The Girl And The Raccoon
Many years ago, my podcast cohost Josef made a Youtube channel called Vaporgen. He had a script running on his server which (if memory serves) pulled a random bit from the middle of a song, stretched it out to 3 minutes and added a distorted picture of something or other as the album art. He did this as a joke, and because it was pretty quick to generate these, the account quickly got shut down because it violated Youtube upload guidelines. It seems like the Vaporgen model has been adopted by a lot of people trying to horn in on the market for lofi compilation videos.
Matthew Ball said a while back that Disney isn't really in the business of making films—or at least, their doing that is only the first step. Where they really make their money is developing IPs that audiences “love”, and monetising that “love”. This is something that I feel has been quite well-understood elsewhere for a while: McDonalds has always (as long as I've been alive, anyway) made itself tremendously appealing to small children by having meals with toys in and play areas and bright primary colours—building "love" that's cashed in later when the kids are older, deciding which fast food place to go to and plumping for McDonalds because of the subconscious warm fuzzy feeling.
It feels somehow more cynical when applied to storytelling; I want stories to be stories, not units of content. It comes to something when the Hasbro cartoons selling you toys feel more honest than the things trying to sell you continued investment in the ~intellectual property~. But I think it can be 'come by honestly', almost backed-into in some cases, and I find a lot of this emerges through one of my favourite genres: lofi hiphop compilations. I watch (or at least have on) a lot of lofi videos; they’re really good background noise for work and rest alike. I'm not an expert on their history but my exposure to lofi videos began—as I think a lot of people's did—with ChilledCow's "lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to", a continuous Youtube livestream of woozy instrumentals and muted beats with the famous "lofi girl" (the whole channel has ended up re-named after her, much like Games Workshop changing their name to Warhammer).
Interestingly, the channel's visuals were originally a gif from the Ghibli anime Whisper Of The Heart until it got taken down as a copyright violation. This lead to the owners commissioning their own version (though one clearly pretty closely based on the original). If this hadn't happened, I think it might've been more difficult for them to develop the channel in the way it has been. They realised that nice as the compilations were, people had become really attached to the gif of the girl, so you got variations, with chilling in various different areas of her flat:
(and of course you can buy prints of the lofi girl; I have one above my sink) You also have her nemesis, the Chillhop Music raccoon:
who started as one of a few little cartoon lads in the images for their compilations and has again clearly chimed with the audience and thus slowly grown to become a character in his own right, with merch and everything. Now every season that passes you have a new stage in his adventures. For a while he was staying at this fancy lakehouse:
but then he moved to Chill City with his pals:
I should stress: these are things I have on in the background, but I definitely feel some of that investment. Where’s the raccoon going to end up next? (Answer: a... weird floating island thing?)
These are more slowly-developed worlds that you see if you've been watching the channels for years, but there are some channels that start from this premise: Blue Turtle’s very nice Lando-looking illustrations of a character on an adventure, for instance:
Or the Dreamhop Totoro lad:
Or this other Chillhop thing, forest tales, which go as far as having words in the videos:
Or the cat on the train:
(doesn't really fit in with the rest tbf, I just really like the cat on the train; it's my favourite one)
I don’t think this is inherently bad; I find it fascinating that what are ostensibly music compilations, Now That's What I Call Music For 20somethings To Code To, are all moving in this direction. It’s almost like coming up with the characters has caused them to create a different, situationally specific way to tell stories—like the Burma-Shave billboards (perhaps tellingly, an advertisement), emerging from the way things are presented.
The thing I've noticed more recently is AI-generated images that are just meant to conjure some kind of vibe. The first one I saw is Cozy Nordic with its hygge-gloomy-rainy aesthetic and it's extremely ai-of-a-year-ago generated art:
I don't know whether the music on this is AI-generated or not, but unlike most channels where they've got music from specific artists noted in the description, this is all attributed to the channel itself so uh, draw your own conclusions. Another example would be Lofi Everyday which does have attributed tracks and has somewhat more recent, but still a bit wonky art:
They seem to have pivoted recently to being almost entirely art of anime girls:
These channels are everywhere now. Josef did something like this as a joke a decade-plus ago and now people are doing it not as a joke and presumably making decent scratch from it. I don't know how different it is that it used to be gifs from Ghibli films and then it was commissioned art and now most of it seems to be AI art, but it feels worse, to me.
(Jay also had something interesting recently about... people who make IRL lofi(???) here which in turn links to a really good history of the Lofi Beats empire at 404 Media here)
- ← Previous
They Not Like Us - Next →
Hermetic