Switched on Pop - Why lo-fi is the perfect background music

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Lo-Fi hip-hop has emerged as a hugely popular genre and internet subculture. Its millions of loyal fans rely on curated lo-fi playlists and live-streams to write to, study to and even fall asleep to. Heck, we even wrote a good chunk of our book to Spotify’s lo-fi beats playlists. There’s just something about those ambient, spacey, plodding beats that place us in a state of determined zen. But what of its musical roots? Who are its stars? And why, despite its mass following on YouTube, Spotify and elsewhere, is it nearly impossible to spot on the Billboard? We trace lo-fi from its godfathers to its moments in the sun, to the complex creative ecosystem playing out on streaming platforms today. MORE You can find music from this episode on this week’s Spotify playlist Sign up for Cherie Hu’s newsletter Water & Music that sent us down the lo-fi hip hop rabbit hole Check out Seneca B on Spotify: Check out weird inside on Spotify Check out eevee on Spotify SONGS DISCUSSED Brenky - Bye Brenky - People J Dilla ft. Common, D’Angelo - So Far To Go Isley Brothers - Don’t Say Goodnight (It’s Time For Love), Pts. 1&2 Charlatan - Wasted Jazz Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com.

It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nate, loyal listeners will recall that you are a professor of musicology. Correct. What are your students up to these days? My students, I choose to believe, are all diligently preparing for their final examinations.

Very diligent students? Yes, everyone. It's funny, when people ask me about what it was like to write our book, I find myself immediately flashing back to those moments. I'm sure some of your students are experiencing when the writing in front of you just seems to drag on for eternity. Oh my God, the terror of the empty page. It's the worst.

Lucky for us, the internet introduced me to the LoFi Beats playlist on Spotify, which I found exceptionally useful to write to. I'm not the only one, according to a study by chart metric, lofi, and and other ambient music has experienced a spike in listenership as more people work from home during social distancing. Interesting. Lo-fi. That's what we're going to investigate today. I want to get a sense of that sound.

I feel like a great example would be the song, Bye, by Branky. What do you notice? Sorry, I was writing an essay on nationalism. What are we talking about? We're talking about lo-fi music. We were supposed to be listening to the lo-fi music. And that's the point. Yes, yes.

It's engaging, but not enough to be distracting. It just helps you work on whatever you're working on, your little paper. I hear a lot of sparseness, you know, just two main textures here, this electric piano melody and a drumbeat, kind of a slower tempo, a lot of spaciousness, these figures that repeat over and over again. It's very, very soothing to listen to. It definitely is, yeah, it has that looping sort of structure. There's no clear hook, there's no vocals, has some,

jazzy sort of sampled qualities to it and it's slow. The beat kind of lags. I also really love that it has these sort of naturalistic sounds, the sort of hissiness and is that like rain in the background? Rain or perhaps the crackling of a vinyl record that hasn't been dusted. Yeah, it's very comforting. Totally. Branky's productions are all over the low-fi.

World. Their song, People is currently on the Spotify Lo-Fi beats playlist that we love so much. What I think is particularly notable about Lo-Fi is that it exists in this internet-driven subculture that is hugely popular, along with other affiliated genres like Synthwave and Vaporwave. Lots of people are listening to it. But it simultaneously exists outside of the Billboard chart structure. I think part of the reason why is that this is wildly popular music that is composed almost to be ignored. Today I want to break down the lo-fi sound into its component parts and try to understand where did lo-fi hip-hop come from? How did it find its audience? And finally, I want to look at

how this genre challenges our core understanding of what popularity in music even means. Okay, that's all. Yeah, great. We're going to do a lot, but it's going to be really fun. We get to listen to some very soothing music in the process. First things first, where did the lo-fi sound originate? I'm on the edge of my seat. So if you ask any lo-fi producer today or any journalist who's written about lo-fi, they'll inevitably cite the late James DeWitt Yancey, better known as J. Dilla or J.D.

