Why We Can't Get Enough of the Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Channel
The Youtube phenomenon- “lofi hip-hop channel”
By Poops
Look around the moment you find yourself in. Take it in through the senses you’ve been gifted. What colours affect you, what smells engage you, what textures influence your comfort, what flavours linger on your palate, and what tones float like ghosts through your environment?
Survey the space you’re inhabiting like an alien on an expedition of sensual discovery. How much of it is intentional, how much information is meeting and culturing and changing in the air that surrounds you? Such are the players in the orchestra of sophisticated modern life. And your awareness is the maestro. You unfold the laptop, scroll down the screen, tap on the button, and you curate a moment inside of a space for a purpose. From alarms to major chords, your ears lead you through this subtle, yet primal ritual. Sound vibrations connect directly to our limbic system which pens prescriptions to the pharmacy in our brains, which releases, without the direct threat of pain, a whole stock room of chemicals designed to move us.
So, what’s your flavour?
In this post-modern age, people earn their wage inside of a screen. A portal to the great technological hive mind. Find more sounds than twelve lifetimes could hear. But the caveat is that you have to choose. Choose a station, choose curation, choose randomization, pick something. Create a cathedral that bends the senses to the task at hand. Sounds that support, rhythms that coat the metronome moving your work forward.
Might I recommend dark chocolate drums, swollen Rhodes chords, and a swing so ingrained in our mass consciousness that we’ve spent more time with it than in the aria that is our mother’s own voice. All for the love of hip hop. But we’re cosmopolitan listeners, raised gems sampled from the underground. We need to be the orators, turning our work into sharp soliloquies on top of warm, downtempo, urban hymns. I need the regional sale manager’s head nodding to this quarterly report like he’s hearing Dilla post-sensimilla. Since problems and solutions belong to each other, enter the Youtube channel: “lofi hip hop radio” – beats to study/relax to, perpetrated by user-Chilled Cow.
Nothing creates this space better than this modern interpolation of elevator muzak. Vibing with tens of thousands of other listeners, it creates a church service that gets the business done. Nothing too abrasive, confrontational, or artificial. Just a Zen garden of expertly selected beats, easy fades, and calm atmospheric tones. The channel was founded in 2015 as a platform to celebrate the work of under-recognized producers and has grown into an inclusive monastery sitting at 3.3 million pupils strong.
The Lo-Fi Hip Hop Youtube channel is simply sound therapy. A no-barrier entry into a fertile space. No words save your words. No distraction, just a passive action. A soft soundtrack to wherever you’re at. And that’s the beauty of it, a soundscape just for you and whatever wave you started by clicking play.