A young cartoon girl wearing large headphones hunches over a softly lit desk. She's scribbling in a notebook. To her side, a striped orange cat gazes out on a beige cityscape.
The Lofi Girl is an internet icon. The animation plays on a loop on the "lofi hip hop radio — beats to relax/study to" YouTube stream.
It's a 24/7 live stream that plays low-fidelity hip hop music — or lofi for short.
"I would say lofi music is the synthesis of golden era rap aesthetic with the Japanese jazz aesthetics that is then put through this lens of nostalgia," says Hixon Foster, a student and lofi artist.
He describes listening to lofi as a way to escape. Some songs are lonely or melancholy, others remind him of his school years in Michigan and toiling away at homework while listening to tunes.
The genre has become increasingly popular in the last few years. There are countless people making lofi music, fan art, memes, spin-off streams, and Halloween costumes.
Basically, Lofi Girl is everywhere. And with nearly 11 million people subscribed to the channel, the Lofi Girl stream has been the go-to place to find this music.
But last weekend, she went missing. YouTube had taken down the stream due to a false copyright claim.
Fans were not happy.
"There were camps that were confused and camps that were angry," Foster said. "I mainly saw kind of, at least through the lofi Discord, various users being like, 'Oh my God what is this? What's really going on with this?'"
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