Lofi study beats are my long-standing guilty pleasure. I know it’s wrong to enjoy these chill streams. So why can’t I stop listening to them?
“Would you turn your fish-tank music down a bit?” my wife demanded, without turning to look at me.
Up until that point we had both been very content, working away in the same room, in private digital worlds. But the noise from my laptop had finally upset that delicately balanced ecosystem.
It was the sound of my guilty pleasure: ‘lofi beats to study to’
Or, as of that moment and forever more: ‘fish-tank music.’
Her newly coined phrase brought to mind another musical definition I’d recently encountered. The subject was Madonna’s 1986 synthpop ballad, ‘Live To Tell’ and the impromptu description was equally perfect.
Hearing that song for the first time on a car stereo, a teenage listener apparently exclaimed: “Yo, it’s like planetarium music.”
If ‘Live To Tell’ is planetarium music – memorable, epochal, built to fill an auditorium – then it seems entirely fitting that Lofi Study Beats is aquarium music – forgettable, ephemeral, built to fill a modest glass box.
Anatomy of Aquarium Chill
Pitchfork memorably described Lofi Study Beats (also known as Lofi Hip Hop) as “the musical equivalent of a white-noise coloring book.”
The colour palette is elementary; any long-time listener can quickly identify the scènes à faire of the genre. These are, in no particular order:
- tinny downtempo beats
- muffled piano hooks
- attenuated guitar cameos
- vinyl/tape distortion
- odd, anti-melodic pauses
- watery, ambient atmospherics
- an absence of discernable vocals.
Every track has a mellow, smudgy feel to it – a scuffed, vintage vibe, like something exhumed from a promotional VHS (without the sinister John Carpenter vibes that more accomplished artists have leaned into).
On these streams, you rarely hear a melody you want to Shazam or add to a playlist because it’s so difficult to discern one tune from another.
The point is to be suspended in a comforting limbo
Occasionally something vaguely familiar will surface from the murk – a hint of the descending keyboard phrase from The Cure’s ‘Close to Me,’ a chord progression reminiscent of Maroon 5’s ‘Memories’ – but these traces dissolve instantaneously, never developing into something meaningful enough to trouble the lawyers.
The point, apparently, is to be suspended in a comforting limbo, a nostalgic place where it’s always 1am and another half hour of web browsing still seems preferable to sleep.
Fear of the live chat
This aural experience is backed up by the images accompanying the streams. These are usually solitary, twilight tableaux rendered in anime style – fairy lights, a laptop, a mug, a faithful pet. ChilledCow’s Lofi Girl constitutes the genre’s platonic ideal.
Charming as these images are, any moment where the video isn’t expanded to full-screen mode can quickly create a sensation of uneasy conspicuity in viewers over the age of 40.
I’ve never so much as commented on a YouTube video, but one glance at the live chat on the right-hand side of the screen is enough to create a feeling of guilt by association.
I’m not studying and I sure as hell don’t know how to relax.
An infinite stream of frantic juvenilia – emojis, typos, non sequiturs – cascades past and, even for the passive bystander, a self-conscious ‘Fellow Kids’ vibe starts to percolate in the back of the mind.
What am I doing here, sharing in the enjoyment of these beats for study and chill? I’m working, not studying, and I sure as hell don’t know how to relax.
2001: a lounge odyssey
Awkwardness aside, I love the theory that the popularity of the genre’s inseparable visuals can be traced to a nostalgic fondness for Adult Swim bumpers.
I remain obsessed with the network’s original 2001 bumpers, which were soundtracked by D-Code’s muscular (and decidedly non-chill) ‘Dust Devil.’
In fact, my burgeoning love for lofi beats more or less coincided with Adult Swim’s debut.
In early December 2001 I was in a record store in Chicago, using a CD listening station to sample a new compilation called Future Lounge Vol 3.
The first track, ‘Reincarnation’ by Pablo, sounded sublime on the over-ear headphones: instantly, a sultry piano loop kicked in, cresting on a warm bassline and a shimmying tambourine, before being joined by a swooning trumpet and, later, the repeated flourish of a Philly Soul orchestral sample.
I bought the CD more or less on the strength of that tune, and the promising vibe of a few other tracks. I almost certainly listened to the album while studying.
The album didn’t quite feel like chillout (about which I was never particularly enthusiastic) and the liner notes touted a potpourri of genres: “downbeat – jazz – latin – deep house – nufunk – off beat.”
Over the next decade I never came across a sustained source for those indistinct elements that I liked the most: that nostalgic, loungey quality.
Smash cut to January 2018 when, thanks to a podcast recommendation, I came across the Chillhop channel (a more melodically inclined cousin of the Lofi Girl channel).
My search for lofi vibes was over – now there was an inexhaustible supply of vague, saudade-inducing beats to add texture to any domestic setting.
Downbeat on downtempo
Of course, you can’t ‘scale’ anything, let alone a musical genre, without losing something. Pitchfork’s indictment describes lofi study beats as “what happens when a generation raised on mood-based playlists definitively stops caring about what it listens to.”
In that phrase you can hear the combination of weary disdain and existential dread that is unique to the imperilled tastemaker.
I should know: I can remember the moment in the mid-2000s when the Web 2.0 buzz around citizen journalism started to become difficult for credentialed professionals to ignore. Why should we even bother? It turns out you guys will consume anything as long as it’s easy to digest.
Of course, while rejecting the lofi study genre tout court, the same publication can laud Saint Etienne’s ‘Pond House’ at length for apparently similar traits: “The point is the vibe, an act of imagination in remembering downtempo radio pop as a mix of capitalist blissout and PTSD numbness.” Hmmmm.
This is the difference between being blissed-out and zoned-out
Well, Pond House wouldn’t sound out of place on a lofi chill stream, but you’d certainly prick up your ears when it came on. You might even feel curious enough to add it to a playlist.
It’s here we find the thread-fine difference between an artist making something intentionally and an artist (or an algorithm) generating something efficiently; for the listener, it comes down to the difference being blissed-out and zoned-out.
As in so many spheres of modern human culture, the connoisseurs must pray that there’ll alway be a place for music, made by humans, that warrants genuine close listening. I hope so, for one. I’ll always remember the joy of discovery when I pulled on those headphones in Chicago two decades ago.
But I’m not really doing my part these days. Like social media, ‘fish-tank music’ is something I’m opposed to on principle but can’t seem to stay away from for longer than a day or two. I know I shouldn’t enjoy it, but I do.
I’m listening to it as I write this.
