Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary

On Yacht Rock and all its permutations: the documentary, the web series and the music.

Halfway through HBO's Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, I was struck with the same realization I had when I spent part of my summer listening to the Yacht Rock station on SiriusXM: this is a genre with a seriously restricted playlist.

Calling Yacht Rock a genre may, in fact, be a stretch. It's a sound, a style, a sensibility that describes a subset of a subgenre: soft rock with an air of indulgent luxury. Beneath that cool, shimmering surface, there are specific musical characteristics that separate Yacht Rock from garden variety soft rock, particularly a reliance on soul and jazz that prioritizes groove over song.

At least that's the definition of Yacht Rock according to the team that invented the term back in the mid-2000s via their comedy web series. Yacht Rock the series became a viral sensation before going viral became part of common parlance—or before YouTube existed, even. The series arrived too early for the creators to completely capitalize on their internet fame but Yacht Rock turned out to be no fleeting fad: the phrase became the prism through which the culture viewed their mellow past. A crew of comedians and crate-diggers performed a work of criticism, finally giving shape to the smooth sounds that wafted through mainstream pop between 1978 and 1983.

Ideas tend to run wild, so Yacht Rock swiftly became bowdlerized, even pirated. Yacht Rock Radio became a staple station on SiriusXM station, helping cultivate an audience that only wants to have a good time hearing great oldies. If there's any condescension to be discerned in Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, it comes from this crowd, all decked out in captain's hats and Aviators, eager to lap up the self-satisfied smirks of the Yacht Rock Revue, grifters who gussy themselves up as sailors to play music they clearly consider corny. Neither the punters nor the tribute acts make any attempt to separate the Bee Gees from the Doobie Brothers, let alone Jay Ferguson from Christopher Cross: it's all fodder for a stroll down memory lane.

Everybody behind the scenes in Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary cares very, very much about delineating the differences between beachy soft-rock and studio-bound sophistication. The distinct details, particularly in how Yacht Rock is built upon slick studio cats interpreting Black music, is articulated cleanly within Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, a difficult trick pulled off with ease thanks to flow charts, clips, and lively talking heads—musicians, critics, historians, and comedians who are conversant with rock critic vernacular without succumbing to snobbishness, chronicling the style with evident affection.

Where most music docs settle for a story, this film spends a considerable amount of time on critical analysis, such as a passage explaining why Daryl Hall & John Oates should not be considered Yacht Rock despite some surface sonic similarities. (They're said to be too Philadelphian, an assessment that's not wrong at all.) The skeleton key that unlocks all the arguments is Steely Dan, whose dedication to perfection led them to hire session musicians who would later go on to play on most records that could be called Yacht Rock. That the careers of many of these pros began long before Steely Dan ceased their charade of being a touring rock band is beside the point. When Donald Fagen and Walter Becker retreated to the plush confines of the studio to find the precise guitarist capable of executing the solo to "Kid Charlemagne," they created the permission structure for other musicians to follow suit.

This argument is convincing—Christopher Cross is on camera explaining that he wanted his debut to sound like Steely Dan—but the 1970s were rife with studio rats. About ten years ago, Dave Grohl helmed his own testimonial to L.A.'s Sound City Studios, the place where such cinematic productions as Fleetwood Mac, Cheap Trick's Heaven Tonight, Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers's Damn the Torpedoes, and Rick Springfield's Working Class Dog were cut. On the other side of U.S., there was the Power Station, the studio where Dire Straits cut Making Movies and Love Over Gold, albums that were every bit the hi-fi demonstration disc as Steely Dan's Aja, as was Roxy Music's sumptuous Avalon. Exquisite productions were an essential part of the mainstream, not the province of the extended Steely Dan Universe.

