Lo-fi and the specific history of American underground music in the 80s and 90s that it references is something worth knowing if you want to understand why the aesthetic works the way it does.

The cassette culture of the American underground in the mid-80s — Guided by Voices, Beat Happening, early Sebadoh, the K Records scene — produced a body of records that were lo-fi out of necessity. The budget wasn't there for better equipment. The results were imperfect in ways that were sometimes charming and sometimes just imperfect.

What happened in the subsequent decades is that the imperfection became aestheticized — the qualities that were forced on the original artists by economic constraint became deliberate choices for artists who had other options. The lo-fi aesthetic is now a reference to that historical moment as much as it is a production approach.

I think this historical reference matters for evaluating contemporary lo-fi. Is the artist engaging with that history seriously, or are they just borrowing the surface qualities without understanding what produced them?