An Exploration of Lo-fi Hip-hop, Pt I: From Shoegaze and Dreampop to Vaporwave

Will the anime girl ever finish studying? And where was the lo-fi hip-hop scene before she began?

Yuki of Studio Chizu’s “Wolf Children” (2012), the original anime girl of lo-fi hip-hop

While the studying anime girl is the face of lo-fi hip-hop, the first lo-fi hip-hop livestream I clicked on displayed a soft pink sakura tree growing on the brink of a hazy cliff over an ocean. A whispering wind rocked sakura petals across the screen and lilting sounds of lo-fi hip-hop played in the background. I was alone in my apartment, and the space seemed too big to fill with only music. So I turned to the lo-fi livestreams pushed by YouTube, easily supplementing audio with visuals.

That was two years ago. Since then, the lo-fi hip-hop scene has boomed. The anime girl is still studying. The sakura tree seems to be growing enough cherry blossoms to continuously release them to the wind. And the streams are still live.

But if you’re trying to Google the history of lo-fi hip-hop — or more importantly, what lo-fi hip-hop is — good luck. The genre is so broad and the community so wide that even those within it disagree over what constitutes lo-fi hip-hop. Depending on who you ask, pioneers of the genre may come from alt-rock, hip-hop or electronica scenes. Wikipedia redirects lo-fi hip-hop to chill-out…