What Good is Dorky Ol' Yacht Rock?
Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery
I watched Yacht Rock: A DocKumentary on Max this weekend, and I thought it would make for a good opportunity to reflect on this odd little subgenre that has become its own cottage industry over the last decade or so.
The documentary, which is directed by Garret Price and executive produced by Bill Simmons, focuses on a certain type of bouncy, smooth adult contemporary music popular in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. This is the music that filled radio airwaves right after Motown’s classic era ended and right before MTV changed image-making in music forever. It’s soft rock, yes, but not all soft rock is yacht rock.
By now you probably know the artists – Toto, Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers. This is the music of suburban art fairs and wine drunk middle-aged yuppies wearing captain’s hats. It’s the music of dentist’s offices and your Aunt Linda. Whatever you think hip music currently is, this is the opposite of that.
And therein lies the interesting journey of what we call yacht rock. This particular brand of soft rock dominated the airwaves at a time when much more interesting things were happening in music. Funk was at its funkiest. Punk rock was exploding in the U.S. and England. Country music’s outlaws were outselling the bland Nashville sound. Van Halen, who in Ted Templeman shared a producer with many of these artists, was making rock music fun again. Yacht rock was and is none of these things. This is music for kids who took jazz guitar lessons or, worse yet, jazz bass lessons. This is the granddaddy of Dad Rock.
This is where I come in, and how I first experienced yacht rock. I was born in 1985, just as the golden years of yacht rock were waning, and yet, in the little coastal Florida beach town I grew up in, these songs never went away. “What a Fool Believes” and “Turn Your Love Around” were the soundtrack of my youth as much as Mariah Carey or Madonna were. The people that listened to yacht rock generally lived in nice homes not far from the water, took their boats out fishing and lived for little street fairs like “Dancin’ in the Streets,” where they would get down to these songs in the most Boomer of ways. This is the music of Fiestaware dishes and seashell shower curtains, Aiwa stereo receivers and newfangled compact discs.
But by the early 2000s that era was disappearing as well. Jimmy Buffett had a big hit with Alan Jackson in 2003 called “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere,” and from then on coastal music would take a decidedly country turn as musicians like Kenny Chesney and Zac Brown Band cashed in on the trend. The soft rock of the ‘70s seemed positively old and, well, dorky. By the time I started record shopping around 2002, the used bins were full of Ambrosia and Toto LPs that you could buy for $2 to $5.
Apparently some comedians out in Los Angeles started buying those records, playing them and pouring over the liner notes at the type of broke nerd parties that people around the entertainment industry seem to always be having. They coined the term yacht rock, and roughly around the same time The Lonely Island started making their videos for Channel 101, J.D. Ryznar, Steve Huey and their troupe started making fanciful versions of the “stories behind the songs” for this silly little genre they made up mostly to entertain themselves. They published a series of web videos – pre-YouTube, mind you – that gained a cult following.
And this is where smooth yacht rock enters my life once again. I never spent money on the LPs – I was now living in Texas and into ’70s hard rock like Thin Lizzy and Blue Öyster Cult, which were also on sale for $2. But at a bachelor party in Austin around 2007, a couple of my friends not only played Doobie Brothers songs incessantly, they actually themed the entire party based on this little web series. Funnily enough, the accessory wasn’t the now-ubiquitous captain’s hat you see at Yacht Rock Revue concerts, but a mustache, and we all grew them in anticipation of the party, which just ended up being a bunch of dudes in a cheap Austin hotel getting drunk and watching comedy videos, an activity that seemed positively boring at the time. The music – and the memories of my childhood it conjured up – stuck with me and I would start listening to and researching yacht rock myself, even hosting a smooth music party or two, captain’s hat and all.
Looking back at the videos, they don’t totally hold up. There is some insensitive humor and for some reason, the makers have never exported hi-definition versions, so they are hard to make out in our 4K world. But the basic outline is there: Smooth rockers like Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins beat the odds to write Southern California hits while foiling the hijinks of villains like Jimmy Buffett and Hall & Oates. There are some really funny, quotable lines and the low-budget vibe of them is still endearing, to me, at least.
I would guess the majority of people who profess to love yacht rock now don’t know anything about this video series, made by a bunch of struggling alternative comedians from Los Angeles, but they nonetheless know about the SiriusXM channel, Yacht Rock Radio, and the countless tribute acts across the country performing these songs, along with a few Hall & Oates and Jimmy Buffett tunes thrown in for good measure.
This seems to frustrate the original video creators to no end, and they have developed a “Yachtski Scale” to rate whether songs are “Yacht or Nyacht.” They seem a little unsure and uneasy about how to manage this behemoth they’ve unleashed on middle America – for the second time.
The documentary does a good job of quickly summarizing this revival before it jumps back to the late ‘70s and into the lives and times of the musicians themselves. From here, we see that while the term yacht rock has become something deeply cringe, the web series actually did its homework – McDonald, as well as the members of what would become Toto, were important session players for Steely Dan, the witty proto-yachters who would lay the groundwork for the jazzy, smooth sounds to follow. Likewise, artists like Christopher Cross would use those same session players and circle the Steely Dan camp as well. Yacht rock was a real scene, albeit one that mostly took place in recording studios.