Mainstream pop/rock was so slick in the late 1970s and early 1980s that it's easy to see why most listeners conflate run-of-the-mill soft rock with pure, uncut Yacht Rock—especially when there are big adult contemporary hits about piña coladas, summer breezes, Key Largo, and Thunder Island. As much as it connotes wealth, "Yacht" suggests the sea, so of course audiences who don't spend hours debating the nuances of the Porcaro brothers aren't going to care that Kenny Loggins made smoother, funkier easy-listening pop than fellow folk-rock survivors America. Those who do care about the details have Yacht Or Nyacht, the podcast helmed by JD Ryznar, "Hollywood" Steve Huey, Dave Lyons, and Hunter Stair, the inventors of the Yacht Rock web series and the term itself. (Disclaimer: "Hollywood" Steve Huey has been a friend of mine since middle school)

Accompanying the podcast is a website that offers the crew's expert rankings of individual songs covered on their show, a list that can provide such revelations as Boz Scaggs—an artist that I've heard within 15 minutes every time I've switched on the SiriusXM Yacht Rock Station, a singer whose Silk Degrees sparked the formation of Toto, a definitive Yacht Rock band—doesn't dominate their Essential Yacht Rock Songs. Ryznar, Huey, Lyons, and Stair are rigorous in their taste in the way only true believers can be: the sonic subtleties matter greatly. Their list of Essentials—songs rated 90 or above on their patented "Yachtski Scale"—amounts to a mere 45 tunes, barely enough to occupy a few of hours of radio play.

Another thing about the Yacht Rock team's essentials: there are only a handful of huge pop hits among these 45 songs. Now, this grouping contains some of the most enduring soft rock hits of the era—"What a Fool Believes," "Heart to Heart," "Rosanna," "Sailing," "Ride Like the Wind," "Africa," etc.—but there are plenty of deep cuts and near-misses here. This suggests that pure Yacht Rock is an aesthetic that is of the mainstream but not necessarily fueled by hits. That's somewhat true. A glance at the Joel Whitburn Billboard books not only reveals that "What A Fool Believes," "Sailing," "Africa," and "Baby, Come to Me" are the only Yacht Rock Essentials to top the Hot 100, but that Yacht Rock barely made a ripple on the Adult Contemporary charts. There, "What A Fool Believes"—a song so important to the style that Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary has a wonderful segment chronicling a handful of the many songs that ripped it off— only reached 22 and Christopher Cross peaked at number one not with "Sailing" but with "Never Be the Same" and "Think of Laura," which topped the charts in 1984.

Yacht Rock may be a subgenre but it's a subgenre with an evocative name, so it's little wonder that the term has been hijacked by fellow travelers: it paints a specific picture in a way soft rock or adult contemporary does not. It's not just the cosplay captains who stretch the definition of Yacht Rock. Questlove, who is one of the talking heads in Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, qualifies his lengthy Spotify Yacht Rock playlist with the addendum that it also includes "Dentist Office Pop," a broad, invented term that covers everything from sepia-toned soft rock to the synthesized pop of Mike + the Mechanics, an icy sound that's the antithesis of the warmth of Yacht Rock. His expansive definition dilutes the peculiar charms of Yacht Rock but any playlist running over 52 hours is bound to bend the borders of a style that's already amorphous.

I'll admit I balk at Questlove's extensive playlist: it feels like a clearinghouse of songs that received some kind of radio play in 1980s, whether it was album-oriented radio (the Police's "Don't Stand So Close To Me") or oldies ("Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys). Say what you will about the stringency of Yacht Or Nyacht: at least it's an ethos. I admire how the Yacht Rock originators continue to refine the meaning of their creation but I do find, as a listener, I am drawn less to Yacht Rock than I am to a specific era of adult contemporary pop that coincides with the subgenre's peak: studio confections constructed largely without the aid of synthesizers. Certainly, that's the aesthetic I adhered to ten years ago when I assembled an "Ultimate Yacht Rock" playlist on Spotify. With a decade's worth of reflection, I can concede that it's filled with songs that do not adhere to the strict definition of Yacht Or Nyacht, but that's fine. Pleasure is paramount with music this smooth and I prefer a loose fit when it comes to my soft rock.