Bas Van Leeuwen

If we had to decide what the soundtrack of the post-2010 Internet was, lo-fi would be the only reasonable answer. Since the terms “lo-fi hip-hop” and “chillhop” started circulating more than a decade ago, the genre has undergone quite the metamorphosis. What was once a score for the geekiest places on the web—spread by young kids in the form of amateur mixtapes with anime-inspired art—became a mainstream sensation that even Will Smith and Disney tried to exploit at one point. Between these two points in time, the history of lo-fi is far from linear, but it’s easy to pinpoint its protagonists. Without a shadow of a doubt, one of them is Chillhop. For anyone remotely familiar with lo-fi music, Chillhop and its iconic Raccoon mascot are essentially synonymou...