How did yacht rock music get its name?
Somewhere at the confluence of the soft rock river and the dad rock estuary is the sparkling, man-made lake known as yacht rock: a collection of very specific bands, production styles, and mast-raising yuppie anthems from the 1970s and ‘80s that weirdly work as a cohesive “thing”… at least with the benefit of irony-infused hindsight. Unlike most reductive genre tags of the past—be it punk, grunge, Britpop, emo, etc — ”yacht rock” was never identified by journalists during its own time and didn’t even enter the popular lexicon until the 2000s.
This benefited all the original purveyors of yacht rock in two ways: it spared them from having to carry around the anchor (pun intended) of an embarrassing label while they were still recording, and it also gave them an unexpected navigational route to a whole new audience in the 21st century—as legions of curious Gen Z kids found themselves magnetically pulled toward the unfamiliar sheen and weird humorlessness of these bearded men and their love of the finer things.
So, how exactly did yacht rock get its name? Well, contrary to popular belief, the category is not limited to songs specifically about boats, although you could certainly make several two-disc compilations of tunes within that strict classification, starting off with Christopher Cross’s genre-defining ‘Sailing’ and closing with Crosby, Stills, & Nash’s high-seas adventure, ‘Southern Cross’.
Yacht rock is also not one of those terms that gradually came into common use from dozens of different sources vaguely referencing different subsets of light FM rock music. Instead, we can easily pinpoint the use of the phrase to a very specific event: the release of a mockumentary video series in 2005.
So, what exactly is yacht rock?
Created by JD Ryznar, Hunter D Stair, and Lane Farnham as part of the Channel 101 film festival, yacht rock was a clever satire of rock’ n’ roll nostalgia shows. Only it shifted the lens from the usual focal points of the late 1970s—punk and disco—to one that was probably listened to by a substantially larger number of people.
“From 1976 to 1984, the radio airwaves were dominated by really smooth music, also known as yacht rock,” says the show’s host, ‘Hollywood’ Steve Huey (played hilariously by actual AllMusic writer Steve Huey). “These yacht rockers docked a remarkable fleet of number one hits, and every song has a story behind it.”
The viewer of this very early YouTube viral clip is then treated to an absolutely ridiculous and entirely fictional re-creation of how The Doobie Brothers’ Michael McDonald was inspired to write the song ‘What a Fool Believes’, one of the staples of yacht rock. The five-minute video concludes with Hall and Oates–acting like bullies from an ’80s teen comedy–challenging The Doobies to a songwriting contest.
Subsequent episodes told similar farcical origin stories for Kenny Loggins’ ‘Keep the Fire’ and Toto’s ‘Rosanna’, each one centred around an imaginary “scene” at LA’s Marina Del Rey, in which all of the titans of smooth, jazz-inflected pop rock are competing with one another for radio dominance. It’s all intentionally very silly, very stupid, and very funny, and while the goal was clearly not to treat its subject matter with a huge amount of respect, there was at least a playful celebration of these “uncool” artists and maybe even a genuine fandom lurking under the surface.
The yacht rock doc series gained a cult following—again, by mid-2000s internet standards—and the fictional genre name it coined soon crept its way into actual record shop conversations and Reddit boards. By the 2010s, it was very nearly a mainstream concept and was actually renewing interest in the very bands that the videos had relentlessly mocked.
Michael McDonald himself called the ‘yacht rock’ videos “hilarious”, and John Oates credited them as “the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection.” As it turned out, the one thing missing from the original songs of yacht rock—a little self-awareness—was exactly what the parodies of ‘yacht rock’ had provided.
