If we are looking for evidence that the algorithmic machine agents that we spend so much time with on social platforms are modifying our behavior and taste, look at the emergence of the ‘lofi hiphop beats to study to’ sub-genre. In New York city about 2 years ago when I was teaching a Unity class, I had a young twenty something student tell me that this was his new favorite genre of music. This is not a musical subculture that exists offline as far as I’m aware, although I am nowadays probably a little too disconnected to detect it if it were. Instead it seems to be a genre which has arisen in response to two phenomena: the need for contemporary feeling background music (maybe we could rename the genre nu-elevator?) and YouTube search engine optimization.
If we peruse this category on YouTube we find a myriad of clips with tasteful short looping anime animations of someone relaxing or studying, a cat looking out the window and a girl with headphones on, along with a few hours of non-descript, smooth and melodic instrumental hiphop beats. The music is mid-90s hiphop with the edges and serial numbers filed off, buffed and massaged to a warm shine. No vocals, no samples, no black or latino people in sight and instead a long smooth sequence of anonymous pianos, pads and boom bap beats. All very cozy and non-threatening. Some of the rhythms flirt with a post-Dilla, post-LA-beat-scene off kilter swing but never venture far enough into rhythmic edginess for you to notice. Samples of Black American soul, funk or jazz music (or any samples besides drum hits, to my ears) are absent. Ahistorical smoothening in which vaseline is rubbed on the lens until everything is a pleasant blur.
Fundamentally the contemporary boom-bap make-hiphop-90s-again movement within the broader contemporary hiphop scene is a reactionary and conservative movement in which one hearkens back to a golden age in which hiphop was artistic, lyrics were meaningful and everyone took everything VERY seriously. In fact this imagined golden era 90s never existed, I was there in New York as a teenager and instead we were listening to a lot of weird stuff like the Fu-schnickens rapping backwards, Nice and Smooth and their often non-sensical sing-rapping (which I love endlessly) along with our Mobb Deep, Wu-Tang, Public Enemy and Gang Starr. The imagined 90s is particularly persistent here in Europe in which serious minded young whites impose their ‘modernist artist’ ethos on the blueprint of rap and frown disapprovingly at a great deal of what made the culture so vivid, playful, experimental and full of joy and energy. While the main-line of hiphop culture has moved on to the decadent and woozy autotuned exclamations of Young Thug and Travis Scott, ‘Lofi hiphop Beats to Relax/Study to’ emerges as a pale and ghostly SEO and AI empowered similacrum of a past moment in the culture. Engaging with an idea of ‘hiphop’ so far removed from contemporary black American aesthetics is safe, since the black people in question are now in the distant and respectable past, or even more conveniently forgotten entirely. We are provided with a view of what might have happened if PM Dawn had emerged as the dominant cultural force of that era of rap, and ushered in 30 years of toothless, denatured new age boom-bappifying.
Note: I mean no disrespect to PM Dawn, who were great, and a great example of how much weird stuff was actually going on in NY rap in the 90s.
