the lovely genre of lofi hip hop
If you frequent YouTube on a regular basis, you might be familiar with the livestream “lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to.” It features an anime girl in a Miyazaki-esque room scribbling down notes in a never-ending loop. Her cat, tail swinging over the windowsill, looks out at the pastel-colored town ahead. All the while, chill beats play from a curated playlist twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
This livestream, hosted on the ChilledCow channel, isn’t the only one of its kind. Yet, all of the titles share the words “sleep,” “chill,” “study,” “relax,” and “game.” It invites listeners to put on the stream just to fill the air, to leave it on as background noise. A subgenre of hip-hop, lofi hip-hop enjoys popularity among the student crowd for these reasons. When you’re stressing about stoichiometry or integrals, the smooth, hypnotic beats found in these streams are a perfect way of calming down and focusing on the problem sets. Many songs feature unintelligible spoken-word samples or none at all, allowing them to serve as passive distractions rather than active ones. The music cuts out all of the extraneous thoughts you might have when working in silence, but it also won’t draw attention away from your primary task.
I discovered these streams in my junior year of high school. I had been going through a sort of personal musical renaissance, opening myself up to several new genres and artists all at once. Lofi appeared on my radar and I latched onto it. I can recall countless nights of working at my desk late at night, finishing up a physics or pre-calculus worksheet as the soothing sounds of Nujabes or jinsang streamed through my headphones. At 2 a.m. on a Tuesday night, the one thing I didn’t want to be reminded of was the constant suburbian silence around me; the persistent reminder that everyone else was getting a good night’s rest while I would have yet another truncated sleep cycle. So I filled the air with this niche subgenre of music, and it comforted me.
I imagine that the thousands of other listeners viewing these streams at any given time have similar stories. Students from all over the world congregate in the chats alongside the streams and talk about life. They study for an upcoming midterm or unwind after coming back from one. They lull themselves to sleep or turn up the volume as they get into the zone in their favorite video game. No matter what they might be doing, all of these listeners have gathered here, in this cozy little corner of the Internet, to enjoy chill, lofi beats.
