J Dilla and Lo-Fi Hip Hop
Lo-fi hip hop is a newer genre that continues to grow in exposure and popularity, but what genres and artists contributed to its inception?
Written and illustrated by Mark Yoder
Have you ever felt the urge to chill/study/relax but you couldn’t quite find the right music to accompany you? Lo-fi hip hop might just be exactly what you're looking for. This relatively new genre has been growing in popularity due to its success on websites like SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and various 24 hour youtube live streams that feature it as the perfect genre for soothing the mind.
Although the term “lo-fi hip hop” is fairly new, this style has been around since the late ‘80s. It used to be called jazz rap and was pioneered by artists such as A Tribe Called Quest, Digable Planets, and De La Soul. Its name and signature sound are the result of chopping up old jazz records to create a loop. The producer would then put some drums under that loop for someone to rap over.
Although he wasn’t the first, J Dilla is considered to be the most influential to make this type of music. J Dilla was a master of minimalism, creating compelling and hypnotic beats using only an MPC 3000 (a device that stores and sequences samples) loaded with a few different drum sounds and four bars from an obscure ‘60s record. He was known for using an equalizer to filter out the high frequencies of a sound, giving everything a muted quality and ensuring that each noise fit in to its perfect pocket of frequency. Another notable technique J Dilla employed was the way he played the drums. He created off-kilter swings and grooves instead of making everything fall perfectly on the beat, something akin to famous jazz drummers that gives his beats a human quality.
He became very popular with musicians far and wide who begged to work with him. He even started releasing his beats by themselves without anyone rapping or singing over them, with the albums Vol. 2: Vintage (a.k.a. The Official Jay Dee Instrumental Series Vol. 2: Vintage). Tragically, his time was cut short by lupus but he continued making beats in his hospital bed before his death. Because he couldn’t leave his bed, he made the beats out of records that he got friends and family to bring him. He released his final album, Donuts, on December 7 and died only three days later. Unfortunately, he never got to see its reception or just how vast his influence would become over the next decades.
The amount that hip hop producers that look up to J Dilla is unquantifiable. His work has inspired everyone from underground artists like Flying Lotus and Knxwledge to mainstream acts like Kanye West and Pharrell. Most noticeably influenced is the genre of lo-fi hip hop which is categorized by two things: being soothing and bringing a sense of nostalgia. The first is being easy to listen to, coming from downtempo, repetitive, and minimal sounds paired with jazz samples. The second is a nostalgia is created through the use of samples from old records and movies, and sound processing.
Like in J Dilla’s music, the sound is processed to remove higher frequencies and leave the signature muted sound, creating a low fidelity, or lo-fi style. Lo-fi producers also warp the sound and add effects like record scratching for a grimier tone. This evokes a nostalgic feeling, emulating the same crude methods of beatmakers from ‘90s, even if the track was made on a 19-year-old on a MacBook.
Image courtesy of Vice
The visual aesthetic accompanying lo-fi beats is often in anime style as seen with the famous “girl studying” cartoon on the most popular lo-fi YouTube channel, ChilledCow. The connection between anime and lo-fi beats stems from various animes featuring beats from J Dilla and other similar producers like Japanese DJ Nujabes. This is partially what made the internet so obsessed with emulating this sound — the internet loves anime.
If you listen to J Dilla’s beats and then tune into a popular lo-fi hip hop stream, the connection is fairly clear: The mellow sounds roughly mixed together in a repetitive but hypnotic way and the embrace of rhythmic and sonic flaws to create a distinctly human sound are distinctly J Dilla. He pioneered a blueprint, showing how a few simple ingredients could go a long way.