A Crisis or a Boring Change?
Thinking about “lo-fi music” in tandem with neoliberalism
“Lo-fi” has grown to denote two separate genres — 90’s indie rock bands like Pavement and Sebadoh; more recently, the infamous “beats to relax/study to” hip-hop stream on YouTube — but some recent essays demonstrate how the genres might not be so different after all, as neoliberal power dynamics are intrinsic to both. In the LARB, author/professor Peter Coviello reflects on the political insouciance of Pavement’s Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain in light of the album’s 25th anniversary. And over at the New Yorker, Amanda Petrusich writes an indictment “Against Chill”: that is, the “non-distracting study music” of the mentioned YouTube channel, which configures art “as a tool for productivity — and then, when the work is finally done, as a tool for coming down from the work.”
8th grade/freshman year of high school, I loved the shit out of Pavement and so many other Pitchfork-canon acts (Neutral Milk Hotel, Flaming Lips, Built to Spill, etc etc), and I always presumed that to be “indie” meant to automatically be against the Pop Music Industrial Complex that churns out vapid radio hits all about the same two or three palatable topics (heartbreak, love, dancefloors). But I’ve gradually gotten the sense that indie’s apathy in fact makes the genre conducive to mainstream pop — so now you’ve got algorithm-core acts like Clairo and Rex Orange County garnering attention from major labels and making Big Bucks from singing about the same subject matter ad nauseam: feeling kind of bored and heartbroken all the time. It’s now more viable than ever to perform jadedness, while making sure to neither analyze nor acknowledge solutions to circumventing such jadedness — and this trend harkens back to the apathy which Pavement cultivated a quarter-century ago. Listening to the band’s track “Unfair,” Coviello hears “an altogether comprehensive evocation of the 22-year-old I was when it first found me.” He continues:
[…] He is a person who, riding the waves of ’90s boom and bust, and keenly mistrustful though indeed he was of pallid Clintonite optimism, could nevertheless have said remarkably little about the real antagonism of the political, or about the real scale of the toll of resource extraction under the guise of liberal enfranchisement […] He did not yet know that an ironizing ambivalence about the empire of liberalism was in fact internal to liberalism’s governing operations, and not its critical outside.
I don’t really listen to instrumental hip-hop but if I were to, I’d rather listen to the real thing — the Brainfeeder, Warp, and Ghostly producers that “beats to relax/study to” is lamely ripping off. Petrusich describes the channel as purveying an evolved form of Muzak, which is the stock, easy-listening music that used to play in elevators and shopping centers. This new “Muzak” — an endless stream of groggy, hazy-sounding tracks by nondescript Soundcloud producers — is now more utilitarian since it’s meant to stimulate listeners into working (rather than just function as a soundtrack), which makes the channel’s claim that it can simultaneously be relaxing come across as dubious. Through this neoliberal framework, wherein music cannot be music alone and must be indirectly “monetized” as a means for productivity, listeners have been systematically disengaged from the art object. As Petrusich concludes:
It makes sense that, in 2019, as we grow collectively more uncomfortable with our own quiet, inefficient sentience, we have also come to neglect the more contemplative pursuits, including mindful listening, listening for pleasure, listening to be challenged, and even listening to have a very good time while doing nothing else at all.
Lo-fi production is deceptive since it communicates a fiction of thriftiness and modesty, when really it’s a passive method for disseminating and inculcating nihilistic disengagement on as vast a scale as possible: the internet. By the firms and other entities that propagate lo-fi music, we’re essentially told to think the world is so fucked and we’ve got too much on our minds to reckon with it; that all we can do is work hard at our jobs and hope to make it as chill an experience as possible. It’s a lethargic worldview that’s both prevalent and full of bullshit.
