Yacht rock
Based on Wikipedia: Yacht rock
The Genre That Didn't Know Its Own Name
Here's a strange fact about music history: one of the most commercially successful sounds of the late twentieth century didn't have a name until two decades after it peaked. The smooth, melodic, impeccably produced pop music that dominated radio from roughly 1975 to 1984 was simply called "the West Coast sound" or, more clinically, "adult-oriented rock." It wasn't until 2005 that a group of comedians gave it the name that would stick: yacht rock.
The name was a joke. The punchline was that this music—with its tales of sailing, longing, and heartbreak delivered over pristine arrangements—sounded like something wealthy Californians might play on their boats while wearing captain's hats and drinking chardonnay.
The musicians who created it were not amused.
What Makes a Song "Yacht"
Defining yacht rock turns out to be surprisingly contentious. The people who invented the term have spent years arguing about what qualifies. They've even coined the term "nyacht rock" (a play on "not yacht rock") for songs that seem like they should count but don't quite make the cut.
The core elements they've identified paint a specific picture. You need high production value—these weren't lo-fi bedroom recordings but expensive studio affairs with top-tier engineering. You need jazz and rhythm-and-blues influences woven into the pop framework. You need electric piano, that warm, slightly watery keyboard sound that became a signature of the era. And you need a certain kind of lyric: complex, wry observations about heartbroken men, often featuring the word "fool."
There's also something called the "Doobie Bounce," an upbeat rhythmic feel named after the Doobie Brothers, one of the genre's defining acts.
But perhaps the most telling requirement is this: yacht rock artists used an elite network of Los Angeles session musicians and producers. The same handful of supremely talented instrumentalists appeared on album after album, creating an interconnected web of collaborations. Michael McDonald would sing backup on Christopher Cross's records. Toto's members would play on everyone else's sessions. The sound wasn't just similar across artists—often, it was literally the same people playing.
The Rules of Smooth
Music critic Matt Colier distilled the genre's aesthetic into three commandments.
First: keep it smooth, even when it grooves. The melody matters more than the beat. You're not trying to make people dance so much as float.
Second: keep the emotions light, even when the sentiment turns sad. Yacht rock is full of sadness, but it's a well-moisturized sadness, one that never becomes ugly or raw.
Third: always keep it catchy. Even the deep cuts, the songs buried at the end of side two, should have hooks that stick with you.
This creates what scholars have described as an inherent tension: yacht rock is "aspirational but not luxurious, jaunty but lonely, pained but polished."
The Exhilaration of Escape
Documentary filmmaker Katie Puckrik has argued that escape is essential to understanding yacht rock. Consider Christopher Cross's 1979 hit "Ride Like the Wind," which tells the story of a man fleeing to the border of Mexico. On one level, it's a smooth, polished pop song with gorgeous production. On another, it's about desperation, about running from something, about the ache of wanting to be somewhere—anywhere—else.
This duality appears throughout the genre. Cross's even more famous song "Sailing" became an anthem of the era, and it's not hard to see why. Sailing is the ultimate escape fantasy for the landlocked cubicle worker: the open water, the wind, the absence of phones and bosses and obligations.
Puckrik has also identified what she calls "dark yacht," a subgenre that leans into the shadows beneath the smooth surface. She points to Joni Mitchell's 1975 song "The Hissing of Summer Lawns," which she describes as "accidental yacht rock." The song depicts a woman trapped in a beautiful house and a loveless marriage—all the material comforts anyone could want, combined with spiritual emptiness. The lawns hiss because that's what summer sprinklers do in wealthy California suburbs, but the sound becomes ominous, suggesting something serpentine lurking in paradise.
The Beach Boys Connection
To understand where yacht rock came from, you have to start on the beach before you get to the yacht.
The Beach Boys created the template in the 1960s. Their aesthetic—sun-drenched California, endless summers, beautiful harmonies—became the foundation that later artists would build upon. Their 1966 recording of "Sloop John B," a traditional Caribbean folk song, might be the earliest example of what would become yacht rock's fascination with boats and sailing.