Dilla has come up a few times. Yeah. Most recently on our episode celebrating the 20th anniversary of DeAngelo's Voodoo, an album heavily influenced by Dilla's production approach. Yeah, absolutely. And Dilla produced for so many greats, folks like Erica Bidu, Common, Buster Rhymes and the Roots. Here's this piece So Far to Go featuring Common, and as you mentioned, DeAngelo, it's one of his most recognizable works.

Very, very cool. Totally. And it has a bunch of those components. that we talked about. The song lays out, I think, three important techniques that Dilla helps herald into the lo-fi sound.

So first is that it's sample-based music. Second is that loose drum feel. And finally, the low-fidelity vinyl hiss. So thing of the first, sampling, right? Looking back to the 80s, 90s era of hip-hop, you can tell that this is sample-based beat production. Right. And so far to go, Jay Della is sampling the Isley brothers.

Don't say good night. It's a hot track. Damn. Dilla wasn't the first person to sample, but he is credited with being a master of the craft. He knew how to take a little moment like that and put it in an entirely new context, make fabulous new compositions. Beyond just his craft and sampling, what he was. he's very much known for is, as we mentioned, that laggy loose drumming feel. J. Della was famous for taking sounds from a machine and making them sound more human.

And this came up in our piece about D'Angelo, where Questlove had mimicked J. Della's sound style on the record voodoo. That's kind of the sound that Quest was borrowing, which is fascinating, right? Like someone sampling acoustic drums, putting them onto a machine called an MPC, and then playing them back in the most human way to then later be imitated by another live drummer. Yeah. Wild. What a complicated tapestry is our modern existence.

A beautiful thing. So I talked to our friend and colleague Estelle Caswell about this. She made a video for Vox as part of her earworm series about what set J. Dilla apart as a producer. Here's Estelle. One thing that people talk a lot about why people look to J. Dilla as sort of this almost godlike figure is that the MPC was built for making hip-hop beats and things like that way easier. There's this tool called quantization, which essentially like if you're playing a drum pattern and your kicks over four beats are a little bit off, then you can just use quantize

on the MPC and it'll snap them to the nearest beat. But what J. Dilla did was he like intentionally didn't use quantize. And in a lot of cases, his kick drums were off by a fraction of a second. So the MPC was this sample-based drum machine that was popular in the 90s amongst hip-hop producers. And one of the things that it lets you do is put all of the various instruments in perfect rhythm. but J. Dillah didn't do that. He intentionally played his rhythms loose so that the kick in the highhats

might not land at the same time more like a drummer than a drum machine, if you will. I wanted to demonstrate this power of quantization by producing a song of my own under my producer named Charlottin. The piece that I made just for you, Nate, I called it wasted jazz. All right, give me a taste of that.

I use my drum machine to automatically align the drummer and the bass player in this track. In perfect rhythm, what producers and Estelle called quantization. So here's the quantized version of the same song. So I isolated the drummer and the bass player to see that they're playing an alignment there. Here's the version where they're, well, having a bit too much fun. Yeah, Charlottin in the house. I'm feeling that, Chuck. Thanks, man. That makes me want to go read a book and write a report on it.

The point being, right, has this, like, really loose feel. It's not quite in time. There's such a subtle difference between those two, and yet the outcomes are completely different. The first feels very sort of driven and locked in, and the second feels really kind of spacey and loosey-goosey. That's really, I like hearing those back-to-back. That's cool.

I'd say that the second one has a lot of ooze, if you will. The primary thing simply being that the instruments are playing together

but intentionally not at the same time. Okay, so we established that Jay Della has this sample-based production. He likes to play

his samples in a very loose sort of way. There's a third and final thing about Dilla's production style that brings us right to the quality

inherent in the words low fidelity, You set it at the very top, in fact. It's that ever-present vinyl hiss. At the time that he was producing music, he was still cutting samples from vinyl records and tapes. Here's a stelle again. Depending on the quality of the record,

you might have something that's crystal clear and beautiful and super high fidelity, but you also might have found a record at a record store that's like a shit ton of scratches and has pops and hisses and might skip a little bit. All of that sound goes into the MPC, and it's up to the producer to decide whether or not they want to filter it out or keep it. An example of somebody who filtered it out a lot would be like Kanye West.

