Why do you listen to lofi hiphop?
Hey guys, I'm doing a write up for uni and was looking to get some info on why you guys love and listen to lofi?
Thanks in advance for any input :)
Posted Jan 27, 2019, 2:51 PM UTC
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It's chill, you can listen to it while, cooking, eating, driving, studying, sleeping... It's pretty much like a life background music.
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[deleted]
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For me, I love the mix of hip hop beats and jazz. I remember around 20 years ago taking a jazz appreciation class in college and listening to stuff like DJ Krush and Mark Farina's Mushroom Jazz compilations out of class and wishing there were more music like that. Now there is a seemingly infinite genre devoted to almost just that kind of stuff. I can find new tracks every day, it makes me so happy. There's something so beautiful about jazz over hip hop beats, especially when it gets that grainy, simplified lofi treatment.
Also, the lofi community is really awesome. It's changed a little over the years, but to a large degree it's really chill, positive, authentic folks.
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The same Mark Farina that was in Dream Machine? What would you recommend I check out by him out of curiosity? Dream Machine was one of my favourite songs that I discovered last year but I never really looked into his other stuff.
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Hey, DeanoM50810, just a quick heads-up:
curiousity is actually spelled curiosity. You can remember it by -os- in the middle.
Have a nice day!
^^^^The ^^^^parent ^^^^commenter ^^^^can ^^^^reply ^^^^with ^^^^'delete' ^^^^to ^^^^delete ^^^^this ^^^^comment.
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Hey u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
You're useless.
Have a nice day!
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[deleted]
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Yup, same one! Awesome track. His Mushroom Jazz compilations are really a nice mix of jazz and hip hop beats. I only know the first few, but I think there are eight volumes now. If you like his house stuff, San Francisco Sessions Vol. 1 is a classic, too, in my book. Really all his stuff is good, though.
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It reminds me of what is now considered old school hip hop. Dilla, a tribe called quest, Pete rock, the roots, etc. To me, lofi hip hop is just a new name for hip hop that gets mixed with chillhop. (I can enjoy chillhop, but it’s not synonymous with lofi imo)
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For some reason listening to it triggers some sort of nostalgia in me? I'm 25 this year and something about the grainy sound triggers like a sort of VHS style home movie in my head of me when I was a kid and things were simple. Crazy I know.
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For me, it has a lot to do with how I got into lofi, especially as a producer. I started out making industrial music, and moved into Drum & Bass. DnB in particular is very production-minded, where your song will sound like balls if you don't have a good mix, clean drums, the right bass frequencies, etc. etc. I found myself getting so obsessed with needing to mix and master well just to make a song that sounds good, that the joy of messing around with samples. making cool synths, and actually writing the songs really disappeared, and felt like the less important half of it.
Then, I heard some lofi (Joji's old stuff got me into it), and just immediately loved the bedroomy, emotional, "I'm just fucking around because I have something I want to express" vibe that it had. Then I started to make it myself, and completely switched over from DnB. I love that it is more about the music, and the feel of it, than if it is done "correctly" or not. Obviously, knowing how to mix etc. is a huge bonus, and I am really glad that I learned how to do it before I got into lofi, as I think the lower emphasis on that makes it really hard for new producers to learn if they come into it from the lofi end, but the "right" way to do it is a lot less clear-cut, and you can make some deliberate choices to not mix "properly" to the benefit of your sound once you know what you're going for.
So yeah, that's my reasoning. Lofi is about the music, not the production, and I love that.