Adventures in Lo-Fi
A tribute to hip hop and bossa nova
When I heard “Passing Me By” in 1992, I understood the lo-fi aesthetic in the crackling needle and distorted, ghostly organ sample from Quincy Jones’ “Summer in the City”. The saxophone precursor to the chorus also introduced me to a more sophisticated rap-jazz fusion. I still remember the day I bought the crazy fabulous Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde — one of my first CDs rather than cassettes — as a young teen in a big record store out of town.
Lo-fi used to broadly refer to any kind of music that had a quality of imperfection or a deliberately dissonant layer that added a richness to the soundscape. It came to be associated with DIY and indie “bedroom music” but had been employed in big studio sounds of artists like the Beach Boys and now, a newer genre of hip hop experimenting with jazz elements in an atmospheric way for YouTubers looking for a calming point of stillness in a chaotic world.
It is easy to make the mistake of homogenizing jazz and hip hop into “chill listening” just as bossa nova evolved, watered down, as it made waves through the US. But bossa nova was an aesthetic revolution that did not aim to create “lifestyle music” any more than lo-fi, which incorporates deliberate, idiosyncratic elements such as a noisy recording quality, or a break of dissonance such as a non-musical sound…
