Our dear Shizuku from Whisper of the Heart has, rather curiously, become God of the Wired. Sorry, Lain — you had a good run.
I’m of course referring to Lofi Girl, the “lofi hip hop radio” channel that streams a never-ending mix of “beats to relax/study to” to 12.7 million subscribers (with 33,000 listeners tuned into the stream as of this writing). Lofi Girl, according to her official documentation, “fosters a wholesome online community of people from all around the world tuning in simultaneously to enjoy its calming and relaxing ambience.” Her lightly animated portrait is based on one of several shots of Shizuku busy at her desk in Whisper of the Heart, racking her brain for worthwhile ideas, becoming a writer. It’s a simple but gently captivating image. It fills you with determination.
Granted, I can’t say that I’ve spent a ton of time listening to the stream under the specified conditions. Back in my day, if I wanted to study, I put on Terence Blanchard’s score for Inside Man!
Last week, Hugh Garry of Formats Unpacked published a post about the basic appeal of Lofi Girl’s key signifiers, anime and hip-hop. Here I want to get into the deeper, weirder, counter-intuitive significance of both those signifiers as incorporated into the channel.
Let’s start with anime. Shizuku isn’t some random caricature. She’s one of the great teen heroines of Studio Ghibli, renowned since the 1980s for its beautifully hand-crafted works of wholesome theatrical anime. This is strange, in this context, because lo-fi hip-hop is actually rather famously associated with Adult Swim and its legendary TV anime programming block, Toonami, celebrated for its selection of action series, such as Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon1, at a time when TV anime was still securing its foothold in North America. Studio Ghibli and Adult Swim aren’t opposed, exactly — Toonami once ran A Month of Miyazaki, in fact — but generally, if you didn’t grow out of anime altogether in your teens, you’d at least grow out of My Neighbor Totoro and into Rurouni Kenshin or Cowboy Bebop via Toonami. So there’s some contrast here.
I’d originally planned to spend some time this week writing a post about the late Japanese lo-fi hip-hop pioneer, Nujabes, who co-produced the music of the popular anime series, Samurai Champloo, which Adult Swim premiered in North America in May 2005. Nujabes and Samurai Champloo were forerunners in the fusion of anime and hip-hop, via lo-fi hip-hop, in the 2000s.
This brings us back to Lofi Girl. See, Nujabes used breakbeats, samples, and scratches in a jazzy, fluttering style to create refreshing mood pieces. That’s “lo-fi hip-hop,” to a lot of people, though Nujabes reportedly rejected “lo-fi.” He wasn’t some scrappy bedroom producer! He worked with live musicians in a studio! In any case, Lofi Girl doesn’t really stream this sort of music. Lofi Girl, on her “lofi hip hop radio,” doesn’t actually play any hip-hop, lo-fi or otherwise. She wouldn’t stream anything on Metaphorical Music; the drums are too busy and the tempo is too quick. She’s all about the “refreshing mood pieces” part but not the “breakbeats, samples, and scratches” part — so, the hip-hop part — and she’s generally not substituting that latter part with some other vintage or variety of hip-hop, e.g., trap. If you listen to the channel for a couple hours, you’ll hear a constant stream of downtempo instrumentals with the slightest kicks. The music Lofi Girl plays, to my ear, generally has a lot more in common with R&B than hip-hop, so perhaps there’s a reductive outlook on black music at play here.
What gives? Why doesn’t Lofi Girl, now the face of “lo-fi hip-hop,” play any lo-fi hip-hop?! And why Shizuku? Why not Fuu?
I’m not asking these questions rhetorically. I think I’ve worked out the answers, and I think Lofi Girl makes perfect sense in an admittedly roundabout way. The “hip-hop” in “lo-fi hip-hop,” I suspect, isn’t really referring to hip-hop but rather referring to Nujabes, with the understanding that Nujabes was indeed a hip-hop artist but one who is perhaps better understood, regardless of his genre, in terms of his affect. Nujabes made “beats to study/relax to” in a sense — that’s actually a pretty accurate description of how I’d occasionally listen to Nujabes outside of watching Samurai Champloo. Nujabes made a sort of hip-hop that I’d describe as tranquil, cozy, and focused.
This — finally — brings us back to Studio Ghibli. The full reasoning goes: (1) Adult Swim and Toonami are closely associated with both anime and lo-fi hip-hop, (2) Toonami and lo-fi hip-hop are now old enough to cultivate some nostalgia for them, but (3) Studio Ghibli is the style of anime most obviously associated with nostalgia, tranquility, and coziness, so (4) Lofi Girl reconciles the imagery of the Studio Ghibli and the music of Toonami in itself, and thus embodies the time-honored fusion of hip-hop and anime in updated terms.
The term “lo-fi hip-hop,” then, is a bit like another recent subject of this newsletter, “acid jazz.” It’s a misnomer and you just have to get over it. Lofi Girl is no snob, and the sort of listener who’s big into her streams doesn’t necessarily care to gate-keep scenes or overthink the whole notion of genre. These listeners know what they’re getting even if they don’t necessarily know why it’s called what it’s called; even if the artist names, the song titles, and the music itself, as expressly samey as it is, are all subsumed into the digital mosaic that gives form to Lofi Girl, God of the Wired. No matter where you are, everyone is always connected!
I personally got into anime via Sailor Moon via Toonami.