While listening to comedy radio, there are ads for a yacht rock channel. This refers to heavily synthesized music coming out of (Southern) California at the end of the 70s and beginning of the 80s. (They always emphasize the Southern. What was the rest of the state up to)? The example given is usually Toto’s Africa, a pleasant enough song hardly typical of the others. They usually throw in a few Christopher Cross songs into the mix. Most of the songs are mediocre at best. The sample lists are short and repeat the same few artists making me wonder if there are enough songs to fill the needs of a radio channel, although they barely/somehow found enough material to do a Jim Gaffigan channel.
But who listens to this stuff, most of which is drivel*? If you can afford a yacht, you can afford some taste. Aspiring boaters? The tone deaf pleased to use a prestigious label to justify this technomoaning?
I said it. This is a personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of discobot.
It’s just a marketing name given to easy-listening hits of the 1970s-early 1980s. Don’t know why the outrage over Poco, Steely Dan, and the Doobie Brothers… seems kinda excessive to me.
Yeah. Throw in some Hall & Oates, Fleetwood Mac, Jackson Browne, Little River Band and maybe mix in some southern rock - and you’ve got a great BBQ mix.
No one is really angry or upset. It’s just mediocre music, arbitrarily defined. Sure, some songs are better than others. But it’s just a group of soft rock songs that “have a jazz or R&B influence” (like most) or synthesizers (like most of that era). This is in. This isn’t. Mix in southern rock than get rid of the stuff which wants to Rise above its Raisin’.
I like that channel! I’ve been listening to Champaign’s How 'Bout Us twice a day.
Also, I think the station identification spots with the guy who sounds like Thurston Howell the Third are amusing.
The term originally came from a “mockumentary” video series about smooth-rock performers from the late '70s and early '80s. The name was meant to be derisive, but it’s kind of stuck over the past few years as a descriptor for the genre, and has increasingly been used with less irony/snark in recent years.
The prototypical yacht rock acts, IMO, are Toto, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, and Michael McDonald (with McDonald seeming to be “Patient Zero” of the sound). And, I do enjoy listening to “Yacht Rock Radio” on SiriusXM, and I’m not ashamed of it.
I always thought it had something to do with Jimmy Buffet. I had no idea Steely Dan qualified. Aja is a fantastic album, and fantastic albums aren’t what I associate with the ‘Yacht Rock’ genre.
I often see Steely Dan listed among the “yacht rock” bands, though I think they’re a bit of an outlier, compared to the other acts, which are a lot more pop-oriented. I think they get lumped in because of their jazz influence and highly-produced sound.
I’d be willing to bet more people know most of the words to Gilligan’s Island, which came out decades ago, than could find Bermuda on a map. Why is this relevant? It isn’t. It’s arbitrary. It’s so arbitrary that the term “nyacht rock” is used to exclude very similar songs. And to include stuff like Steely Dan which is good but not really that much like Toto.
Nuts. I like the SiriusXM Yacht Rock station. It’s one of a dozen regulars I tune to.
That’s the thing about Sirius. I listen until I hear a song I don’t like and then I change the channel. That happens on every single channel they have. No channel is perfect. No one kind of rock fits my mood every minute of every day.
And if you do listen to multiple channels, you’ll hear yacht rock songs on many of them. Steely Dan especially. All yacht rock means is non-headbanging rock of the 70s. Nobody at the time thought they were making a particular style of music. They just liked melodies and fine instrumental work. That’s timeless.
I have watched the episode where Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald team up with Vincent Price to scare Michael Jackson away from hard rock (“Beat It”) a million times and it’s never not funny.
