(Auto) Ethnographic notes about DIY ethos in lofi hip hop 1

Abstract

This article explores the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos within the realm of lofi hip hop, highlighting its significance in the aesthetic and modes of listening, production, and curation. This phenomenon is particularly prevalent among urban youth who are connected to the internet but face the harsh realities of work and study. Through digital ethnography, I delve into the personal narratives of individuals who actively contribute in lofi hip hop community. Initially, I examine the DIY esthetic characteristics that manifest in the sound, visuality, and textuality of lofi hip hop. Subsequently, I analyze the DIY performativity and affectivity exhibited by listeners, bedroom producers (artists), and DJs (YouTube channel owners and playlist curators). Finally, I provide a concise autoethnographic narrative to contextualize the hypothesis that the DIY culture observed in lofi hip hop is related to the recent dynamics of capitalist realism.

Introduction

This article seeks to reflect on how the do-it-yourself (DIY) ethos emerges in the relationships of composing, listening, and curation of lofi hip hop. ² The data and considerations presented here are an excerpt from digital ethnographic research, which began in 2018 and continues in an incorporated, everyday, and embedded way with the digital world (Hine, 2000). The lofi hip hop scene is simultaneously local, translocal, and virtual due to the technologies that compress the informational time, such as the computer, cell phone, and the Internet (Guerra, 2021; Wajcman, 2014). In this sense, my role as a digital ethnographer is to map the webs that attribute meaning and significance to lofi hip hop (Ingold, 2015). I focus on the ways people make and feel the music, rather than the musical notation, as lofi hip hop is a relevant sound expressive form because of its affective, sensorial, and emotive character (Feld, 2012; Leavitt, 1996; Seeger, 2008).

The data presented here represents a cross-section of a broader study in progress. Therefore, for the purposes of this article, data from the following domains will be used: social media ethnography, integrating comments on Youtube videos; conversations in the chat of live sessions; posts and comments on Instagram and Facebook; music reviews and survey of articles, news in vlogs, blogs, newspapers (Pétonnet, 2008[1982]; Rifiotis, 2016); semistructured qualitative interview with listeners of lofi hip hop, observer-participation and auto-analysis producing the sound lofi hip hop, based on the ethos DIY (Guerra, 2017; Merriam and Tisdell, 2015).

Lastly, I present some fundamental categorizations for the discussions that will follow. First, in this article, I state that there are three social actors in lofi hip hop, namely; the listener, the bedroom producer (artist, composer), and the DJ (curator of playlists, owner of Youtube channels and lofi hip hop labels). However, the boundaries of each social actor are not delimited, for example, a listener can become a bedroom producer, through the stimulus of the network and the DIY ethos. The sample obtained demarcates such subjects as belonging to an umbrella category of young people between ages 16 and 35, mostly inhabitants of urban centers. Concerning the interviews conducted so far, there was a significant number of bedroom producers identified with the male gender, while in the case of listeners, the majority identified with the female gender, interviews with DJs have not yet been finalized.

Another important discussion is the fact that lofi hip hop is used in a contradictory and/or paradoxical way to relax, and also to study/work (Winston and Saywood, 2019). My goal here is to understand Relax and Study/Work as systems of symbolic efficacy in listening and producing lofi hip hop (Lévi-Strauss, 1975). For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, lofi hip hop was presented by the media as an antidote for anxiety and depression (Antunes, 2023; Yamaguti, 2021; Zaramela, 2020), in a scenario in which the categories “anxiety and depression” served as a support to elaborate emotions during that period of collective trauma (Cuervo and Santiago, 2020). Therefore, there are elements in the sound, visuality, and textuality of lofi hip hop that allow the use of sound regarding such functionalities, which, as I will demonstrate, is intrinsically connected to the way we produce life in contemporary times.