I think a lot of his early stuff where he was sampling a lot of soul records sounds super clear and new and high quality. Whereas somebody like J. Dilla or Madlib, you listen to their sampling and the records that they're choosing. are kind of dusty. They really like kind of kept the scratches and the hisses and the pops of vinyl in the record. And like that is literally like a way to describe lofi hip-hop as like dusty grooves or something like that. This has always been the most interesting thing to me

about lo-fi hip-hop is that it sounds intentionally created to sound old. It's made in a way that makes it sound like it's not even produced well. And on top of that, oftentimes lo-fi hip-hop producers will add in organic sounds like rain or bird song, which makes it feel like someone's bedroom window is left open while recording. And this is true in a time when home recording technology is the best it's ever been, right? Phineas and Billy can produce a number one record from their bedrooms.

But listening to Estelle, I finally understand that it's Jay Dilla's combination of samples played slightly out of time with a lot of hiss that then inspires so many future lofi producers and creates this whole aesthetic. Interesting. Yeah, it stands in opposition to the kind of anodonic chamber that so much pop production exists in where every sound is like shrink-wrapped and devoid of any blemish or rough edges. This lo-fi style is kind of leaning in and even adding in those rough edges in case you don't have enough of them. Exactly. Okay, so now I feel like I have a clear idea of kind of the musical building blocks of this lofi sound.

But an unanswered question for me is why when I go on to Spotify and check out this playlist, am I just assaulted by like anime characters? What is that about? And pretend I don't know anything about anime because I don't. If you search for lofi on any streaming service, it seems you get all of these branded anime characters, often studying, giving a clue of what you're supposed to do. And actually, this is an important part of Lofi's history. People come to Lofi in many ways, that's for sure.

But something happens in television around the time that Dilla is hitting the peak of his career as a producer that dramatically widens the audience for his style of production and is connected to that anime artwork. Dilla and his peers like Madlib and Japanese Lofi producer, Nujabez, start making their way onto the popular TV program, Adult Swim, known for its anime shows. What? Did you ever watch Adult Swim? Oh, yeah. Are you kidding? Space Ghost Coast to Coast? Yes. Maybe with Dragon Ball?

No, no. None? A robot chicken? I want to say. Definitely. In a profile from 2018, Vice noted that this anime look that we're getting is at least in part due to the fact that Adult Swim was acquiring a handful of popular anime shows

already using beats from these producers. So the sound that starts to fill up chunks of empty airtime between shows and becomes synonymous with the programming, they start to use that sound as commercial bumpers. It made the sound recognizable to millions of American teens. Here's a sample of an adult swim bumper. So if I'm getting this correctly, like millions of young people were first exposed to J. Dilla style while watching. anime cartoons on Adult Swim. That's exactly right. Fascinating.

Very sadly, J. Dilla passed away at the young age of 32 in 2006. But his influence certainly lives on, right? In the early 2010s, the kids who've come up on Adult Swim and J. Dilla, they start making their own music, Lofi, and suddenly have a generation of aspiring music producers who are emulating the sound of J. Della. and beyond that, they have accessible music software with pre-cut samples. They're all sliced and dice and ready to go. Stuff that Dilla would have to do manually and take hours and hours.

Kids these days. Yeah, kids. And they're making beats. Not necessarily for anyone to sing a rapover. Just those loops of oozy, jazzy, sample filled. That's crunchy stuff, right? They sound a lot like the instrumental song snippets that used to fill the bumpers in between adult swim. shows. That's so funny that this music that we now associate as being background music may have

originated in this context where it was sort of the background or the connective tissue between like a TV shows. Yeah, and it then becomes the things you study to. There's actually some science that backs this up. There are real studies that show that background music done just right can improve cognitive function by boosting our mood, delaying fatigue, and even sharpening concentration over time, as long as there aren't lyrics, which can have a demonstrably negative effect on anyone's work performance. Yeah, I know from personal experience that listening to music with lyrics while you're writing is a terrible idea because you start to put the lyrics into whatever document you're working on. And all of the sudden, you're like, I firmly,

believe that this policy is bad because I'm toxic, I'm slipping under. No, no, wait, wait, what? Yeah, it's not a good idea to plagiarize Britney Spears in your paper. Like, that's not going to go over well. Someone cynical could say, well,

this stuff was made as interstitial music and now it's study music, like it's totally useless, but that is exactly the point. Interstitial music needs to be interesting enough to keep your attention just enough that you don't want to change the channel. in the same way that you need to listen to this stuff so that you're not going to get it from your seat and stop studying.

