Yacht rock

Definition#

The term yacht rock did not exist contemporaneously with the music the term describes, Many “yacht rockers” included nautical references in their lyrics, videos, and album artwork, exemplified by Christopher Cross’s anthemic track, “Sailing” (1979). According to Mara Schwartz Kuge, who worked in the L.A. music industry for two decades, “Soft rock was a genre of very popular pop music from the 1970s and early 1980s, characterized by soft, mostly acoustic guitars and slow-to-mid tempos … most people have generalized the term to mean anything kind of soft-and-1970s-ish, including artists like Rupert Holmes. Not all yacht rock is soft, either: Toto’s ‘Hold the Line’ and Kenny Loggins’ ‘Footloose’ are both very yacht rock but not soft rock.” Comprehensively defining yacht rock remains difficult, despite agreement that its central elements are “aspirational but not luxurious, jaunty but lonely, pained but polished”. Journalist Jack Seale stated that, as in other “micro-genres”, certain albums of artists who are accepted as proponents are “arbitrarily ruled in or out”. For example, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982) is accepted as yacht rock, but Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977) is not.

Yacht Rock creators#

Yacht Rock web series co-creators Ryznar, Steve Huey, Hunter Stair, and David Lyons have attempted to apply precision to what is defined as yacht rock, and have been critical of overly expansive definitions of the term. In 2016, they invented the term “nyacht rock” to refer to songs that have sometimes been classified as yacht rock but that they felt did not fit the definition. Factors that the four list as relevant to yacht rock include: * High production value Los Angeles–based studio musicians and producers associated with yacht rock Ryznar and company have argued that many artists sometimes associated with yacht rock, particularly the folk-driven soft rock of Gordon Lightfoot and Eagles, fall outside the scope of the term as originally conceived.

Origins#

The socio-political and economic changes that contributed to the emergence of the genre have recently been described by journalists like Steven Orlofsky, and by documentary-film maker Katie Puckrik. Orlofsky pointed out that some contemporaneous pop groups such as Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, and Supertramp were well-respected by critics and listeners. Yacht rock was art “untouched by the outside world”. By contrast to what followed, it “was probably the last major era of pop music wholly separated from the politics of its day”. O’Sullivan also cites the Beach Boys recording of “Sloop John B” (1966) as the origin of yacht rock’s predilection for the “sailors and beachgoers” aesthetic that was “lifted by everyone, from Christopher Cross to Eric Carmen, from ‘Buffalo Springfield’ folksters like Jim Messina to ‘Philly Sound’ rockers like Hall & Oates”. Some of the most popular yacht rock acts (who also collaborated on each other’s records) included Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, and Toto.

Resurgence#

Around 2016, positive reappraisals of the genre began to appear in The Guardian, The Week, and on BBC Four, which broadcast Puckrik’s two-part documentary, I Can Go for That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock, in June 2019. (That documentary is a play on the 1981 Hall & Oates song “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)”.) Yacht Rock Revue from Atlanta, and Yachtley Crew from Los Angeles.

Radio format#

The yacht rock radio format can be found on both terrestrial radio and satellite radio stations. SiriusXM offers a yacht rock channel seasonally to subscribers, and also streams the channel year-round via their Sirius XM mobile application. The format has also been adopted by several commercial radio stations, either as a variant of soft adult contemporary, or as a standalone format. Self proclaimed yacht rock stations include WKEY-FM in the Florida Keys, WWMK in Northern Michigan, WINX-FM, KZOT 1180 AM, Omaha, NE, and WTWV-FM in Virginia Beach.

Perspectives#

A 2012 Jacobin article described yacht rock as “endlessly banal, melodic and inoffensive, fit to be piped into Macy’s changing rooms”. The article describes the popularity of yacht rock as reflective of a regressive Reagan-era American society and “about the garden of nightmares America had become”. According to the Jacobin article, yacht rock served as “an escape from blunt truths” about sociopolitical issues of the day. In an article in The New Inquiry, music scholar J. Temperance stated that yacht rock “sterilized the form of its soul and blues elements and instead emphasized disinterested, intentionally trite lyrical themes”. In a uDiscovermusic article, Paul Sexton expressed how yacht rock as a genre seemed to “exude privileged opulence: of days in expensive recording studios followed by hedonistic trips on private yachts”. According to writer Max McKenna in a 2018 Popmatters article, the lack of political messaging in the yacht rock genre is a “conservative gesture(s) flying under the radar in a climate of poptimist reappraisal”. In response to the Jacobin article, music scholar J. Temperance wrote in The New Inquiry that, rather than being a reactionary genre, yacht rock was essential to the growth of pop music in a time of “cultural darkness”, “serving as a dialectical pole to progressive rock as well as to punk, postpunk and even proto-postpunk, spurring drastic retrenchments”. Due to its perceived lack of political involvement and borrowed elements from black music genres, yacht rock has garnered the perception of racial ignorance amongst certain critics of the genre. but is available year-round on the SXM app. iHeartRadio also has a dedicated “Yacht Rock Radio” station that airs this format 24/7 on its website and app. In 2018, Jawbone Press released The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s by author Greg Prato, which explored the entire genre’s history. The book featured a foreword by Fred Armisen (who would later spoof the genre on an episode of the Emmy Award-nominated mockumentary series Documentary Now with Bill Hader as the fictional band known as The Blue Jean Committee and released the album of the same name In 2024, HBO Max released Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, directed by Garrett Price. The documentary received a cumulative 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Rick Beato, a music producer and Youtube educator, said, “I find that term, yacht rock, completely offensive.” Beato argues that the genre and the documentary try to group artists with very different styles.

See also#

• List of yacht rock artists
• Culture of California

External links#

• Yacht or Nyacht – list of songs as evaluated by the creators of the Yacht Rock web series for applicability to the genre