Captain & Tennille, the husband-and-wife duo who won a Grammy for Best Record in 1975, had been members of the Beach Boys' live touring band. Their winning song, "Love Will Keep Us Together," borrowed a riff from the Beach Boys—composer Neil Sedaka acknowledged the debt. The connection wasn't hidden; it was a direct line of musical inheritance.
From there, the aesthetic spread. Christopher Cross picked it up. Eric Carmen picked it up. Hall & Oates, though rooted in the Philadelphia soul tradition, picked it up. Even folk-rock artists like Jim Messina, who'd started in the more rough-hewn Buffalo Springfield, picked it up. The sailors-and-beachgoers imagery became a shared language across different strains of popular music.
The Sound of Ignoring the World
Yacht rock emerged at a peculiar moment in American history. The idealism of the 1960s had collapsed. The decade had begun with the promise of the civil rights movement and ended with assassinations, Vietnam, and disillusionment. By the mid-1970s, Watergate had destroyed whatever faith in institutions remained.
Into this environment came music that stubbornly refused to engage with any of it.
Journalist Steven Orlofsky has noted that yacht rock was "probably the last major era of pop music wholly separated from the politics of its day." There were no protest songs here, no calls to action, no rage against the machine. Instead, there was introspection. There were songs about relationships, about yearning, about personal emotions divorced from any larger social context.
Some critics view this as a failing. A 2012 article in the socialist magazine Jacobin described yacht rock as "an escape from blunt truths" about the sociopolitical nightmares of the Reagan era. The music was, in this reading, a kind of willful blindness set to a pretty melody.
Others see it differently. Music scholar J. Temperance argued in The New Inquiry that yacht rock served an important cultural function precisely because it was so divorced from the turbulence around it. By providing a "smooth" alternative to punk's anger and progressive rock's pretension, yacht rock created a space for listeners to simply feel their feelings without having to process them through a political lens.
There's also a materialist explanation. The rise of FM radio in the 1970s created new incentives for advertisers. FM stations wanted to attract affluent listeners—specifically, women who controlled household spending. Yacht rock, with its emotional accessibility and non-threatening vibe, fit the bill perfectly. At the same time, changing gender norms meant that male artists felt freer to express vulnerability in their lyrics. The combination produced exactly the kind of sensitive, smooth, emotionally available music that would become the genre's hallmark.
The Racial Critique
Yacht rock didn't emerge from nowhere. Its smooth soul influences, its jazz inflections, its sophisticated chord progressions—all of these drew heavily from Black American musical traditions. This has led to pointed criticism.
Some critics have characterized the genre as a revival of "white rock forms" that borrowed from Black music while stripping away its cultural context. The Jacobin article described Michael McDonald, perhaps the most central figure in yacht rock, as a "bleached, blue-eyed soul cracker"—a brutal assessment suggesting that he had taken the form of soul music while abandoning its substance.
New York Times critic Wesley Morris has written about the broader phenomenon of white artists receiving recognition for possessing what he calls the "absurd" quality of Blackness in their music—being praised for doing what Black artists originated. Yacht rock, with its deep roots in rhythm and blues and its overwhelmingly white roster of stars, fits uncomfortably into this pattern.
Defenders of the genre point out that the Los Angeles session musician scene was more integrated than this critique suggests, and that many yacht rock artists openly acknowledged their influences. But the criticism persists, and it's part of why the genre has remained culturally fraught even as its sounds have been rediscovered and appreciated.
The Saccharine Stigma
For decades, yacht rock was mocked relentlessly. The fashion was garish—all those mustaches, all those tight polyester shirts, all those perms. The sincerity was saccharine—grown men singing earnestly about their feelings in an era when irony was becoming the dominant cultural mode. The smoothness was seen as evidence of soullessness.
