In Defense of Background Music

Hi friends,

Recently I saw a video posted by my friend Alfred Darlington, who you may know through his music as Daedelus. In my view, Alfred is one of the pioneers of Los Angeles’ beat scene and someone who helped expand the possibilities of how electronic music could be performed live. But that’s a story for another time.

The video was about lo-fi beats and the world of Lofi Girl, and it got me thinking about how we consume music now. Not everything we listen to asks for our full attention. Sometimes music accompanies work, reading, cooking, driving, or simply moving through the day.

At KCRW, we’ve been experimenting with some of those ideas through Play This in the Background While You Do Stuff, including long-form mixes on YouTube and the new YouTube Stations feature. The challenge is how to serve different modes of listening while still keeping discovery, intention, and human curation at the center.

So I asked Alfred to take the question from here.

– Ale

A few words in defense of lo-fi

By Alfred Darlington aka Daedelus

If ambient is music minus attention, then lo-fi is backgrounded beats that get you through your most mundane moments. This could easily describe just about all listening, and yet with lo-fi, you have a genre that attempts a perfected form — it's manufactured nostalgia meets unobtrusive head-nod at the nexus of forgettable melody. It's famously organized in YouTube playlists that invite you to “chill to,” however you deem it so.

This itself is not novel; decades before, Muzak provided canned productions that stores could purchase to give an infectious hum to commerced dollars. The rise of the middle class was soundtracked in malls, hold music, and indeed, airports. So on one level, lo-fi is just the next iteration for a hungry internet, but why then the dithering of bit rates and inclusion of boom bap? Is it that same hazy lens we listen through that's giving us just enough plausible deniability of awareness?

The real kicker is: why is this so popular on streaming services if few could even recall a singular producer to seek out? It’s not as if there aren’t icons of beatmaking that influenced this aesthetic. Nujabes, Madlib, late-era Dilla — on their records that omit emcees — are notable. Each probably had too much grit to be considered "lo-fi," but still provided an inkling of possibility. So the gentrification of Hip Hop is another barb ascribed to lo-fi.

Ok so what then is Hi-Fi music? That’s the past’s future. A next big sales pitch for an audiophile’s latest gizmo. It can’t be fully achieved because it's always just a bit out of reach — aspirational stuff. Lo-fi takes the opposite approach and makes those years of AM/FM radio tuning, 8-bit gaming consoles, and Adult Swim bumps an included part of the listening experience. Brian Eno famously said, “Whatever you find weird, ugly, uncomfortable, and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature...” And the world is now full of uncanny valleys we're constantly hiking through. What better music to match?

Now Spinning On My Turntable
The Koreatown Oddity - Purdy

The Koreatown Oddity has always had a way of making the absurd feel strangely profound. On Purdy, his fourth album for Stones Throw, everyday observations become little philosophical worlds: lawn care, condiment rivalries, a knight heading into battle, and the shifting perspective that comes with family life.

At the center is the idea of being both inside the picture and standing outside of it, trying to understand your own life while you’re still living it. The beats remain dusty and playful, the humor wonderfully specific, but there’s more reflection underneath it all.

He was also recently in the KCRW studio with Wyldeflower for her fifth radioversary. Listen here.

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