This new iteration of lo-fi hip-hop has allowed for some semblance of peace while studying for the SATs or just smoking a blunt on a Saturday afternoon. Now more than ever, with the world at our fingertips, and the ability to judge and be judged based on looks and activities available at the press of an app, people just want to forget about the bullshit. So, why are these remixes so popular? A big part of it, obviously, is the infinite teenage desire to chill. It’s a new take on rap, where textures are favored over lyrics, where melodies pop while ideas are subdued beneath layers of haze. Zeuz has parlayed it into more traditionally legitimate work, with an official remix included in Lil Nas X’s “Montero” rollout. Once Syn had an adequate lexicon to draw from, he was able to branch off in his own directions, like on his “Flaws and Sins” Juice WRLD remix.īoth Syn and Zeuz have earned reputations for remixing rap songs instead of creating originals. The best way to learn is to study those who came before you, to memorize their moves, and learn why the things they do work. From there, I evolved.” This sentiment shows how lo-fi hip-hop remix culture isn’t different from any other genre, really, aside from the fact that it exists almost entirely on the internet. So I’m like, ‘Damn, I could try this.’ I started by copying his ideas because they were good ass ideas. I got a few other friends who are pretty big in lo-fi. “I was like, ‘Damn, this is sick.’ So I just started listening to some lo-fi on Spotify. “He was actually one of the big reasons I got into lo-fi because I was just scrolling through YouTube and I saw one of his remixes,” he says. Syn, for his part, was introduced to the world of lo-fi hip-hop thanks to Zeuz. At first I couldn’t comprehend getting that many views.” Zeuz currently boasts 388,000 YouTube subscribers, and his video for “Ransom,” which was uploaded in July of 2019, has gained over 4 million views. “I switched to lo-fi and I started blowing up even more because people went crazy for my remixes of “Shotta Flow” and “Ransom.” I was just like, ‘Yo, I really love doing this. “I started blowing up because of these meme videos I was doing,” explains Zeuz. The community of lo-fi hip-hop beatmakers and connoisseurs have created a world based on equality and open source lessons. One thing both Syn and Zeuz explain is how few barriers to entry there were to get into the genre. Around freshman year, I finally started listening to hip-hop and I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool.’ A year goes by and I’m like, ‘Oh, let me try making this.’ I just started making it from there.” “I was not into hip-hop at all when I was growing up,” he says. Syn Beats was an EDM kid before he got more into rap music as a high school freshman. It’s turned high school students into superstars, and two of the producers who are flourishing in the YouTube lo-fi hip-hop remix community, Zeuz Makes Music and Syn Beats, have demonstrated just how popular the genre has become.īoth artists came to the genre in unexpected ways. Tools can be purchased for cheap, or found on not-quite-legal areas of the internet. Lessons are all over the web and they’re readily available to anyone with internet access. Quite simply, it’s easier than ever to record music. This evolution has been slow but steady, and the emergence of the genre in its current iteration has as much to do with democracy and a level playing field as it does with musical trends and styles. That remains the defining link between the original forms of lo-fi hip-hop music and the latest phenomenon, particularly the subsect of “Beats to study to/Beats to chill to” that are dominating YouTube. While the sound from Dilla to now has changed immensely, the ethics of the style has stayed the same. Those producers pulled from the recording methods of jazz players, which in turn, has had an outsized effect on the creation of lo-fi hip-hop. Beatmakers like J Dilla, Nujabes, and Madlib brought the raw feeling of lo-fi indie rock music to rap production, favoring unmanipulated live-sounding instrumentation instead of the glossy boom-bap that was becoming more popular at the time. In the beginning, it was purely an aesthetic choice. Like all mutating scenes, the lo-fi movement in hip-hop began as something far different from what it has become.
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