Lofi hip hop aesthetic

I understand lofi hip hop as an expressive form, primarily sonic, because I understand that defining it as a musical genre is to practice a certain reductionism of the dynamics of sound mixtures, and ignores its visual and textual expressiveness, which is esthetically present in the works conveyed and analyzed. I also distance myself from categories such as “micro music genre,” “niche music,” or “Internet music,” used by music critics when lofi hip hop emerged, based on the same principle. Likewise, I do not understand lofi hip hop as a branch of Hip-hop or Lo-fi, or something like “Lofizization” of Hip-Hop or “Hip-Hopzization” of Lo-Fi, because I do not identify one expressive form above the other, and I don’t support the idea that there is a unique and pure Lo-Fi and/or unique and pure Hip-Hop. Based on Feld's (2017; Feld et al., 2020) concept of sounding, ³ I define lofi hip hop as an autonomous sound expressive form but based on mixing, that is, I characterize it as the relationship between persons in cyberspace with two distinct and complex artistic traditions, Lo-Fi and Hip-Hop.

August 11, 1973, was the symbolic date chosen for the birth of Hip-Hop. Much more than a musical genre, it's a cultural movement integrated with various performative areas such as dance, visual arts, and fashion. Deeply rooted in African-American popular culture in the United States, it remains as vibrant as ever even after 50 years. Lofi hip hop is a direct result of this creative dynamism presented by Hip-Hop. For example, if DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash were the characters who started the origin myth of Hip-Hop (Vianna, 1988), in lofi hip hop, the responsibility for the origin myth would fall on producers like J Dilla and Nujabes.

In particular, lofi hip hop draws inspiration from the source of Hip-Hop and its experimental branch from the 1990s and early 2000s (D’errico, 2015: 280 in Winston and Saywood, 2019: 43). According to the individuals I interviewed, the element that represents the essence of Hip-Hop in lofi hip hop would be the beats, but in a slower tempo. Through a sound analysis of 20 songs, I discovered several esthetic elements shared with Hip-Hop, such as sampling, effects like punch, scratching, filter pass transitions, musical structures, and mixing. However, the element of rap/rhyme is most absent in lofi hip hop. Nevertheless, there is also a strong influence from the DIY spirit of Hip-Hop that continues to resonate within lofi hip hop, as we will explore further.

Regarding Lo-fi, it is necessary to highlight the studies of Schaffer (2001[1977]) when working with the opposition Hi-Fi x Lo-Fi. For the author, Lo-Fi would be the noise, the sound pollution, symbolically associated with the city, while Hi-Fi would represent the sound cleanliness, symbolically represented by life in nature/countryside. However, Feld (2012; Feld et al., 2020) questions such polarization, since the natural scenarios of the tropical forests of Papua New Guinea fit into a Lo-Fi sound spectrum, but with no such urban problems to understand that Lo-Fi scenario. Such reflections are important to understand the history of Lo-Fi terminology and its presence in sound studies, from a musicological, cultural, and social perspective.

But the Lo-Fi present in the terminology lofi hip hop is closer to the conceptualization that emerged in the mid-1980s, that was used to define musical productions made in an amateur way (DIY). The popularization of this idea came from a New York radio program called “Lo-Fi,” from the WFMU station, led by DJ William Berger, which broadcasted homemade recordings of songs, sent by amateur musicians/composers (Conter, 2016: 45). For my interviewees, the sound of noise, “crumpling paper,” “needle on vinyl,” “radio tuning,” “sea,” “win,” and “rain” were the sound characteristics associated with Lo-Fi, present in lofi hip hop.

Spencer (2005) argues that Lo-fi would be the celebration of the amateur, consequently, it would be the heart of a DIY practice, because by rescuing the idea of amateur sound characteristics, a “cultural entity” of producing with what is available is created. However, the functioning of lofi hip hop in creating low fidelity carries certain particularities, for example, different from the origin of Lo-Fi, in which cassette tapes were the technical apparatus for recording music and—theoretically—would be able to produce “organically amateur” sounds. In lofi hip hop, the advent of informational time compression technologies such as the computer, the Internet and music production software's, have provided a dynamic in which devices that can produce “high fidelity” sounds are used to produce “low fidelity” sounds.