It has that same kind of effect on us. Okay, so now we know how these beats are made. We know where they come from. We know that they're wildly popular, but I have a difficult question for you. Okay. Can you name one lofi producer? Yeah. Brinky.

The producer that we talked about at the beginning of the show. Well, that's just a coincidence. And how about a second producer? Squeasy Bops Johnson. I love Squeezie Bops Johnson, even though you just made them up. Oh, busted. Okay, no, I can't name another one. Is that what you wanted to hear?

Yeah, actually it is what I wanted to hear. Isn't it strange that this genre is so wildly popular, and yet we can't name a single producer, even having written the majority of our book listening to this stuff in the background? Now that you pointed out, yeah, that is a little weird. Why that is and the implications for the artists who make this music when we return. Shopify, facilita

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per per records. Don't be deceived by those chill vibes.

The story of Lofi is a story about power. Ooh, scintillating.

In order to understand Lofi Hip Hop the day, you need to know that it's found its mainstream fan base on YouTube. In 2011, YouTube rolls out this feature that gives birth to the entire Lofi ecosystem,

as we know today. The 24-hour 7 live stream. The 24-7 live stream was actually originally designed for large-scale, live broadcasting of things like sports games and news conferences, but around 2017, this same tool in the hands of DJs led to a proliferation of 24-hour YouTube role. radio stations. Channels like college music and chilled cow. These stations led the way.

They go back to back and play tons of this oozy lofi from a variety of creators. It seems like there's an endless amount of this music. And to show you what I'm talking about, can you log onto YouTube right now? Yeah. So let's search for a lofi beats. L-O-M-Dash-F-I beats. Okay. we've got

chilled cow yeah college music yep lofi beats to quarantine and stay indoors too lofi beats to relax

slash study too yeah all right you're making your case here all right which one do you like let's choose one let's let's go check it out lofi miracle wave beats to relax slash get nothing done to as in angrile a miracle

sorry what let's go check out a chilled cow station. Okay. What do you see? Well, I see a looping anime image of a young girl studying in her bedroom with a cat. It's very soothing. Okay. And I'm listening to one of these Dilla-esque beeps, and so are 39,086 other people. Just right now. Any given moment. Just right now, Yeah, at 308 on a Wednesday. Well, also there is a chat box that is just lit up like a Christmas tree. It's going so fast.

What are people talking about? People are just putting in like random letters. Someone says, for all the high school seniors, let's go and keep on studying. Oh, that's great. Someone said my little brother is addicted to this. So there is a whole community of people who are participating in this live radio stream with you, potentially studying for their exams, all these looks like a bunch of high schoolers that are getting chilled, cowed with you. Yeah, it makes me feel like I'm not alone, you know, pulling an all-nighter or something.

I think what's notable here, though, is that this stream, unless you're chatting, which is probably a distraction from your studying, isn't really meant to be, watched, right? It's meant to be played in the background in a tab next to your paper that you're writing, which means that the artist whose music is playing aren't necessarily being recognized. And this is where the power imbalance with those curators comes into play. I actually spoke to a journalist who's been reporting on exactly the subject. My name is Sherry Hu. I'm a freelance music and tech writer and the owner of the music industry newsletter, Water and Music. Sherry says that the curators of these live streams, channels like college music, chilled cow, they're often more

