how lofi hip-hop took over youtube

I read through a lot of the comments on my videos. I'll usually heart the ones that make me laugh or just stick out to me in some way. A lot of them are really nice and thoughtful; others are just weird. But whether it's good or bad, insightful or just a meme, there's always someone asking what's the song or where do you get your music. Almost all of the time, it's a lowii hip-hop song—songs that have no lyrics, very few instruments, and a drum pattern that repeats for minutes on end.

I have a TV in my bedroom; I bought it like a year ago, and I honestly don't even use it that much. You'd probably expect me to be watching movies or Netflix shows or anything else on it, and I do sometimes. But most of the time, I'm one of those 21,000 people listening in whenever I'm working, gaming, or just relaxing. It's on in the background. Once I get out of the zone and quit focusing on whatever it is I'm doing, Loi is there.

People remix quite literally anything they want and turn it into Loi. It can completely switch up the vibe of any [Music] track. I mean, it's as you would expect: slowed down, repetitive, but unique in a way. It can turn music that you hate into music that you love. So what is it about this kind of music that grabs so much attention but seemingly blends into the background of any situation? What is it about these repetitive beats that have introduced millions of people to a new genre of music they didn't even know existed in the first place?

This is how Loi hip hop took over in the 1980s. People started using the word Loi to describe the style music: Low Fidelity, a style that's lower in quality than the mainstream music you'd more often hear. Music that is degraded, damaged, scratched—music that is perfectly imperfect. Now, whether or not this is on purpose depends on the artist.

Compare this to today's music, or Hi-Fi, which is expertly mixed and mastered to produce the best sound imaginable. It doesn't matter if you recorded it in a million-dollar studio or just in your bedroom on a rainy day; no one is expecting Loi to sound professional. It's supposed to sound raw.

Lowii hip-hop sound stems from the '90s when artists tended to rely heavily on samples from even earlier music. Sampling is basically just taking a small snippet of a song from another artist and using it in your own way. It sounds like stealing, but it isn't. Okay, it really is, but people take samples all the time and flip them in ways that don't even sound remotely like the original. It all depends on how you slice them; it depends on which pieces you take and rearrange to create a completely different sound.

A lot of modern songs are filled with samples. Juice WRLD's "Lucid Dreams," that was produced by Nick Mira, actually sampled Sting's "Shape of My Heart" from 1993, and then they got sued. But it shows that sampling is still very relevant today. You'll usually find any Loi song, stream, or mix accompanied by some depressing looping anime GIF with a VHS overlay. It's as if they're trying to invoke some kind of nostalgia in you, but this makes sense.

Most people tend to have some feelings of nostalgia while listening to Loi, and it's hard to explain. It's like your brain is putting you into a trance and forcing you to live a non-existent memory, but at the same time giving you a sense of a future that hasn't happened yet. I actually asked a bunch of my friends and just random people if they listen to Loi, and surprisingly most of them actually did. But when I ask them why or what they like about it, they couldn't really tell me, and that's pretty cool.

See, with most genres, you can point out the lyrics or certain instruments or something, but here it's different. I found that people that are into heavy metal, rap, rock—people that are interested in basically every genre there is—can somehow find an interest in this. Whether you're young or old, it fits somehow.

In Loi, there's tons of references and samples from jazz and soul artists. That's the basis of most songs you'll hear today. It encompasses and forms the sound of Loi. It's meant to sound like you're listening to a hip-hop instrumental through an old speaker. The samples come from...