fi hip-hop might be a meme, however thanks to 24-hour streaming streams and playlists on YouTube and SoundCloud, these jazzy, inoffensive tunes have become both practical and escapist functions for young people seeking music both for relaxation and concentration. The coronavirus pandemic has led people to log more hours online due to boredom or virtual workplaces and schools, and livestreamed music performances are reaching their full potential. Music will support ease our escalating anxiety — even Will Smith recently created his own “chill beats to quarantine to” playlist — and lo-fi hip-hop is an excellent place to start.


While the genre connects with listeners on a utilitarian level, its cosplay inspirations, dedicated fan communities, and pop-culture references show its influence has spread behind the one-night binge study sesh. The sound replicates nostalgia by design, and the pops and cracks of vinyl distortion and excellent are intentional because the irregular vocal loop or cautiously curated BoJack Horseman sample. With listeners finding themselves in a more and more noisy world for political reasons amongst others, they’re finding comfort and consolation in a genre build onto channeling the old.


“The genre as a whole is nostalgia,” Steven Rogers, better known by his recording name Beowülf, told MTV News. “That’s what connects with people the most.”


Rogers stumbled upon lo-fi hip-hop while scouring the web to curate a soundtrack for working on his girlfriend’s homework. At that moment, “it was all over,” he mentioned. He had watched his brother make beats for years, nevertheless the genre’s authentic sound and inherent simplicity gave him the confidence to try it out on his own. His signature compositions mix chill beats with distorted dialogue from media like The Perks of Being a Wallflower, It’s A remarkable Life, and The Simpsons, and his music has garnered 4.2 million listeners from 79 countries last year on Spotify alone.


Followers of Rogers’s YouTube account, where he has more than 15,000 subscribers, describe his music as “the feeling of losing almost all my anxiety” and “the right sort of sad.” One of his most popular tracks, “Today is a Gift,” samples a monologue about the past — and dumplings — from Kung Fu Panda. In the comments on the corresponding video, one fan recounts listening to the track while “doing some classwork also it was just so confusing (...) Then I heard Master Oogway’s voice and just… broke down?? In the middle of math class?”


An animated Jack Black film from 2008 might seem like an irregular nexus for all-encompassing catharsis. Nevertheless 2000s nostalgia is in full swing, and there really are a couple of theories why millennials might be the most nostalgic generation yet: that they were raised within “a technological divide,” they grew up in a recession that caused them to over-romanticize, or that it’s merely a buffer for anxiety about the future. It only makes sense that they’re looking at halcyon beats, just as much as they’re reminiscing about downloads on LimeWire and Bratz.


“I think that sort of stuff has habitually resonated with people,” Clifford Stumme, director of Interdisciplinary Research at Liberty University, told MTV News. “Any time people feel like they’re going through a tough time, it’s easy to look back on the happier past and have the ability to like that and reside in that for a second as a form of escapism.”


Stumme runs a YouTube channel called the Pop Song Professor, which he uses to analyze pop songs and lyrics. While lo-fi hip-hop’s scarcity of words has led some music critics to write it off as background music, he’s saw a lot of sentimentality and “thoughtfulness” in the genre, which he attributes to its creators.


“A lot of elevator music is very corporate. It’s very well put with each other, very finely tuned to the point where it’s acceptable to everybody, although interesting to no one,” he mentioned. “The thing that separates [lo-fi hip-hop] is partially the emphasis on imperfection ... Just the very nature of lo-fi itself is the idea of low excellent in a recording.”


It’s certainly more than “background music” to Bas van Leeuwen, cofounder of Chillhop Music, one of YouTube’s biggest lo-fi streams. With countless livestreams hosting more than 3,000 listeners around the clock, along with more than 2 million subscribers, what began as a labor of love between him and close companions in the Netherlands has blossomed into a 25-person team, serving as a promotional channel, label, and publisher for artists across the world.


Chillhop artists including Arbour, Sleepy Fish, and Aso make normal appearances on Spotify’s Lo-Fi Beats and Chill Lofi Study Beats playlists, and they’ve partnered with artists like L’indécis on tunes like “Staying There” and “Soulful,” which have noticed their way into segments on NPR. Bas describes the sound as “a modern take on lounge music [that] assists the [you] get into a good flow,” and the genre finds its roots in downtempo jazz and hip-hop beats, with a “sonic nostalgia” similar to vaporwave. Listeners on Chillhop Music livestreams go as far as to describe it as “therapy for your brain,” evoking the feeling of embarking on “an exhilarating journey although not rushing the process.”


The nostalgic and low-key journey listeners experience may also be in part because of the genre’s visuals. Popular streaming channel ChilledCow has become synonymous with the anime girl studying to the point of parody, just as Chillhop Music’s stations have lent themselves to the cozy raccoon, who only takes breaks from their laptop to give the occasional yawn or beat of its tail.


“I think the visuals that became popular also help [create the] mood among listeners,” van Leeuwen mentioned. “This is why images of research characters rose to be the front of the music nowadays, nevertheless it is an objective of [ours] to showcase who’s actually in back of the music more.”


Nostalgia was certainly a “in” for Quentin Mulligan, who records under the name Frumhere. With dreamy visuals, a penchant for lowercase lettering, and melodramatic titles like “She Only Likes Me Whenever I’m Drunk” and “I Still Have All Our Old Texts,” he has cultivated more than 820,000 monthly listeners on Spotify. “What I think is unique to lo-fi hip-hop is that essentially you’re designing this nostalgic sound, both in the way that the tracks are created as well as in the compositions themselves,” he told MTV News.


Having grown up studying and playing classical piano, Mulligan noted the distinction in being a “classic, performing, competing musician” versus the population of lo-fi “bedroom producers,” where the barrier to entry is different, and then some creators are using free or low-cost software like GarageBand to prepare tunes. “For the most part, [lo-fi] music is obtainable, just because the folks are available that create it,” he said.


It’s that accessibility that has inspired fans to reach out in back of playlists and livestreams to Instagram, where Mulligan mentioned he gets a lot of DMs about his music helping people through breakups. “When I first began making music under the Frumhere project, I was actually going by way of the worst breakup of my life,” he mentioned. “So it holds a lot of weight as soon as people reach out to me, especially once they mention that it helped them get through something tough emotionally.”


Music has the power to evoke memories for listeners, and while lo-fi hip-hop is a genre built to rouse nostalgia, sentimentality isn't exactly a novel concept in music. “People have habitually been prepared to romanticize things,” Stumme mentioned. “It just so happens that one of these big emphases now is the past.”


Still, there might be something to be mentioned for lo-fi hip-hop’s composition, and the way its creators mix simplistic melodies with a judicious use of words to prepare intense memories, feelings, and nostalgia. “The beat is very minimal, the complete sonic experience is very stripped back and very careful,” Stumme mentioned. “When you have something to mention, I think folks are going to listen.”