What’s yacht rock? Within the new HBO film, Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, nobody can agree on a definition.
For the comic Fred Armisen, yacht rock is “a really enjoyable feeling.” However for the author Rob Tannenbaum, yacht rock is an area the place singers “might declare not simply your sensitivity however your torment at how delicate you’re, your sense of being ravaged by having emotions.” He calls this “pretty distinctive to yacht rock,” which might be true if soul music didn’t exist.
How about one other, extra particular, definition: “One strategy to know should you’re listening to yacht rock is [if you hear] the sound of Michael McDonald’s voice,” based on Alex Pappademas, creator of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Different Sole Survivors From the Songs of Steely Dan. Then once more, David Pack, lead singer of the band Ambrosia, calls McDonald’s type “progressive R&B pop,” whereas Questlove describes yacht rock as “utility greater than it’s music.”
This all begs the query: If yacht rock is such a obscure label, what makes it price utilizing?
J.D. Ryznar and Steve Huey helped coin this imprecise time period of their 2005 mockumentary collection Yacht Rock, lengthy after the music it tried to model was out of fashion. Every episode traced the actions of goofy, fictionalized variations of McDonald, his contemporaries, and his collaborators — Corridor & Oates like to dunk on “clean music,” whereas Kenny Loggins’ character says pompous issues like, “when a good friend is drowning in a sea of disappointment, you don’t simply toss them a life vest, you swim one over to them.”
Because the yacht rock label caught on, it gave a set of youthful listeners a strategy to discover and perhaps embrace — even when mockingly — music that had develop into a sort of cultural shorthand for uncool, the goal of mainstream jibes in Household Man and The 40-Yr-Previous Virgin. “For a very long time, I believed Steely Dan, man, that’s simply music for dorks and weirdos,” the critic Amanda Petrusich says in A Dockumentary. “You come to it jokingly,” Pappademas provides, discussing yacht rock. “However then you definately instantly end up appreciating it sincerely.”
As yacht rock DJ nights and streaming playlists proliferated, this elevated the artists most intently related to the type, serving to to increase their careers. “I totally anticipated to be completely forgotten by the top of the Nineteen Eighties,” McDonald says in A Dockumentary. As a substitute, the movie reveals him and Loggins collaborating with the bass virtuoso Thundercat in 2017 and acting at Coachella — one of many world’s most distinguished phases.
That mentioned: Whereas the yacht rock label gave some artists a lift, it really masks the lineage of the music it purports to explain. It serves as camouflage, fairly than offering readability.
Most notably, the time period obscures the sizable debt that these information owe to contemporaneous Black music. Most of the tracks related to the type are steeped within the language of Nineteen Seventies R&B, conversant with Marvin Gaye‘s intricate, tortured funk, immaculate Quincy Jones productions, and the ethereal, wrenching ballads Earth, Wind & Fireplace and the Isley Brothers scattered like birdseed throughout the second half of the Seventies.
The dialog was facilitated by session musicians who moved simply between worlds. Chuck Rainey performed bass with Steely Dan but additionally appeared on Gaye’s I Need You and Cheryl Lynn’s Cheryl Lynn. Greg Phillinganes dealt with keyboards for McDonald and Leo Sayer in addition to Michael Jackson and Stevie Surprise. Horn participant and arranger Jerry Hey hopped from Boz Scaggs and Michael Franks to Teena Marie and Janet Jackson.
A Dockumentary nods to yacht rock’s lineage. “Yacht rock is related to white teams and white songwriters and producers, however I do know extra Black yacht rock than I do conventional yacht rock,” Questlove says, pointing to Al Jarreau, the Pointer Sisters’ “Gradual Hand,” and George Benson’s “Flip Your Love Round.” That music doesn’t get a lot play within the typical yacht rock dialog, although — or in A Dockumentary.
What does it imply that one of many strands of white music that was most in contact with the Black music of the Nineteen Seventies was reclaimed largely as a joke, even when it’s an affectionate one? Armisen believes that “there’s nothing better, in a method, for any style to be joked about, as a result of it signifies that it’s related.”
This can be a wise perspective for a comic. It’s not stunning, although, that the themes of the wisecracks don’t all the time really feel the identical method. “At first, I felt a bit insulted, like we have been being made enjoyable of,” says Loggins. “However I started to see that it was additionally a sort of ass-backwards strategy to honor us.”
Not like Loggins, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen hasn’t reached this stage of acceptance. When the documentary’s director requested him about yacht rock, Fagen cursed at him and hung up the telephone, an alternate that was recorded and included within the movie. Steely Dan’s longtime producer Gary Katz expressed the same disinterest within the yacht rock label — albeit utilizing less-colorful language — this summer season throughout an interview with the music supervisor Scott Barkham in Brooklyn Bridge Park.
It’s common for artists to specific hostility in the direction of style phrases. The truth is, they’re consistently saying they don’t wish to be “pigeonholed” or “put in a field.” When the critic Kelefa Sanneh printed Main Labels, a book-length protection of musical style, in 2021, he wrote that artists “hate being labeled. They usually assume extra concerning the guidelines they break than concerning the ones they comply with.”
There’s definitely a case to be made towards the entire concept of summing up a big physique of artwork in a phrase or two. The result’s, all too usually, style descriptors which can be both all-encompassingly obscure or just inaccurate. Some labels, nonetheless, are not less than pretty impartial — “post-punk,” “home music.” Some, however, have detrimental connotations, in the event that they’re not downright sneering on the songs they declare to explain: Take “bro nation” or “PBR&B.”
As A Dockumentary makes clear, “yacht rock” nonetheless reliably elicits chuckles. However even when that humor helped these musicians achieve youthful followers, it usually runs opposite to the tone and themes of their songs. “The time period emerged from what was basically a comedy present,” which had “a very large influence on the way in which that the music is now mockingly appreciated,” Petrusich factors out. Nonetheless, “the information that [these artists] have been making have been completely honest.”
Can these information — and the artists behind them — ever be taken severely in the event that they’re nonetheless being laughed at? Loggins is a surprisingly versatile songwriter with a sinuous supply and a knack for unpredictable funk. McDonald’s voice stood out even throughout a time when commanding voices have been ubiquitous; songs like “You Belong to Me” and “I Maintain Forgettin’ (Each Time You’re Close to)” are important contributions to the soul canon. However when these acts are lumped into yacht rock, they’re relegated to the minor leagues, caught as purveyors of slick chill-out music for the ageing and prosperous.
“I’ve made peace with ‘yacht rock,’ however for the primary few years, I simply hated it,” Pack says in A Dockumentary. “I’m like, ‘Why did they choose our era to make all of our music into a giant joke?’”