recognizable than the artist themselves. So I'm an avid listener to those live streams when I'm working. It serves a very specific function of helping me focus. And so I will admit that I'm not like looking at the screen every time a new song comes up to see which artist is playing. And so multiple songs will kind of go past a lot of the time without me really knowing which artists are being streamed. So they're not totally anonymous, but they definitely take a backseat in terms of name recognition. This is kind of a unique musical ecosystem. So much of our appreciation of music is connecting with an artist and their identity and their narrative. And here it's like, nope, it's just kind of going by in the background. That's very different than a lot of

our musical listening experiences. Exactly. I mean, in theory, streams like these would be great exposure for smaller producers who are trying to build their fan base. and yet the channel Chill Hop, which has, what, 2.75 million subscribers, thousands of people tuned in at any given moment, it makes you wonder about the value of that exposure, if the people, quote-unquote, watching the streams are just listening to them passively. Yeah. Setting the exposure question aside for a moment,

I think there's another bigger rift in the ecosystem that tends to isolate power in the hands of platforms and curators. I like platforms like Spotify and Apple Music that generate income from premium subscribers, YouTube generates the vast majority of its revenue from advertising, which means that in a situation like these 24-7 live streams, there's no functional per-play royalty structure at work. The ad money follows the channel owners, not the artists. It's then on curators to pass that payout to lo-fi artists whose songs appeared in the stream. Here's how it's played out for Seneca B. She's a lo-fi producer who's had tens of millions of streams and has been featured in these

YouTube channels. I've never once received a payment from anyone from a YouTube channel at all ever. God damn. I know, right? And it's not because they're not good people. It's usually the fact that YouTube pays so little that like this, this lo-fi playlist with four million views that has two of my songs and ten others by other people, it's like the amount of money this person probably got for that is like nothing.

And then trying to split it up between like 10 different people is like you'd be paying us like $30 a pop. So this economy is kind of built into the structure of YouTube. But Sherry says there's a specific reason why big streaming numbers on YouTube aren't translating into big dollars for the artists. This is like a very specific thing about love hip-hop live streams or any 24-7 live-stream on YouTube. Normally if you have a YouTube video that's like 40 minutes long and you want to monetize it,

YouTube will usually seed ads every like 10 minutes or so. But for a 24-7 live stream, I think normally there's only an ad when you first open the video, and that's it. For some of these videos, the average watch time will be like 40 to 50 minutes, which is a really long time. But there's only one ad being served in that entire time. And so these channels don't have that much ad revenue to work with in the first place. And then if they were then going to try to take that revenue and split it among all the songs that were consumed in a given time period, I think that would just be. costly and unrealistic on their part. And I think the artists and producers in this space understand that as well. So there's simply not enough advertising revenue for this whole thing to even work out to start paying the artist.

It makes me wonder then where does someone like Seneca B go if they want to see some returns. She says the answer is Spotify. When you distribute on Spotify, even if you get included on a ton of playlist, like the money goes to you because it follows the song. But it's just the volume taken to get there is like kind of high. But again, once you get like 500,000 players, like you may get a check for a thousand bucks or something, which is definitely something. Wow. I mean, yeah, that's definitely better than YouTube, but 500,000 plays to a couple thousand dollar check, that's not good math. It's really hard.

It's a volume game. And the curators understand this just as much as the artists do. In fact, they're still running these 24-7 live streams. But they're also migrating a bunch of these curated song lists over to Spotify and Apple Music and the form of playlists. However, there's a challenge here, right? Playlisting in and of itself doesn't necessarily generate revenue. So the curators are actually, these folks like Chill Hop and College Music, they're now evolving in order to grab a cut of the Spotify royalties. Here's Sherry explaining what I mean.

Chill Hop, for instance, they now have a label and a publishing business. They'll sign an individual track and release it on. like your standard paid streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. And I know for Chill Hop, their label business now, it makes up the majority of their revenue because they're actually getting royalty payments from Spotify for their own catalog. So basically this pseudo industry of curators,

live stream, YouTube, they're starting to act a lot more like the traditional recording industry. They are signing deals with these artists so that when those artists are played in Spotify and Apple Music and their places, parts of those royalties are going to the curators. Whoa, okay. They want to get in on that business. Gotcha.