Yacht rock is informed by Black music styles that were popular at the time like jazz fusion, R&B and disco, but the documentary only briefly touches on race, and when it does it seems afraid to go deeper, as did the 1619 Project, which took a glancing blow at yacht rock in one of its early articles. Does yacht rock owe a debt to Black music? Yes. Is it a whitewashed music? I would say it is not. For one, Black musicians like Bernard Purdie, Quincy Jones, Michael Jackson, Brenda Russell and George Benson all contributed directly and definitively to this smooth pop/R&B hybrid as both stars and performers. Secondly, yacht rock largely avoids the type of minstrel-like mimicry of blues rock from the same era. Yacht rock is sophisticated studio music and deeply nerdy musician music, a space where good players tend to freely cross genre lines in search of a good groove or song. This is one of the hidden joys of American music, a place where cultures tend to brush up against one another.
Thirdly, many of these songs, like “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near),” would become popular in Black communities, first when they hit the radio in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and again when they were used as samples during the hip-hop era. Lastly, there is also the lyrical content: Songs like “Takin’ it to the Streets” speak of racial awareness, hopeful brotherhood and shared struggle. The Doobie Brothers even appeared on the TV show What’s Happenin’ during this era.
If Eric Clapton is a clear example of racism and appropriation in rock music, a better comparison to yacht rock might be the early years of Stax Records, or even Muscle Shoals, where integrated session players created funky, rhythmic sounds we now normally associate with soul and R&B music.
The documentary does confront the blind spots, though, most namely Toto’s “Africa,” a song and music video that even the most forgiving critic would say highlights the worst impulses of colonialism. And the modern, captain’s hat-wearing audience seems to eschew yacht rocky songs by R&B artists like Al Jarreau and Chaka Khan for white soft rock pablum like Bread and Starland Vocal Band – schmaltzy, saccharine stuff that was never cool and never will be.
Race is always an important topic in American music, but I wish the documentary would have left more of its 90-minute runtime to delve into the ideas around masculinity and yacht rock, something it only briefly and lightly touches on – and a concept that cuts both ways for the so-called genre. On one hand, yacht rock carves out a space in music where men can talk about and process their emotions. Michael McDonald songs are particularly good at showing vulnerability, while other artists touch on ideas of devotion, conflict resolution and hope. Compared to the misogynistic hard rock and often-racist punk rock of the era, there’s something commendable about this Jonathan Livingston Seagull-esque dive into the male psyche. There’s a sensitivity to this music that feels sincere, if a little broad.
On the other hand, this entire domain is almost completely male, which is even more disappointing when you consider that Carol Kaye was playing legendary bass lines on Beach Boys sessions in Los Angeles just a decade prior to the rise of yacht rock. Blame the source – from the beginning Steely Dan was an aggressively dorky and male type of music and it’s no surprise their sessions were real sausage fests. There are women around the periphery of yacht rock – Stevie Nicks sings a duet with Kenny Loggins and Nicolette Larson scored her own yachty hit – but from the original sessions to the video series to the current glut of pop cultural references, this is a (mostly white) boy’s club.
And because of this, yacht rock seems fated to again sail into middlebrow oblivion for at least the time being.
Culturally, yacht rock has become the domain of a certain type of middle-aged man – I can picture him presiding over his barbecue grill now, talking about the last time he and the wife took the custom golf cart down to see the local Yacht Ryacht tribute band over IPAs at Moose Nuts Brewery or wherever the Hell it is he goes to be aggressively and threateningly uncool. Content to hear “What a Fool Believes” for the thousandth time, he knows nothing of Thundercat and would never even consider putting on as much as a Carly Rae Jepsen record, let alone delve into Japanese city pop or Brenda Russell. The elements that people, namely creatives and musicians, keep rediscovering – the production precision, the fusion of styles – mean nothing to him as long as he can wear his captain’s hat and air guitar along to the solo in “Lowdown.” This music is probably as good as modern American radio music gets (one of the reasons its hung around so long), but it is also, by design, meant to appeal to the masses, and the masses often suck.
There is, and always has been, a lameness to yacht rock, but its core lameness is different from that of the beer-bellied doofus I just described. The original lameness is that of the talented and nerdy musician – the one who sat in their room practicing scales or soldering a home recording console together and couldn’t be bothered to “work on their image” or self-promote. It’s no wonder that MTV killed yacht rock, because all of the style in yacht rock is in the chords, the changes, the harmonies and the tempos. When you are that deep in, there’s no time to go try on leather jackets. You’re living to nail the perfect take.
Those grey-haired artists themselves are begrudgingly appreciative of the yacht rock moniker – mostly because it resurrected their previously dead careers and gave them a second act none of them saw coming. All that is, save for Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, who tells the director to go f-ck himself in what is easily the documentary’s most captivating moment. Yacht rock, for whatever reason, never decided to spin off in its own direction and get proggy, jammy or jazzy. This is radio music, and it remains radio music, and its creators seem content to shit the hits for a few more years while they still can. And good for them. Go play those casinos, boys. Get paid and shuffle off this mortal coil to the great studio session in the sky.
With this in mind, I wish the documentary would have come full circle to the original dorks and nerds who created the web series. Over the years they have kept the flame of yacht rock burning by creating specific criteria to rate yacht rock songs – the personnel who played on the tracks, incorporation of jazz styles, and self-deprecating lyrical content, to name a few – but with their podcast and “Yachtski Scale,” they have also pushed yacht rock in more inclusive and interesting directions – spotlighting female artists as well as Black artists. Gen Z seems to view Yacht Rock with the derision any Millennial cultural phenomenon deserves (See The Office, phrases like “adulting.”), but perhaps some of its cooler, more disaffected hipsters will stumble onto the library of deep cuts Ryznar, Huey and the gang have critiqued and rated to find something a little richer and more interesting than they previously realized.
But in the meantime, I hope this documentary drives a final nail in the coffin of the modern yacht rock revival. Did I mention Bill Simmons produced it? Let this music rest for a little while and let’s see if it comes back. “This Is It?” One can only hope.
