"There is a movement here, called JBPWave, which are mixes of Jordan Peterson over this music. This one is an explanation by a British journalist, of what’s happening."

That's a quote from I don't know who, passed along to me by a reader I do know, and linking to this:



ADDED: "This music" — according to the email — refers to "Lofi," defined as "a new offshoot of hip-hop." My understanding of the music term "lo-fi" was not something new or growing out of hip-hop. I remember it as something from the 1990s that grew out of indie rock... but, obviously, the same word could be used independently by 2 different things, either out of ignorance, a desire to confuse, or based on a belief that the earlier usage was more or less dead.

I looked up "lo-fi" in Wikipedia, which confirmed my understanding:

During the 1990s, the media's usage of the word "indie" evolved from music "produced away from the music industry's largest record labels" to a particular style of rock or pop music viewed in the US as the "alternative to 'alternative'". Following the success of Nirvana's Nevermind (1991), alternative rock became a cultural talking point, and subsequently, the concept of a lo-fi movement coalesced between 1992 and 1994. Centered on artists such as Guided by Voices, Sebadoh, Beck, and Pavement, most of the writing about alternative and lo-fi aligned it with Generation X and "slacker" stereotypes that originated from Douglas Coupland's novel Generation X and Richard Linklater's film Slacker (both released 1991). Some of the delineation between grunge and lo-fi came with respect to the music's "authenticity". Even though Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain was well known for being fond of Johnston, K Records, and the Shaggs, there was a faction of indie rock that viewed grunge as a sell-out genre, believing that the imperfections of lo-fi was what gave the music its authenticity.

In April 1993, the term "lo-fi" gained mainstream currency after it was featured as a headline in the New York Times. The most widely-read article was published by the same paper in August 1994 with the headline "Lo-Fi Rockers Opt for Raw Over Slick"....

Rap is only mentioned in the "See also" links at the bottom of the article, as Cloud rap ("Cloud rap (also known as trillwave or based music) is a microgenre of hip hop music... typically characterized by its 'hazy,' lo-fi production") and SoundCloud rap ("SoundCloud rap is a music genre that originated on the online audio distribution platform SoundCloud... characterized as 'simplistic, subdued beats, often with snippets of strings and sometimes complemented with emo chords, paired with lyrics that ping-pong between braggadocio and nihilism, with lots of sex and odes to heavy narcotics').

Anyway, as to the use of Jordan Peterson's voice in that music, it reminded me of the time, back in 2005, that my voice — recorded by a student in my Federal Jurisdiction class — was used in a music recording. I love the musical repurposing of spoken word recordings. The very best thing in that category — as far as I know — is Glenn Gould's "The Idea of North" (which I dragged into the conversation last month (about a man who wouldn't listen to the news)) and also back in 2015 ("The country I come from is called The Midwest The North") and in 2009 ("It suddenly dawned on Conan O'Brien that the Palin speech is 'a poem'").