Wikipedia’s entry for Yacht rock is as heavily footnoted as an article in an academic historical journal. It reads like one, too.
“Yacht rock (originally known as the West Coast sound[4][5] or adult-oriented rock[6]) is a broad music style and aesthetic[7] commonly associated with soft rock,[8] one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Drawing on sources such as smooth soul, smooth jazz,[1] R&B, and disco,[7] common stylistic traits include high-quality production, clean vocals, and a focus on light, catchy melodies.[6]”
Like many well-sourced Wikipedia entries, the one for yacht rock buries the lede: Who fuck made up this stupid genre and why are they still allowed to roam free among the general population?
It seems those responsible for spawning the yacht rock genre are four individuals: J. D. Ryznar, David Lyons and Hunter D. Stair with an accomplice named Lane Farnham.
Yacht Rock web video series screen shot
And it turns out that yacht rock was created as a spoof, a mockumentary, if you will. Ryznar and Stair created the 12-episode Yacht Rock web video series after noticing the converging recording careers various soft rock titans like Steely Dan, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins and Toto.
The Yacht Rock series premiered in June 2005 at the Channel 101 community film festival in Los Angeles.
But in a hideous pop culture twist, the sly satire escaped the 4th wall and slithered into reality, mutating into its own musical genre, complete with cover bands dressed in Navy blue double-breasted suites jackets, white pants and wearing captain’s hats.
From Wikipedia, the source of all true facts:
“The term “yacht rock” did not exist contemporaneously with the music the term describes,[6] from about 1975 to 1984.[7][8]” The series creators came up with the term yacht rock because of the frequent seafaring references in lyrics, videos and album art such as Christopher Cross‘s anthemic, “Sailing” (1979).[12] and Duran Duran’s Rio (1982).
This music was part of the soundtrack of a very peculiar era in American life spanning the end of the Ford Administration, the Carter Administration, and the first term of the nightmarish Regan Administration.
In 1975 the No. 1 single of the year was very yacht rockian “Love Will Keep Us Together” by Captain & Tennille. By 1984, the end of what became the yacht rock epoch, the top single was “When Doves Cry” by the not at all a yacht rocker, Prince.
Yet, even at the end, yacht rock represented: “Footloose” by Kenny Loggins was the #4 single in ’84.
During the years from ’75 to ’84 rock music had already burned through new wave and punk; disco spread Saturday night fever; hip hop was ascending into its golden age. The hippie-dippy esthetic took its last toke and vacuous cocaine-sniffing yuppie materialism replaced it.
“Understood as a pejorative term,[6] “yacht rock” referred, in part, to a stereotypical yuppie yacht owner enjoying smooth music while sailing” according to all-knowing information source Wikipedia.
Journalists like Steven Orlofsky and documentary-film maker Katie Puckrik have pointed out that socio-political and economic changes contributed to the genre’s the development [20]
Yacht rock was art “untouched by the outside world,” notes the ‘Pedia’s entry.
And then there’s this insightful, wonky analysis from you-know-where:
“By contrast to what followed, this “was probably the last major era of pop music wholly separated from the politics of its day.”[3] Yacht rock represented an “introspective individualism” that emerged after the death of the “mass-movement idealism” of the 1960s. Its “reassuringly vague escapism” was boosted by the rise of FM radio which brought together two consequences of gender emancipation: women who controlled household spending and men who “felt freer to convey their emotions in song”.[15]
So why yacht, why now?
Could it be America has entered a much more shitified version of 75-84, only now we have the Internet, social media, Spotify and Fox News?
Puckrik’s two-part documentary, “I Can Go for That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock”, aired on BBC Four in June 2019, proof the contagion has jumped the pond, infecting Europe, or maybe just the UK where they’re even more susceptible to bad ideas than Americans. Further proof yacht rock’s cultural rehabilitation appeared in UK pubs in The Guardian,[28] The Week,[3]
The Wiki entry I’m heavily cribbing from, says journalist “Orlofsky has argued that the genre’s resurgence is partly due to its function as an antidote to the negativity of the Trump era in the US just as in its original context, when yacht rock created “the perfect soundtrack for listeners trying to ignore Watergate and Vietnam“,[15] it now again represents “a defiant, fingers-planted-firmly-within-ears disregard of any and all political unrest.”[3]
Just because yacht rock is soulless doesn’t mean it doesn’t have an audience large enough to provide work for otherwise unemployed musicians.
Numerous yacht rock cover bands with cheeky names like Yachty By Nature, Yachtley Crew, The Docksiders, Point of Sail, Monsters of Yacht, and Hall & Boats now slither all across the land.
But wait, there’s more socio-pathologic analysis that really puts the genre in dry dock (get ready):
- A 2012 Jacobin article described yacht rock as “endlessly banal, melodic and inoffensive, fit to be piped into Macy’s changing rooms”.[33] 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”.[34]
- 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.”[35]
- 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“[36]
But even cultural social socialist commentators have a soft spot – sort of – for the genre:
Music scholar J. Temperance wrote in The New Inquiry that, rather 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”.[34]
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Temperance attributed the “smooth” sound that is characteristic of yacht rock to an indifferent approach to capitalist culture and a “regressive tolerance of allegedly transgressive music with a truly liberatory anality” by using existing symbols rather than create new anti-establishment symbols that are eventually added into the establishment symbols.
The New Inquiry article describes the role of yacht rock as a genre that would help people differentiate music appreciation from status by using common symbols and “rendering the popular into the smooth.”[34]
And did I mention that yacht rock is as white as the pants on the lead singer of Yachtly Crew?
Once more from the Oraclepedia:
Yacht rock has also faced racial criticism, given the genre’s associations with “the revival of white rock forms” as writer Max McKenna stated in the 2018 Popmatters article.[36
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.[37]
And, of course, this is all The Beach Boys fault.
Captain & Tennille, who were members of the Beach Boys’ live band, won “yacht rock’s first Best Record Grammy” in 1975, for “Love Will Keep Us Together,” a song that composer Neil Sedaka acknowledged was inspired in part by a Beach Boys riff.[23] 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.”[24]
So it appears that yacht rock is both escapist nostalgia for the “good old days” that never were and evidence of a repressive cultural swirling cesspool that America keeps sailing back into.
Those who do not learn from schlock rock history are doomed to repeat it and repeat it and repeat it….
This link takes you to ALL of the Yacht Rock Episode in order on JD Ryznar’s YouTube Channel.
DANGER! CLICK THIS LINK AT YOUR OWN RISK!