As well pointed out by Andy Bennett (2018: 4), the rapid rise of digital recording technology from the mid-1990s and the increasing availability of high-quality digital recording equipment in the home, which revolutionized the music production process and radically altered the relationship between musicians and the music industry. The Hip-Hop was one of the first popular styles to embrace the possibilities of DIY music creation offered by digital technologies. This means that thanks to the new digital tools and resources available, Hip-Hop and rap artists were able to create, record, and produce their music independently, without relying so much on major record labels or traditional recording studios (Evans and Bayam, 2022). This phenomenon has also allowed DIY in Hip-Hop to take on different cultural guises, for example in the creation of DIY subcultures in Australia (Mitchell, 2003), in the struggles for more rights in Iran (Golpushnezhad, 2018), in the negotiation between individuality and collectivity in India (Dattatreyan and Singh, 2020), in the construction of masculinity in Austria (Reitsamer and Prokop, 2018), but also in discussions of non-normative identities (Lindsey, 2015).

In lofi hip hop the DIY of Hip-Hop, also can be seen as “deteriorating” samples to obtain an “amateurish” and/or “nostalgic” sound. For musicologists Winston and Saywood (2019: 44), this arises from the practice of experimental Hip-Hop and its “post-turnable” culture, although it differs from this tradition because lofi hip hop uses analog recording emulation techniques, adding imperfections that give the music a sense of timelessness and nostalgia. Despite the digital nature of production and online distribution, producers maintain a connection to the past by applying these analog effects, creating a unique esthetic that combines the modern with the vintage. This approach reflects the complexity of lofi hip hop's relationship with nostalgia, the past and technological evolution. Reynolds (2011: 363 in Winston and Saywood, 2019: 44) calls reverent exploitation to the Hip-Hop practice of searching for “different/rare” sounds in record stores to sample. In the case of lofi hip hop artists, a wide range of samples are used, as well as beats and sound degradation effects, as well details such as “vinyl sound.” In addition, there are also excerpts from interviews, the dialog of characters in films and/or cartoons, Bossa Nova, Jazz, MPB, and Samba songs. ⁴ In this sense, the DIY ethos manifests itself both as creativity in making music with what is available (the vastness of the Internet), and as a critical element to copyrights.

If several sound characteristics try to represent symbols of amateurism, then “home-made,” through imperfections on purpose or not, sound degradation and samples, it is also possible to draw a parallel with the visual and textual characteristics. For example, visually it is common to represent “anime” traits, Japanese cartoons, there are even “samples,” collages, gifs, and images taken from movies or cartoons, which often generates problems with copyrights. In addition, there is variety in the scenes represented, however the representation of people studying in the bedroom, lying in bed, or images of nature are common and point to the dynamics of “home,” “comfort,” and “intimacy.” Textually, like much of the writing on the Internet, there is a certain relaxation with the correct grammar of the words, the title of the playlists invites people to listen to these samples while they study/work and/or relax. Textuality it is also important, because many relationships between individuals are through the writing of comments and conversations in chats, so textuality is what configures lofi hip hop in a local, translocal, and virtual DIY scene, because it constitutes a collective way to listen and produce.

The DIY mode of listening, production, and curatorship in lofi hip hop

The DIY ethos is rooted in the idea of seeking autonomy and creating independently, outside the traditional channels of the music industry, that is, DIY is the act of creating, producing, and distributing something independently, without relying on “mainstream” institutions (Bennett, 2018; Guerra, 2017; Bennet and Guerra, 2021; Spencer, 2005). This is a characterization that finds echo in the dynamics of lofi hip hop, especially at the beginning of its history. However, today there are more capitalized and contradictory dynamics with the music industry. There are also particularities in lofi hip hop when compared to other expressive forms born on the Internet. But, first let us see the categories of subjects who make the lofi hip hop scene.

