Lo-fi aesthetics deserve a more honest conversation about what they actually are.

There are two completely different things happening under the lo-fi label. The first is intentional aesthetics — artists who could record cleanly but choose tape saturation, room noise, and limited frequency response because those constraints serve the music's emotional goals. The second is underfunded recording — artists who would record cleaner if they could but are working with limited resources.

Both are legitimate. The problem is when the first category is used to romanticize the second, or when the second category borrows the aesthetic vocabulary of the first to claim an intentionality that wasn't there. I don't think this means anything goes or that anything is automatically good — a badly recorded song is still badly recorded. But I also don't think production values are the correct frame for evaluating music whose entire premise is that production values aren't the point.