Why is Yerba’s Sleepdealer on my best 1,000 albums ever list?
YouTube’s lofi girl and Spotify yield lofi hip hop bliss. That’s a bingo!
Some stats & info about Yerba – Sleepdealer
- What kind of musical stylings does this album represent? Lo-Fi Hip Hop, Hip Hop, Martini Lounge
- Rolling Stone’s greatest 500 albums ranking – not ranked!
- All Music’s rating – not rated!
- When was Sleepdealer released? 2016
- My ranking, the one you’re reading right now – #962 out of 1,000
Yerba’s Sleepdealer on Spotify
What does the “best 1,000 albums ever” mean and why are you doing this?
Yeah, I know it’s audacious, a little crazy (okay, maybe a lot cray cray), bordering on criminal nerdery.
But here’s what it’s NOT: a definitive list of the Greatest Albums of All-Time. This is 100% my own personal super biased, incredibly subjective take on what my top 1,000 albums are, ranked in painstaking order over the course of doing research for nearly a year, Rob from High Fidelity style. Find out more about why I embarked on a best 1,000 albums ever project.
What does Yerba’s Sleepdealer mean to me? What does it make me feel? Why is it exciting or compelling?
One of the things that I’m learning through the process of research and writing this best 1,000 albums ever list is how much my process of discovering and consuming music has changed over the years. I do down a pretty deep rabbit hole talking about this topic in my coverage of the remarkable French hip hop album that’s a soundtrack to a movie called Ma 6-T Va Crack-er, so for this one I want to specifically talk about YouTube and Spotify.
On YouTube, there are a series of channels that deliver “live” music, meaning you tune in and hear whatever happens to be streaming on that channel at that moment. Essentially Internet radio, if you will. My favorite one is under the heading of “lofi hip hop radio – beats to relax/study to,” and the visual is simply an ever-repeating anime of a young lady studying with headphones on as a cat gazes out over a cityscape.
I started listening to this channel to the extent that I noticed that the name of the song playing “live” would display at the top left of the video window. After a spell, I realized that I wanted to figure out a way to “capture” the songs that I particularly liked so that I could listen to them at some later date.
Enter Spotify.
I would simply plug the song titles and artists I particularly liked into Spotify’s search field, and often enough the music service had access to it. As Christoph Waltz’ Col. Hans Landa says in Inglorious Basterds, “That’s a bingo!”
I started “collecting” these songs in a lofi hip hop playlist, and then noticed that a bunch of the best ones were from an act called Yerba, from an album called Yerba. A great example is “Tokyo (feat. Patrick Perkins).”
“Astoria” might be my favorite, and not just because I lived in the Astoria neighborhood of Queens in New York City for a spell.
I think lofi hip hop is so appealing because it’s immersive enough to allow you to concentrate on work or other tasks, while also relaxing enough to be great backdrop music for spending time with other people.
That lofi playlist that I created (called “get right lofi” if you must know) gets as much or more plays than any I’ve created in recent years.
That’s to say you should deal yourself some Sleepdealer when you get a chance.