The Yacht Rock Joke Is Getting Old: Critic’s Take

What is yacht rock? In the new HBO movie, Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, no one can agree on a definition. 

For the comedian Fred Armisen, yacht rock is “a very relaxing feeling.” But for the writer Rob Tannenbaum, yacht rock is a space where singers “could declare not just your sensitivity but your torment at how sensitive you are, your sense of being ravaged by having feelings.” He calls this “fairly unique to yacht rock,” which would be true if soul music did not exist. 

How about another, more specific, definition: “One way to know if you’re listening to yacht rock is [if you hear] the sound of Michael McDonald’s voice,” according to Alex Pappademas, author of Quantum Criminals: Ramblers, Wild Gamblers, and Other Sole Survivors From the Songs of Steely Dan. Then again, David Pack, lead singer of the band Ambrosia, calls McDonald’s style “progressive R&B pop,” while Questlove describes yacht rock as “utility more than it is music.”

This all begs the question: If yacht rock is such a vague label, what makes it worth using? 

J.D. Ryznar and Steve Huey helped coin this imprecise term in their 2005 mockumentary series Yacht Rock, long after the music it attempted to brand was out of style. Each episode traced the activities of goofy, fictionalized versions of McDonald, his contemporaries, and his collaborators  — Hall & Oates love to dunk on “smooth music,” while Kenny Loggins’ character says pompous things like, “when a friend is drowning in a sea of sadness, you don’t just toss them a life vest, you swim one over to them.”

As the yacht rock label caught on, it gave a set of younger listeners a way to explore and maybe embrace — even if ironically — music that had become a kind of cultural shorthand for uncool, the target of mainstream jibes in Family Guy and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. “For a long time, I thought Steely Dan, man, that’s just music for dorks and weirdos,” the critic Amanda Petrusich says in A Dockumentary. “You come to it jokingly,” Pappademas adds, discussing yacht rock. “But then you suddenly find yourself appreciating it sincerely.” 

As yacht rock DJ nights and streaming playlists proliferated, this elevated the artists most closely associated with the style, helping to extend their careers. “I fully expected to be totally forgotten by the end of the 1980s,” McDonald says in A Dockumentary. Instead, the film shows him and Loggins collaborating with the bass virtuoso Thundercat in 2017 and performing at Coachella — one of the world’s most prominent stages. 

That said: While the yacht rock label gave some artists a boost, it actually masks the lineage of the music it purports to describe. It serves as camouflage, rather than providing clarity. 

Most notably, the term obscures the sizable debt that these records owe to contemporaneous Black music. Many of the tracks associated with the style are steeped in the language of 1970s R&B, conversant with Marvin Gaye’s intricate, tortured funk, immaculate Quincy Jones productions, and the airy, wrenching ballads Earth, Wind & Fire and the Isley Brothers scattered like birdseed across the second half of the Seventies. 

The dialog was facilitated by session musicians who moved easily between worlds. Chuck Rainey played bass with Steely Dan but also appeared on Gaye’s I Want You and Cheryl Lynn’s Cheryl Lynn. Greg Phillinganes handled keyboards for McDonald and Leo Sayer as well as Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder. Horn player 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 associated with white groups and white songwriters and producers, but I know more Black yacht rock than I do traditional yacht rock,” Questlove says, pointing to Al Jarreau, the Pointer Sisters’ “Slow Hand,” and George Benson’s “Turn Your Love Around.” That music doesn’t get much play in the typical yacht rock conversation, though — or in A Dockumentary. 

What does it mean that one of the strands of white music that was most in touch with the Black music of the 1970s was reclaimed largely as a joke, even if it’s an affectionate one? Armisen believes that “there’s nothing greater, in a way, for any genre to be joked about, because it means that it’s relevant.” 

This may be a sensible perspective for a comedian. It’s not surprising, though, that the subjects of the wisecracks don’t always feel the same way. “At first, I felt a little insulted, like we were being made fun of,” says Loggins. “But I began to see that it was also a kind of ass-backwards way to honor us.” 

Unlike Loggins, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen hasn’t reached this stage of acceptance. When the documentary’s director asked him about yacht rock, Fagen cursed at him and hung up the phone, an exchange that was recorded and included in the film. Steely Dan’s longtime producer Gary Katz expressed a similar disinterest in the yacht rock label — albeit using less-colorful language — this summer during an interview with the music manager Scott Barkham in Brooklyn Bridge Park.

It’s not unusual for artists to express hostility towards genre terms. In fact, they are constantly saying they don’t want to be “pigeonholed” or “put in a box.” When the critic Kelefa Sanneh published Major Labels, a book-length defense of musical genre, in 2021, he wrote that artists “hate being labeled. And they think more about the rules they break than about the ones they follow.”

There is certainly a case to be made against the whole idea of summing up a large body of art in a word or two. The result is, all too often, genre descriptors that are either all-encompassingly vague or simply inaccurate. Some labels, however, are at least fairly neutral — “post-punk,” “house music.” Some, on the other hand, have negative connotations, if they’re not downright sneering at the songs they claim to describe: Take “bro country” or “PBR&B.” 

As A Dockumentary makes clear, “yacht rock” still reliably elicits chuckles. But even if that humor helped these musicians gain younger followers, it often runs contrary to the tone and themes of their songs. “The term emerged from what was essentially a comedy show,” which had “a really big impact on the way that the music is now ironically appreciated,” Petrusich points out. However, “the records that [these artists] were making were entirely sincere.” 

Can those records — and the artists behind them — ever be taken seriously if they’re still being laughed at? Loggins is a surprisingly versatile songwriter with a sinuous delivery and a knack for unpredictable funk. McDonald’s voice stood out even during a time when commanding voices were ubiquitous; songs like “You Belong to Me” and “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near)” are essential contributions to the soul canon. But when these acts are lumped into yacht rock, they are relegated to the minor leagues, stuck as purveyors of slick chill-out music for the aging and affluent.

“I’ve made peace with ‘yacht rock,’ but for the first few years, I just hated it,” Pack says in A Dockumentary. “I’m like, ‘Why did they pick our generation to make all of our music into a big joke?'”