i probably didn't talk enough about how i feel about this stuff. cause i don't actually think that stuff's not worthy of seeking out. i'm old enough to have lived through the 80s and 90s, and i remember the new jack swing and pete rock / digable planets / DITC / g funk eras of hiphop pretty well. so to me, what the kids are calling chillhop or lofi hiphop or whatever gets played on those "lo fi hiphop beats to study to" is, to me, just hiphop. cause i'm old, LOL.

on the other hand, the triplet flow kinda thing that you hear on mainstream hiphop radio nowadays is an interesting development. the beats have slowed down to 60-70BPM, the production is a lot less sample-based. aesthetically it doesn't resemble anything you'd have seen associated with hiphop back when people were still talking about the four elements. i'm not willing to say the new stuff is NOT hiphop-- cause most everyone who's making it and involved in it calls it that, and some MCs and producers have done work in both styles, and at the end of the day, i'm a descriptivist-- but i do think that it's weird that the new styles becoming prevalent have basically displaced the older dusty crackly sample-based boom bap type of sound to either "classic hiphop" stations for stuff made before 2000 or so, or into these weird secondary adjunct genre descriptors like "chillhop" or "lofi" or whatever. and it sucks, to me, that what whole generations of people have known as just "hiphop" now has to be relegated to a nebulously defined subgenre. i don't want to dump on people trying new things in established artforms at all, i think that's critically important. it's just that when the new forms displace the old ones completely in the mainstream consciousness, the existing forms start to feel "othered", i guess, and that part does kinda suck.

on the topic of "music FOR something" though, certainly brian eno's Music For Airports was and is a huge album that people still talk about and use for its intended purpose, so yeah, ambient music and other genres that are crafted explicitly for a certain instrumental purpose have been around a while, and i don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that. sousa marches might even fit into this category if we stretch it a bit, since the original point of military marches was ultimately not just to sound impressive but also to keep time for marching troops. i'm not really against that sort of thing when the music is being made explicitly for that purpose.

but the thing i was trying to criticize in my original comment was things like the "X music to Y to" 24/7 youtube streams and auto-generated spotify / google music playlists that are explicitly focused on what you're supposed to be doing while you listen to it, instead of things that are more inherent to the music itself or the cultural context that surrounds it. i know a lot of people who aren't that into music who, nonetheless, consume a lot of music, and it's almost exclusively in the form of these activity-based playlists where the point of listening to them isn't to try to develop an understanding or appreciation of the music being played, or the cultural or genre conventions that music is in conversation with. so instead of saying "here's a playlist of chicago footwork through the 90s and 00s", it's, "here's a bunch of music to work out to." it ends up having kind of a destructive, atomizing effect on musical subcultures. some of the kids who are listening to "chill lo fi beats to study to" are gonna fall in love with sample-based hiphop just like i did, and they might start producing their own. but it's very unlikely that they'll end up connecting that sound back to a subcultural movement of predominantly Black musicians who used sampling to reinterpret Black music history for a whole new generation of people. if they don't go out of their way to learn these things (and there won't be much incentive to), then they're just gonna think of that sound as "lo fi beats", and they'll probably internalize the original context of where they heard it, and think of the productions they make as being explicitly for the context of being played in those 24/7 streams. and that's really ultimately what i'm worried about.

sorry i know that was rambling and not particularly well written but i don't have time to make it any shorter right now

there's still good and bad ambient/background music though, like Eno's ambient tape fuckery and also i found decent ambient rock on bandcamp once, so i think it's actually aboutfilling the space with something that progresses and actually moves while remaining steady and slow

edit: also as musou (muso?) points out there is actual purpose which probably answers the question better