The term "yacht rock" itself was coined as an insult. J.D. Ryznar and his collaborators created their web series in 2005 as a parody, depicting the major figures of the genre as ridiculous characters obsessed with smooth grooves and musical purity. The joke was that this music was so uncool it had circled back around to being fascinating.
But something shifted around 2015. The stigma began to lift. Positive reappraisals appeared in publications like The Guardian and The Week. The BBC aired a documentary exploring the genre with something approaching reverence. Streaming services added dedicated yacht rock channels, and Sirius XM launched a satellite radio station devoted entirely to the smooth sounds of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Why the rehabilitation? Orlofsky has suggested that yacht rock serves the same function now that it did in its original era: it's an escape from political turmoil. Just as listeners in the Carter and early Reagan years used yacht rock to tune out Watergate and Vietnam, listeners in the post-Obama era might be using it to tune out whatever is troubling them now. The music's refusal to engage with the world becomes a feature rather than a bug.
The New Wave of Smooth
The yacht rock revival has spawned new bands devoted to recreating the sound. Young Gun Silver Fox, based in London, crafts original songs that could have been recorded in 1979. Yacht Rock Revue, from Atlanta, performs loving tributes to the classics. Yachtley Crew, from Los Angeles, takes a more humorous approach, embracing the genre's inherent absurdity while still delivering the goods musically.
These bands exist because there's a market for them. Yacht rock has proven remarkably durable as a cultural phenomenon, perhaps because it taps into something genuinely appealing beneath its easy-to-mock exterior. The production really is beautiful. The harmonies really are gorgeous. The songcraft really is sophisticated. Whatever you think of the fashion or the politics or the cultural implications, these were talented people making carefully considered music.
The Ongoing Debate
The question of what counts as yacht rock continues to generate surprisingly heated arguments. Is Fleetwood Mac's "Rumours" yacht rock? The genre's creators say no, somewhat arbitrarily. Is Michael Jackson's "Thriller" yacht rock? Apparently yes, despite Jackson being far more associated with other genres.
These arguments might seem trivial, but they reveal something about how we categorize music. Genres are always somewhat arbitrary, their boundaries drawn by consensus rather than objective criteria. Yacht rock is unusual because its name and definition were applied retroactively by people who weren't part of the original scene. The musicians themselves didn't set out to create "yacht rock." They were just making music, and two decades later, comedians told them what they'd actually been doing.
This makes yacht rock a kind of thought experiment in genre classification. How do we know when a song belongs to a genre? Is it the sound? The personnel? The era? The lyrical themes? The vibe? Yacht rock encompasses all of these and none of them definitively. It remains, in the words of its chroniclers, "aspirational but not luxurious, jaunty but lonely, pained but polished"—a set of tensions rather than a set of rules.
Sailing On
In 2024, HBO Max released "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary" (the pun in the title tells you everything about the genre's relationship with self-seriousness). Directed by Garrett Price, it received a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, suggesting that audiences remain fascinated by this strange corner of music history.
Not everyone was pleased. Rick Beato, a music producer and YouTube educator known for his detailed analyses of popular songs, called the term "yacht rock" completely offensive. He argued that the genre concept tries to lump together artists with very different styles, flattening the genuine diversity of what was happening in popular music during those years.
He has a point. Michael McDonald's blue-eyed soul is quite different from Steely Dan's jazz-inflected cynicism, which is quite different from Toto's virtuosic pop-rock, which is quite different from Christopher Cross's gentle balladry. The yacht rock label captures something real about the era's aesthetic, but it also obscures the individuality of the artists it encompasses.
Perhaps that's inevitable with any genre label. Jazz means a thousand different things. Rock means a thousand different things. Even yacht rock, coined as a joke and refined through years of podcasts and arguments, ultimately points at something real while failing to fully contain it.
The music remains. Streaming services will keep serving it up. New generations will discover it and either embrace its smooth charms or mock its dated fashions. And somewhere, a listener will hear "Sailing" for the first time and feel, just for a moment, like they're escaping to somewhere better—which might have been the point all along.