When the amateur esthetic appears in the analyzed works, it is also a reflection of the relationship between the artist and the listener, because it is possible to read the category “amateur” as a conceptual metaphor of the amateur of Hennion (2007). In other words, we understand the listener as an actor who mobilizes the web of lofi hip hop, who participates in radio chats, in the comments of playlists, in Facebook groups, who opines on the songs, reports his affections, exchanges impressions, and uses sound to study, work or relax, making him an active agent, and it's because of this agency that some listeners try to become a lofi hip hop artist, even if they have no prior musical knowledge. It is from the engagement with discovery, trial and error, that many listeners become amateur producers, since all they need to hear the sound, is all they need to compose a lofi hip hop song. As well demonstrated by a phrase I encountered in my fieldwork “That's a laptop. That's an Internet connection. Now you are a music artist” (Confidentiallofi, 2021).

For example, in a Facebook post made by a profile of the record label called Kamekameha Records at 8:15 am on June 26, 2019, in the group “LoFi Hip-Hop Community” the following question was asked: “Who is not a LoFi producer but a listener-fan?”, getting a total of 123 reactions and 117 comments (43 unique comments from different people) until July 24, 2019. A number of 12 different people (around 28% of unique comments) expressed something on the spectrum of both (i.e. being a producer and a listener) or having the desire to become a producer. Examples: “I’m trying to produce lofi”; “Me! I’m a listener but I want to produce some tracks someday lol”; “I joined this group as a fan. But I’m starting to produce”; “Both, I just started in music creation ? lofi is a music style with great potential ?”; “I’m a fan and I want to learn how to make some music.”

Also, let's analyze the following excerpt (Yamaguti, 2021):

I started producing lo-fi at the beginning of 2019. One of the reasons was that I was very interested in starting as an amateur musician. Lo-Fi Hip Hop is something very easy to do on a technical level. So, because of the low barrier of entry, that's how I got started.

I believe that the “low barrier of entry” of lofi hip hop is constituted by some factors that relate to each other. Let's see: (a) low complexity in the structure of a lofi hip hop song; (b) ability to learn how to produce musical work, through video lessons on Youtube, which implies the nonobligation of having previous musical knowledge; (c) less bureaucracy to release and distribute a song; (d) certain anonymity of the lofi hip hop artist, which gives more courage to individuals to share their music; (e) the sound characteristics of “homemade,” corroborating Paula Guerra's statement that “the DIY ethic transformed into a habitus (Bourdieu, 1989) and ethos, reflecting a transformation of the agents from cultural consumers to cultural producers” (Guerra, 2018: 244).

The bedroom producer of lofi hip hop is the artist, composer, and producer of the works that circulate through digital companies where there is performativity of the expressive form (Bacal, 2016; Benjamin, 2006). It is important to emphasize that a bedroom producer does not necessarily produce music in his bedroom, the category “bedroom” can be an esthetic fetish tool for sound production (Bacal, 2016). In addition, there is a relationship between human and nonhuman in the songwriting process (Bacal, 2012, 2015; Latour, 2012), and currently, artificial intelligence applications and websites that compose lofi hip hop songs are emerging. Furthermore, there exists a market that caters specifically to samples and timbres tailored for the lofi hip hop.