And the curators, they're trying to find a way to translate this massive audience into a sustainable business. Like, it is a volume game. But it's not one that's necessarily great for the artists. So it could be who we spoke with, though grateful for some of the passive income that streaming brings in. She's actually now attending law school. And frankly, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. Like, you know, honestly, very rarely is music a career. I guess it makes sense in a way.

You know, this is one of the most intractable issues that musicians are encountering today is like, how is your music valued by the music industry as it stands? And like so many other artists, lo-fi beat makers, are finding that it's not really commensurate with the kind of work and attention that their music is getting. But I think the things that artists produce can be meaningful art, that give people relief, that help them work and study and inspire people to get through the last few pages of that book that they're trying to close when they have a massive deadline coming up. Okay, so, Nate, we've been listening to Lo-Fi Beats, which means obviously there's a quiz coming.

Let's try to recap. What have we learned today? Okay, well, I've been hitting the book. So, Lo-Fi Beats are inspired by the work of Jay Dilla. They're unquantides. They hit rhythmically kind of off the beat. They often have these vinyl hisses and other kind of rough edges. They come surprisingly from the world of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim,

where Jay Dilla Beats were used as interstitial music between anime cartoons. And today they have proliferated thanks to 24-7 YouTube live streams and Spotify playlists, where especially with YouTube, these creators do not see nearly enough of the monetary rewards of what is like a million-plus subscriber business. How did I do? Charles. Ooh, dang. You were fully paying attention. Well, I had a good professor. Oh, thank you very much. Armchair professor.

I feel like one of my big reflections from all of this learning has been that as much, much as I appreciate the ethos of making music for the community because you love it, I am 100% one of those people. I also get worried when I see a system that so severely disadvantages the people making the thing that's in such high demand. I know there's this critique of whether music designed to be ignored is worth listening to it all, but I think our journey today was a fantastic reminder of how music can serve completely different purposes depending on what we need as listeners. I think there's enormous value in music that engages a different part of our brain than say, Doolipa or Rihanna or Travis Scott. Yeah, maybe that's what we need right now. Like music

that meets us where we're at, managing all the troubles and everything that's going on, it takes us to the sort of place of Zen. Yeah. And maybe we should just take an extra moment to check out who those artists are, follow them, and give them some extra love. We want to give a huge thanks to everyone we spoke with for this episode. Sherry Who, You can find her work and subscribe to her wonderful newsletter at patreon.com slash C-H-E-R-I-E-H-U, or just search water in music. It's amazing. I read it every week. We've got the article that launched us into this wormhole linked in the description box.

I also want to send much love to producer Seneca B for sharing her music and her experience with us. You can find her artist page on Spotify by searching Seneca, space, B. And many thanks to producers' Evie and weird. Inside, whose voices didn't make it into the show, but who provided incredible insights into the world of Lofi. You can find Evie's artist page on Spotify by searching EEVEEEE. Really cool stuff. Weird Inside is weird dot inside, one word.

We'll link to some of their music in the show description as well. Other things you can find in the description are links to some other great reporting on Lofi if you're curious to learn more. And also, of course, we have a playlist. We've pulled together all the music from the episode into one fabulously curated playlist, go check it out. This episode was produced by the fabulous Megan Lubin. Really appreciate the work on this piece. Snaps. Additional production by Bridget Armstrong, Nishaw Kerwaw, Liz Nelson, myself, Charlie Harding, and of course, Nate Sloan. Our editor, mixer, and engineer

is Brandon McFarland. Our illustrator is Iris Gottlieb, and social media by Abby Barr. We're members of the Vox Media Podcast Network, and you can find episodes of our show wherever you listen to podcasts. We will be back in another week with a... Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Real talk, Nate. I have to interrupt you here. Yes, what? How dare you? We're not just coming back for another episode next week. We're coming back for the episode next week. We're going to speak to the person who inspired the original show.

St. Jepson, may she always smile down upon us. It's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to chat about her music. We're going to talk about some of the really fun origin stories we've never told. And until then, thanks for listening. You faked me out, Charlie. That's sneaky, man. That's sneaky. Thanks for listening.