I enjoy it but need more after a bit.
There is a website and podcast specifically surrounding YR. There is even a list of songs rated as YR or not YR.
Interesting niche, this.
I listened to a bit yesterday, and one song that came up was ‘I’d Really Love To See You Tonight’ by England Dan and John Ford Coley. While it was playing I Shazammed* it and looked at the related artists. It was horrrid. But also a pretty good definition of the genre. Songs I certainly know, but really don’t want to listen to. Serves me right for even going there - just reading a song title has put an earworm in my head. Who ever thought “Baby I’m a want you” was a good idea?
I will survive.
On my yacht elevator, the music is played down in the orchestra pit. I have to admit it sounds good, even up in the mezzanine.
- Shazammed? Shazamed? “I used Shazam” seems a bit stilted
I disagree. None of these are yacht rock, IMHO. Yacht rock is easy, breezy, light-hearted and shallow with no hidden meanings — like “Sailing” by Christopher Cross. Also, the tone is light and pleasant.
“Eye in the Sky” by Alan Parsons Project, on the other hand, is deep and full of hidden meaning in the lyrics. It also has a sharper tone in the music (and lyrics) with a little more edge to it.
Similarly, I don’t think anything by ABBA or Fleetwood Mac falls into the yacht rock category, either, even though they were putting out albums during the time period in question.
I disagree strongly about MTV killing Cross’ career. “Ride Like the Wind” was a truly great rock song. Everything he did after that was movie soundtrack music. I don’t personally like “Sailing” but I acknowledge it’s a perfectly competent song. Following that up with “Arthur’s Theme,” though, was fatal. It was co-written by Burt Bacharach, Carole Bayer Sager,and Peter Allen, all top names but not in rock. It was released in 1981, just when MTV was being rolled out nationally. Even if they had done a video just out of the movie without Cross in it anywhere, MTV would never - could never - have played it. Though it hit #1 on the Adult Contemporary list, Adult Contemporary was poison. Cross made his choice abut which way to go. His music kept him off MTV, not his body.
We were Sailing and Think we’re going make it…
The puns are better than most of the music I’ve heard so far. It certainly is smooth, though. The soundtrack of complacency. Compared to punk, new wave, Kraftwerk it was fairly square when it came out. No wonder they try to accept some additional groups.
Not upset it’s enjoying a Renaissance. But not everything deserves a wider audience.
Most of the core groups appeared before either punk or new wave.
And adults don’t care whether music is hip or not, just whether it’s good.
The Guardian’s of the Galaxy soundtracks are pretty Yacht Rocky.
If you don’t like yacht rock then, Hail (hail), what’s the matter with your head, yeah.
This is indicative of one of the most important defining moments for the ‘Yacht Rock’ ‘sound’, such as it is.
A lot…MOST…of these bands either started or were composed of a lot of truly elite studio musicians based in the Los Angeles area. These are guys who were truly great at playing their instruments and writing songs to a specific goal. They just used their down time on their own projects and had some success with them and good for them. If you dive into their discographies you’ll see a lot of cross-support where members of one band will fill in on another’s song here and there. They mostly understood where they were going and what they were doing and could work well with each other because they’d already been doing it for years by the time this opportunity came along.
Sort of like the Eagles initially being brought together to back Linda Ronstadt. Following that they saw an opportunity and took it. And hell, good for them. I won’t begrudge any musician the opportunity to succeed.
Yes, a certain amount of cross-pollination happens in any local scene. The Seattle scene certainly had it. So did San Francisco during the late 60s. And hell, John Popper appeared to play harmonica on apparently all of the 90s alt-bands records.
But this time it happened in Los Angeles, where the music industry at the time was based so the crop of people with whom to cross pollinate were truly the best players, singers and songwriters since the Brill Building. It gave opportunity to manufacture a specific kind of SoCal sound and capitalize on it for some musicians.
This. Exactly.
I wish there was a “Like” function on this board for posts like this. Ha-ha!
I like yacht rock. I wouldn’t want to listen to it exclusively and I’m not claiming that it’s “great art” by any means, but I enjoy it.
And that’s fine.
What do you think about “Liz Lemon’s Theme” (also by Christopher Cross)?
Well, yeah. He put a lifetime’s worth of his best material in his first album (which did not feature a photo of Mr. Cross, btw), and when it came time to do a 2nd, he just redid what made him successful in the first place.
In some ways, his debut album reminds me of Scorsese’s Raging Bull, also released the same year. Both are literally the apotheosis of their respective movements - Cross for “yacht rock”/“easy listening MOR”, Scorsese for “Introspective, character-driven American films w/o happy endings” - arriving at the exact moment those movements died.
Here’s my duo playing in an elevator. YouTube
I love yacht rock, not exactly for the songs, but it harkens back to a time of my life that I cherish. It’s more a nostalgia thing. That being said, most of the musicianship on it is stellar. As someone aid earlier, it was all the hotshot musicians and producers putting it out.
I don’t agree with much of that Wikipedia article. Michael Jackson but not Fleetwood Mac? Really? I think defining yacht rock is awfully subjective. It’s a lot like the Louis Armstrong quote: “If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know .”
I don’t even really think of it as “yacht rock”. It’s merely pop from the seventies into the eighties. Not disco, not the harder forms of rock, not country western, just old pop. At the time, you could hear all those genres on the same radio station within an hour. I miss that.
Absolutely, in part because the genre definition itself was created decades after the fact, and originally “defined” by a small list of acts being spoofed in that mockumentary series.
There are a handful of performers that are clearly yacht rock, which have been mentioned several times already (Cross, McDonald, Loggins, Toto, etc.). And, there’s a lot of music from that era which very clearly isn’t yacht rock (e.g., disco, punk, hard rock, etc.)
But, then, there’s a middle ground which is subject to debate. As noted earlier, Steely Dan is often classified as yacht rock, but I think that they only meet some of the criteria (for example, I think that their lyrics are smarter and more cynical than the “keep it light” yacht rock ethos). Similarly, a lot of people classify Jimmy Buffett in the genre, and while he definitely celebrates the laid-back boat/tropical lifestyle, I don’t know that his music contains the high production values typical for yacht rock.
(FWIW, I really don’t see Michael Jackson as yacht rock, at all.)
"I spent 15 minutes listening to Yacht Rock. The cheesy DJ voice is the best thing about it. "
while i admit I love the cheesy DJ voice- fifteen whole minutes! 
I’m not saying it’s much. As of now, I’ve listened to it for almost an hour, which is nothing. I can’t say I’ve enjoyed much of it. I’m too young for it to have nostalgia value.
Another thread lists a dozen genres from the 70s with 3 examples of each. Yacht rock wasn’t on that list - it wasn’t a thing then.
I’m trying to figure out whether Billy Joel makes the list.
I wouldn’t classify him as yacht rock, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard one of his songs on the SiriusXM channel. But, YMMV, of course. 