Many YouTube channel owners call themselves DJs, as they perform a curatorial function of the radios and playlists on streaming sites. The role of the DJ is to select artists and sounds to go into their live sessions (radios) or thematic playlists. They usually look for songs and artists on Soundcloud, but bedroom producers also look for them to try to get a sound into a playlist, going so far as that some artists offer money to have their songs on the radio/playlists. However, DJs usually refuse such proposals, as they see it as “bad” or that it would “distort” the meaning of lofi hip hop (Winkie, 2018; Zaramela, 2020). Some DJs choose Youtube as the digital company of choice for building their labels and channels, because, according to DJ Celsius, “Popular platforms like iTunes, Spotify and Google Music, despite their best intentions, end up putting people in a musical airlock. […] The 24/7 streams often feature music that people didn’t know they’d want to hear” (Winkie, 2018). But there are the DJs who exploit the other streaming platforms, like the duo from the College Music channel:

Jonny Laxton, 19, from Leeds and Luke Pritchard, 20, from Reading. Together, they’ve turned their radio station into a label—showcasing their artists through Spotify playlists, creating a brand that isn’t anonymous or throwaway, like the ones people often stumble across online. “We don’t want someone to find the stream and the next day not be able to find it again” says Pritchard. (Winkie, 2018)

From my observation, I consider that the most common is the use of most or all digital streaming companies for the circulation of musical work and for the development of lofi hip hop labels, playlists or radios. However, such decision demands energy, labor time and money. Let's see,

Celsius tells me that the terabytes of storage he rents on cloud servers cost around $200 to $300 a month—which means that between ad earnings and Patreon, he makes about $1500 a month. ‘It's not that lucrative for me personally,’ he says. (Winkie, 2018: n/p)

Therefore, DJs are the actors who move the money that circulates in lofi hip hop culture. In addition to monetizing channels, playlists, and radios, another way DJs raise money is when they turn the channel into a digital label (record label) and sell t-shirts and accessories of their brand, as the College Music duo and the Lofi Girl channel (formerly Chilled Cow) does. This action is a way of consolidating lofi hip hop as an independent industry. The bedroom producer gets a smaller percentage of the earnings (or none), this happens because many seek only visibility, which generates situations such as artists offering money to enter the channels of wide reach (Winkie, 2018: n/p). In the case of Brazilian channels, DJ Fábio's concern was the opposite of Pritchard's, as shown in the excerpt below, taken from the CanalTech website report called “What is lo-fi music and why did it explode during the pandemic” by Zaramela (2020):

My biggest fear when creating the radio was that producers would ask for money so I could play their music, but they didn’t even touch the subject, they were too excited about the idea! The few I asked about money said that monetizing was not the focus. (Zaramela, 2020: n/p)

Also, it is the role of the DJ to be the actor who mediates the relationship between listeners and bedroom producers. He is the one who makes the choices of sounds and artists, and maps their reverberation in the public that consumes them, and thus makes small profits from this process. Constituting a small independent scene on the Internet, for the consolidation of their work. It is important to note that bedroom producers also try to make money, usually through Bandcamp, but they can also sell beats, tones, noises and other samples, that is, the meaning of “success” for a lofi hip hop bedroom producer is to get music on a consolidated channel. But, I was able to have contact with two bedroom producers who started making lofi hip hop music in expectation of getting some financial return, as well as meeting a “record label owner” who opened a label only for lofi hip hop music, with the same intention.

The lofi hip hop scene is mostly virtual, because until recently, there were no shows or performances by artists in the “offline” world. Most social interactions and relationships take place in the digital sphere of life, so characteristics of locality and translocality are recurrent. In this way, people make and listen to lofi hip hop in a cage of the algorithmic platformisation of life. According to Srnicek (2017), a crucial characteristic of digital platforms is their reliance on “network effects.” This means that the more users a platform has the more valuable it becomes for everyone involved. Platforms are not neutral spaces but are designed with a particular agenda. They may appear as open environments for users to interact, but they embody a specific set of rules and politics. The platform owner dictates the rules for product and service development, as well as interactions within the marketplace (Srnicek, 2017: 30–32).

