Nobody called it yacht rock until a 2005 web series did
The smooth, studio-polished soft rock of 1975 to 1984 went by names like the West Coast sound. Its current label comes from an online video series made in 2005. The show's creators now police the genre with odd precision, even coining nyacht rock for songs they think don't make the cut.
Yacht rock draws on smooth soul, smooth jazz, R&B and disco: pristine production, clean vocals, light and catchy melodies. AllMusic's Matt Colier boiled it down to three rules in 2014: stay smooth even when grooving, keep emotions light even when the song turns sad, and make every track catchy, however deep it sits on the album. Nautical imagery turned up in plenty of lyrics and album covers, though that alone does not qualify a song.
The four creators of the original series, J. D. Ryznar, Steve Huey, Hunter Stair and David Lyons, look for elite Los Angeles session players and producers, wry lyrics about heartbroken, foolish men, often using the word fool itself, and an upbeat groove they call the Doobie Bounce. By their reckoning the folk-flavoured soft rock of Gordon Lightfoot and Eagles falls outside, and near-misses are dismissed as marina rock. The boundaries stay arbitrary: Michael Jackson's Thriller counts, and some Toto songs show it need not be soft. Core acts, who often played on each other's records, include Steely Dan, Kenny Loggins, Toto, Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald.
Its charm, the documentary maker Katie Puckrik argues, is the thrill of escape laced with thwarted longing; she cites the line in Christopher Cross's Ride Like the Wind about making it to the Mexican border. Critics have split over what that escapism means. A 2012 Jacobin essay sneered that the music was bland enough to pipe into Macy's changing rooms and read its success as a symptom of Reagan-era retreat. The writer Steven Orlofsky sees it as a way listeners once tuned out Watergate and Vietnam.
Reappraisal came around 2016 in The Guardian and on BBC Four, which aired Puckrik's two-part documentary in 2019 under a title punning on a Hall and Oates hit. Newer bands now cater to the fans, among them Atlanta's Yacht Rock Revue and the Los Angeles outfit Yachtley Crew, SiriusXM runs a seasonal channel, and stations from the Florida Keys to Northern Michigan have adopted the format.
Source: Yacht rock
