1950s–1970s: Origins and influential works DIY music predates
written history, but "lo-fi" as it was understood after the 1990s can be traced to 1950s rock and roll.
AllMusic writes that the genre's recordings were made "cheaply and quickly, often on substandard equipment. In that sense, the earliest rock & roll records, most of the
garage rock of the '60s, and much of the
punk rock of the late '70s could be tagged as Lo-Fi." Although
Smiley Smile was initially met with confusion and disappointment, appreciation for the album grew after other artists released albums that reflected a similarly flawed and stripped-down quality, including
Bob Dylan's
John Wesley Harding (1967) and
the Beatles'
White Album (1968).
Pitchfork writer Mark Richardson credited
Smiley Smile with inventing "the kind of lo-fi bedroom pop that would later propel
Sebadoh,
Animal Collective, and other characters." Editors at
Rolling Stone credited
Wild Honey with originating "the idea of DIY pop". In the early 1970s, there were a few other major recording artists and bands who released music recorded with portable multi-tracking equipment; examples included
Paul McCartney,
Todd Rundgren, and
Bob Marley and the Wailers. Produced shortly after the Beatles'
break-up, the home-recorded solo release
McCartney was among the best-selling albums of 1970, but was critically panned. In 2005, after an interviewer suggested that it was possibly "one of the first big lo-fi records of its day", McCartney commented that it was "interesting" that younger fans were "looking back at something like that with some kind of respect", before adding that the album's "sort of ... hippie simplicity ... kind of resonates at this point in time, somehow."
Something/Anything? (released in February 1972) was recorded almost entirely by Rundgren alone. The album included many of his best-known songs, as well as a spoken-word track ("Intro") in which he teaches the listener about recording flaws for an
egg hunt-type game he calls "Sounds of the Studio". He used the money gained from the album's success to build a personal recording studio in New York, where he recorded the less successful 1973 follow-up
A Wizard, a True Star. In 2018,
Pitchforks Sam Sodsky noted that the "fingerprints" of
Wizard remain "evident on bedroom auteurs to this day".
Jamaican record producer
Lee "Scratch" Perry is often noted as one of few major record producers of the early to late 1970s to embrace lo-fi aesthetics and deliberately include tape distortion and recording artifacts into his productions. Commenting on Perry's low fidelity aesthetic, filmmaker
Jeremy Marre noted in his 1979 documentary
Roots Rock Reggae: "To other people's standards, the instruments may sound distorted, the balance way off. But it's just these rough edges that give
Reggae the sound they can never copy abroad." Perry's distinct production style, which throughout most of the 1970s solely utilized the recording capabilities of a consumer tape deck in his home studio, was sought out by several musicians and bands, most notably
Bob Marley and the Wailers,
Linda and Paul McCartney,
The Clash,
John Lydon,
Robert Palmer,
Simply Red,
Junior Murvin, and
The Congos, whom he worked with in his Black Ark recording studio.
Record Collectors Jamie Atkins wrote in 2018 that many lo-fi acts would be indebted to the reverb-saturated sound of the Beach Boys' 1970 song "
All I Wanna Do".
Pitchfork writer Madison Bloom crowned
Peter Ivers, a 1970s Los Angeles musician, as "the weirdo king of bedroom pop, decades before the genre existed." In 2016,
Billboard writer Joe Lynch described
David Bowie's
Hunky Dory (1971) as "pretty much the blueprint for every lo-fi indie pop album of the last 25 years", citing
Ariel Pink as a descendant. Active since 1969,
Stavely Makepeace, and their spinoff group
Lieutenant Pigeon, were described by
AllMusic's
Richie Unterberger as creating "quirky, slightly lo-fi homemade production married to simple pop songs with heavy echoes of both '50s rock & roll and British
novelty music." Michael Heatley of
Record Collector describes
Wizzard's debut album
Wizzard Brew (1973) as "lo-fi, retro
rock'n'roll".
1970s–1980s: Indie, cassette culture, and outsider music With the emergence of punk rock and
new wave in the late 1970s, some sectors of popular music began to espouse a DIY ethos that heralded a wave of
independent labels, distribution networks,
fanzines and recording studios, Lo-fi musicians and fans were predominantly white, male and middle-class, and while most of the critical discourse interested in lo-fi was based in New York or London, the musicians themselves were largely from lesser
metropolitan areas of the US. (pictured in 2011) is frequently referred to as the "godfather" of
home recording.
2010s: Lofi hip-hop In the late 2010s, a form of
downtempo music tagged as "
lofi hip-hop" or "chillhop" became popular among YouTube music streamers. It combines
hip-hop beats with elements of
chill-out. Several of these YouTube channels attracted millions of followers. The genre tends to be deliberately unpolished and features audio imperfections, distorted sound quality, and less professional audio equipment. The Japanese artist
Nujabes, often called the "godfather of lofi hip-hop", is credited with driving lo-fi's growth with his contributions to the soundtrack for the popular anime
Samurai Champloo. The 2004
MF Doom and
Madlib album
Madvillainy is regarded as a "shared touchstone" for lofi hip-hop. ==See also==