But when DIY appears in the lofi hip hop dynamic, it's according to Bennett's (2018) argument that in a world where more aspects of social life seem to be controlled, if not excessively regulated, DIY cultural practices persist on the outskirts, engaging in a continuous conversation with the everyday urban culture (Bennett, 2018: 11). In addition, Winston and Saywood (2019) suggest that if we consider a Deleuzian control society as one where the boundaries between institutionally regulated spaces blur, the ChilledCow lofi hip hop chat seemed to disrupt the highly monitored YouTube platform, creating a gap, even if temporary, within and between these regulated spaces. This was made possible by a degree of anonymity and interactions among strangers that carried no significant consequences. In this environment, emotional labor shifted away from work and was directed towards interpersonal care (Winston and Saywood, 2019: 50).

That's why I argue that the DIY ethos in lofi hip hop reveals itself as a “web of melancholic welcome” between subjects. This dynamic differs from other expressive forms born and reproduced on the internet, such as vaporwave or seapunk. The artists, producers and DJs are part of a generation facing the “systemic impossibility” of late capitalism, as argued by Winston and Saywood (2019), making lofi hip hop a creative and autonomous alternative for survival in contrast to a fast-paced, stratified and unequal world.

A preliminary (auto) ethnographic narrative on feeling the DIY ethos in lofi hip hop

One of the ways in which I address this complexity is through the use of an autoethnographic method, which allows me to explore my own bodily experience in lofi hip hop (Mauss, 2003; Santos, 2017; Sauthcuk and Sauthcuk, 2014). By adopting this approach, I have been able to delve deeper into how lofi hip hop fits within the framework of late capitalism, as stated in the previous point. I consider Latour's (2012) concern to fill the macro-social categories of meaning, so I ask the question: How do the subject's performativity highlight late capitalism? In attempting to answer this question, I have observed that the most appropriate characterization of the world in which lofi hip hop is situated would be capitalist realism, a concept proposed by Fisher (2020), as I will argue next.

To support this argument, I present a brief autoethnographic narrative of my “arrival in the field.” Therefore, I report that at the turn of the year 2017 to 2018, I was in a personal context full of stress, anxiety, and sadness, because I was trying to reconcile my job with my graduation; alongside this, I nurtured the personal desire to continue my studies seeking to be approved in some postgraduate program. The political, social, and economic context of Brazil, at that time aggravated, and my professional practice dealt directly with such issues. In other words, my subjectivity was undermined between the decision to comply with the demands of work that were directly related to a difficult political context, but also to complete my degree and continue my academic career. Therefore, one way to organize these confusing and diffuse elements of my subjectivity was to turn my attention to music. When I got home one day, after work and classes, I ended up finding through Youtube algorithms the livestream of Lofi Girl channel entitled “lofi hip hop radio—beats to relax/study to,” and browsing Youtube, I developed a special appreciation for the playlist N O S L E E P of the channel the bootleg boy and the album Life by the artist Jinsang, distributed by the RiseSunny channel. Listening to these sounds was like a mental rest after a long and intense day of work and study. It was in this way that lofi hip hop presented itself to me, not as an object that I would come to study, but relationally with the context in which it was embedded.

The path I traced was not a unique and special event, several points of this brief story, such as finding lofi hip hop through exhaustion from work and studies, stress, anxiety, or to be able to concentrate on work and study are reproduced by several people around the world, such as: “I started Lo-Fi a year ago, when I was in my most depressive phase, I stopped for a while after feeling better … But now whenever I feel sad, I come back…” or “I started listening to these mantras that were for concentration. But I used it so much, it was bothering me, it was boring. The video was specifically 3 hours long. I met lofi around, that was probably it, on autoplay.”

Apart from being a youth worker and student who used lofi hip hop for different purposes, the DIY lofi ethos also embraced me to regain my old passion in composing and creating music. It was in January 2018, during my vacation that the opportunity arose to travel and be partially isolated listening to a lot of lofi hip hop and other similar expressive forms. To work out the emotions of the year that had passed, I decided to make peace with music making. I was affected by posts on Facebook groups and comments on Youtube videos, in which there was encouragement for people to produce their own lofi hip hop sounds. The opportunity was given, and I decided to venture into this web, from a lofi hip hop listener I started the process of trying to become a bedroom producer.

