Yacht rock is a subgenre of music that spans a time frame from approximately1975/1976 to 1984. The term yacht rock did not come into contemporary use until the LA-based web-streaming Channel 101 produced a comedy series in 2005 called “Yacht Rock”. People can find all kinds of sources on the subgenre of yacht rock, but it is a misunderstood musical subgenre by numerous sources indeed.
What is Yacht Rock?
Yacht Rock expert Timothy Malcolm of the internet’s Houstonia Magazine defines yacht rock as created between 1976 and 1984, smooth, melodic, light, bubbly, and complex with components of jazz, rhythm, and blues, with a good deal of Fender Rhodes electric piano, lyrics that do not override the melody, and may portray buffoons intellectually.
Timothy Malcolm and Chris Jones host the popular podcast “Hall of Songs” with expertise in musical composition and lyrics. Mr. Malcolm believes yacht rock does not include acoustic guitar riffs, but other sources do. Numerous musicians, whom you may not recognize their names, were LA session musicians and became part of yacht rock, which is posthumously defined as a musical subgenre, along with extremely well-known artists and bands.
Why Do People Like Yacht Rock?
The soft rock genre emerged in the 1950s or 1960s, depending which soft rock expert you source. Soft rock combined elements of pop, professional studio production, and slower tempos than classic, punk, heavy metal, etc., i.e., all rock’s subgenres. Yacht rock is associated with soft rock, but contains its own specific characteristics.
Most people who enjoy soft rock and complex musical compositions or the artists that produced yacht rock enjoy yacht rock. The Eagle, 100.9 FM, headquartered in Quincy, Illinois, but broadcast in several states, frivolously reports that, “Guys with neatly trimmed beards who sat in boats on their album covers” are typical yacht rockers.
Why Is it Called Yacht Rock?
We can trace the name back to the web series that gave this musical subgenre its moniker. When the artists that define yacht rock produced it, yacht rock was not a thing. Even the web series that coined the term “yacht rock” produced as Channel 101’s series called “Yacht Rock” in 2005 did not use the term “yacht rock” in the show’s content.
Channel 101 spawned “Yacht Rock”. The characters never used the term, but the host of the show, Steve Huey, did in introductions. The series revolved around overblown aspects of musicians and the music industry. The main protagonists in “Yacht Rock” centered around artists Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald.
Actors JD Ryznar and Hunter Stair play Loggins and McDonald, and produced “Yacht Rock” with Lane Farnham. Steve Huey, the host, was an actual music critic for Allmusic in 2005. The characters in the show used the term “smooth music”. The title “Yacht Rock” became a buzzword for radio stations, a genre in bins at music stores, and a category on iTunes over 21 years after the genre’s era ended. “Yacht Rock” revitalized sales of the show’s featured artists’ works.
“Yacht Rock” episodes featured over 60 well-known artists including Daryl Hall and John Oates of Hall and Oates, Steely Dan, Christopher Cross of “Sailing” fame, Jeff “Skunk” Baxter, lead guitarist of the Doobie Brothers, Michael Jackson, Eddie Van Halen, The Eagles, Steely Dan, and fictional characters in parodic fictional scenarios. Channel 101 produced 12 episodes of “Yacht Rock” and was in business from October 2003 to November 2005.
What Qualifies as Yacht Rock?
The “Yacht Rock” series portrayed so many artists as yacht rock musicians. The subgenre the series created was defined long after the yacht rock era ended by musicians, actors, and people in the entertainment business. What qualifies as yacht rock is left up to critics of musical compositions and lyrics. Texas Outside found a few credible sources that attempt to define the “true” qualities of yacht rock.
Our first source, Timothy Malcolm, qualifies these songs as a few that represent “true” yacht rock, “What a Fool Believes,” The Doobie Brothers, “Heart to Heart,” Kenny Loggins, “FM,” Steely Dan, “Human Nature,” Michael Jackson, “Rosanna,” Toto, “Nothin’ You Can Do About It,” Airplay, and “I Really Don’t Know Anymore,” Christopher Cross.
Johnny Black, of The Eagle, 100.9 FM, reports that these artists qualify as yacht rock, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Beach Boy members with Chicago, Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, Pablo Cruise, Boz Scaggs, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Captain & Tennile, Ambrosia, Seals & Crofts, Orleans, The Blue Jean Committee, and Christopher Cross.
What Is an Example of Yacht Rock?
Two songs that are the most mentioned songs that epitomize the yacht rock subgenre come from the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan. “Yacht Rock” was a spoofy parody on the smooth rock music genre and the lifestyles of its musicians. In 2015, Rolling Stone Magazine published an article called “Sail Away: The Oral History of Yacht Rock” in 2015, which was a deep dive into the history of yacht rock and possibly worth reading or not. Rolling Stone does not always hit music critiques dead on due to ideologies.
“What a Fool Believes” by the Doobie Brothers (1979) and “FM, No Static at All” by Steely Dan (1978) are the most reported on yacht rock songs. Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins wrote “What a Fool Believes”. Steely Dan members Donald Fagen and Walter Becker wrote “FM, No Static at All”.
“What a Fool Believes” lyrics depict a man who thinks his fling with an old flame meant as much to her as it did him, and never gets it that she did not think much of the fling at all. Its musical composition flows in with a springy, canorous, mosaic-like conglomeration prominently featuring a Fender Rhodes electric piano with resonant Michael McDonald vocals.
Fagen and Becker wrote the lyrics to “FM, No Static at All” for a movie called “FM”. Its lyrics have suffered through all kinds of analyses for years, but what makes its lyrics fodder for yacht rock is that FM could stand for female/male. FM’s musical composition is typically considered smooth jazz for white people like 1962’s Antônio Carlos Jobim’s composition with Portuguese lyrics by Vinícius de Moraes’ “The Girl from Ipanema” characterized. Its cool complexity features sax riffs and runs that neither compliment nor insult its lyrics.
