SoundCloud rap is hardly as limp or as purposefully benign as Chillhop’s study music, but the genres do share a sort of practiced nonchalance, a heavy dedication to chill. Interestingly, as a musical ethos, chill has also eked its way onto the pop charts: SoundCloud rap, one of the most popular and lucrative genres of the decade, is marked by distortion, low fidelity, and a slurred vocal delivery that seems plainly indebted to anti-anxiety medication.
Spotify presently classifies chill as a genre, and there are an incredible number of playlists devoted to insuring a chill experience. It merely existed to facilitate and sustain a mood, which in turn might enable a task: studying, folding laundry, making spreadsheets, idly browsing the Internet. They found the question silly if not fatuous-the music wasn’t really for liking, in the traditional sense. “Do you enjoy this?” I asked my students. The rise of chill as an aspirational state suggests that perhaps the best thing to feel is not much at all. These days, to describe someone as “chill” is to propose that they’re slightly apathetic, but in a delightfully easygoing way. I found that the song evaded precise description-perhaps by design-so I free-associated on my notepad: koi pond, medical-grade marijuana, boutique hotel, hot-stone massage, European airplane, cool dentist. Every once in awhile, the raccoon started typing or casually flicked its tail. The video featured an animated raccoon wearing a peach hoodie and drinking a cup of coffee, in a dorm room strewn with generational signifiers: houseplants, seltzer, a turntable. We called up the channel on the classroom computer.
More than 2.2 million people had subscribed several thousand were listening at that moment. The channel’s description was gentle, unassuming: “We hope you enjoy these chill lofi hip hop tunes while studying / chilling / working,” it read. Last fall, the students in one of my writing classes alerted me to a wildly popular YouTube channel, run by an organization called Chillhop Music.
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