Although I had a basic knowledge in music, when it came to music production, the process of recording, editing, mixing, and mastering a work I knew nothing, adding to this problem the fact that I was not used to composing Hip-Hop, beats or electronic music. However, I believed that the esthetics of lofi hip hop invited me to learn such sound traditions. In the beginning, I used my own laptop keyboard to compose sounds, emulating piano and building beats, based on the idea that having the correct instruments is not the main purpose. Therefore, I sought to express sounds that referred to amateur production, in which the works could be identified as produced in a home-studio. This movement was an attempt to find a certain “fidelity” in the “low fidelity” production. In other words, I highlighted noises and sound forms that evidenced the “manual” or homemade production that characterizes lofi hip hop. And it is such esthetic elements of simplicity and amateurism that generate engagement and confidence in a listener to start producing/composing. That is, to be embraced by the DIY ethos of lofi hip hop.

At the same time as this learning process was taking place, I also succeeded in building my master's project and started my postgraduate studies. Therefore, the position in which I found myself during the research, was (and is), of immersion, for I am part of the generation that I set out to study, that is, many individuals that I interviewed during these years are mirrors of my own condition. I often felt I was conducting an ethnography on the act of studying, because most of the time I was researching ethnographically the very process of doing a thesis, reading, filing, and writing texts with the sound of lofi hip hop. One of the decisions I made in the middle of the research was to record these study incursions in the field diary, functioning almost as a record of “work hours,” but also of outbursts about exhaustion, stress, and anxiety.

For example, this excerpt from the field diary:

October 15, 2022

I woke up at 7:43 am on Saturday, October 15, 2022. Another day that I wake up before the alarm clock rings [after two thousand words describing my study routine and the amount of work I need to do] I think that the path I have chosen of academic life will never allow me to rest, because of the very form that this work is, an eternal action of “theorizing about the lived”. All this distresses me, because if this is my career, what will be my future after defending the thesis?

So, the locus of my research, unlike traditional ethnographies, did not have the moment when I “went” to the field, but it was embedded, everyday, and embodied (Hine, 2000) in and by me. At the same time, lofi hip hop sound accompanied me in moments of study/work, rest, and even remote analysis sessions with my psychoanalyst, that is a constant part of my process of elaboration on the lived world. Therefore, in dialogue with Winston and Saywood's (2019) hypothesis—that lofi hip hop helps people to go through everyday life as a “contradictory and/or paradoxical” way—I have matured to the idea that the workings of this apparent contradiction are closer to a field of dispute.

Let's see, according to Fisher (2020), the contemporary cultural scene (post Berlin wall) would be submerged in an esthetic based on nostalgia. This mechanism not only covers the cultural industry, but it is also reflected in popular expressive works, as it is a consequence of the dynamics of functioning what he calls “capitalist realism.” That is, the contemporary stage of capitalism comes from the nostalgic tool to prevent subjects from imagining other socio-economic ways of producing life. In this sense, Fisher's definition of nostalgia would be close to Svetlana Boym's characterization (2001) of restorative nostalgia. On the other hand, Winston and Saywood (2019) argue that lofi hip hop would belong to Boym's (2001) conceptualization of reflexive nostalgia, because,

the distortion and aging of the sample work to position it in an imagined past that never existed, and that the very act of transparently fracturing the sample serves to evoke nostalgia in its listeners, just as Boym's (2001: 49) reflective nostalgia “cherishes shattered fragments of memory.” (Winston and Saywood, 2019: 44)

I partially agree with the authors, as I believe that the argument of a “reflexive nostalgia” can be sustained when lofi hip hop works as creating spaces of survival in the face of hypermodern neoliberal advance. But lofi hip hop playlists associated with Trump, and reports of increased productivity at work (Flores, 2021), show the restorative potential practiced by nostalgia. The nostalgia without place, time, and subject can be directed to different ends, so my interpretation of lofi hip hop is a field of disputes over its own meaning (Bourdieu, 1989). For example, the esthetic characteristics that refer to the nostalgia present in the works, are the same as those associated with DIY, “homemade,” “amateurism,” and through them, individuals can be transported to places of protection and subjective comfort, in which the sound serves both to relax and to produce more. Even in this apparent contradiction and/or paradox of music being used like a cure or poison, there are nuances of differences in its use, since the practice of music being used for work has a long tradition, prior to contemporary capitalist work dynamics, as well music for relaxation or chill out (Schaffer, 2001[1977]; Toop, 1995).

Therefore, in order to understand nostalgia as a tool that encompasses cultural productions in the contemporary stage of capitalism, I need to see lofi hip hop as a consequence of this ambivalent context, serving both in a restorative and reflective way. However, according to Fisher (2020) there are three “fractures of the capitalist realist discourse,” they would be: bureaucracy, the environmental issue, and discussions about mental health, it is through these debates that bridges could be built to different futures than the one experienced today. In this sense, I reinforce the argument of Winston and Saywood (2019), that the reflexive character of nostalgia is predominant in lofi hip hop, because it is fundamental to create a support web between subjects from different places in the world, in what I currently call the “web of melancholic welcome,” it is the moment that the sensitive discourse on depression, anxiety, stress, among others arise for people to connect and support themselves collectively. So, I see lofi hip hop as an artistic tool inside the discussions about the mental health fracture discourse of the working/students youth living in urban centers.

Final remarks

In this article, I sought to present the importance of the DIY ethos for the existence of lofi hip hop as an expressive form. If in esthetics it emerges from the relationship between two distinct sound traditions, on the other hand, in the ways of listening and producing, it is performed by urban youth connected to the Internet, who show through sensitive discourses a social scenario of deep economic, social, and emotional helplessness. The DIY esthetic of lofi hip hop transports them, through nostalgic affection, to places of emotional security, without time and without place, to navigate through the days. Either to escape from life's difficulties, when they activate the Relax system, or to face them by serving as a means of concentration, focus, when activating the Study/Work system.

But it is in the moments of collective listening, such as the lofi hip hop radios that work 24/7 with their chat's next to the videos, or in the comments of playlists, or in forums and Facebook communities that a “web of melancholic welcome” is built, that is, a DIY cultural scene of lofi hip hop, similar to Guerra (2018: 242) identified, “the existence of affective communities in Porto and Lisbon, based on musical, esthetic and social affinities—but not that of a social movement.” It's not something organized, but as I observed in a chat on Lofi Girl's “lofi hip hop radio—beats to relax/study to” it said “this is the healthiest place on the internet.” Where there is lofi hip hop it is common to come across comments like this:

ChilledCow has entered the chat; insomnia has left the chat; anxiety has left the chat; depression has left the shet; stress has left the chat; anger has left the chat; negativity has left the chat;

100 Reasons why you shouldn’t commit suicide. 1. We would miss you.” […] “100. But, the final and most important one is, just, being able to experience life. Because even if your life doesn’t seem so great right now, anything could happen.

At the moment I became a listener and ventured into the production of sounds inspired by lofi hip hop, I could feel such DIY affectivity taking over my body and I was perceiving in a dialectical way the slice of society that I belonged to: Another young urban victim of economic insecurity, and subjected to quasi-intermittent hours of work and study. Therefore, the DIY ethos in lofi hip hop reveals the precariousness of “a generation that was born into this dotted, ahistorical, anti-mnemonic culture—a generation for whom time has always been cut and packaged in digital micro-slices” (Fisher, 2020: 48). So, it is necessary to find security through an indeterminate nostalgia, which can be reflexive or restorative (Boym, 2001), and sometimes lofi hip hop is that place.