Even better Far Cry track is “It’s Not As Simple As That”. With Donald Fagen on background vocals. Love it!!!
Another great vocalist of the yacht rock era is Kenny Rankin. I don't know if he qualifies but his music is just beautiful.
Are we keeping this thread going? So far it's been a learning experience in music for me... Hope the boat doesn't set anchor here!
It's been a few years since I've complained about this "yacht rock" thing, so I'm about due for a curmudgeonly rant. The term "yacht rock" was invented 25 years after the fact and is essentially meaningless. It's not a "genre" that reflects the way that people (even people on yachts) actually listened to music during the 1970s -- nobody was making distinctions between Kenny Loggins and Gerry Rafferty, or between Toto and Chicago -- it was all "soft rock" (mediocre soft rock, to be more specific). "Yacht rock" is an evocative phrase, but the reality is that the music had nothing to do with yachts, and very few of its creators or listeners had a yacht connection. (I can't imagine Donald Fagan spending more than a few minutes on a yacht without kvetching that he was seasick.) There wasn't really a Yacht Rock "scene." And to lump Steely Dan with Kenny Loggins is akin to lumping the Beatles with Gerry and the Pacemakers. I remember hearing the term "California rock" in the 70s and 80s, and while this term isn't as sexy or evocative as "yacht rock," I think it's preferable -- vaguer, yes, but not misleading. End o' rant.
You might be right that it's a misleading name. But self-designation doesn't seem to me to be dispositive (no one really called themselves "Krautrock," except arguably Faust) and the fact that it's retrospective doesn't seem particularly damning either, aren't there other genre designators like that? The only one I can think of offhand is something I can't remember the name of, durn it, but anyway it doesn't seem to be a no-no on principle, for similar reasons to the self-designation objection. Anyway, I'm not that het up about it either way, and I'm not saying you're wrong (at least about the name itself being misleading, due to a dearth of yachts on the scene--but I always imagined it more about people listening to it on yachts, so I'm not sure about this either). In any case, @LeftCoastGator has really specific ideas about what is or is not "yacht rock," and it seems to me 1. if it's that specific a label, it could be useful, and 2. it's kind of a funny label. Yacht Rock Revisted: What Yacht Rock is—and isn't. His epistemology is explained below (from page 20): The web series sparked a renewed interest in the overall SoCal soft rock sound, and the guys who created actually (and perhaps inadvertently) did a good job of isolating a particular kind of soft rock, more jazz and soul based the the Mellow Mafia folk and country variety of say, The Eagles or Jackson Browne. Over the years, people have started to get into the specifics of what this sound is, and if you dig around in the album credits, you start to notice some patterns. For instance, the same studio musicians appear on certain artists albums over and over again, and don't appear on other somewhat similar albums. For instance, you might think an album by, say, Linda Ronstadt and The Doobie Brothers sound somewhat similar, but you'll find that share almost no studio musicians. So then if you take this list of producers and musicians and look for other projects that they're involved in, the more obscure bands, like Airplay and Pages being to emerge, and lo and behold, they too have a very similar sound. After you do this enough, you're able to isolate a very particular type of soft rock with a very specific sound. And once you do, you'll begin to find outlier bands that, while they might not have the same studio guys, do a good job of capturing the sound.
I know this is a delayed reaction, but this is a superb thread title. It makes me think of a "Dread Zeppelin"-style gimmick band who plays Manowar covers Yacht Rock-style...
Obviously no one believed me, but again, the idea that the guys who did that web series invented the term "yacht rock" is bogus. At best, they independently came up with the term. Can I "prove" that at least some people were using the term in the 70s? No. At least not without doing some serious digging to try to find the term in publications--maybe just local South Florida publications--from the 70s, but I don't believe that I have false memories of people using the term way back when, at least in South Florida.
Just when I thought I was out… OK, so let's break this down, shall we? (We shall.) The term "yacht rock" was invented 25 years after the fact and is essentially meaningless. True. And false. It's meaningful in that—like all musical genres—it describes a specific type of music. And almost all musical genres are created after the fact and by the people other than the performers, so it's hardly atypical. It's not a "genre" that reflects the way that people (even people on yachts) actually listened to music during the 1970s -- nobody was making distinctions between Kenny Loggins and Gerry Rafferty, or between Toto and Chicago -- it was all "soft rock" (mediocre soft rock, to be more specific). I'm not sure why that matters—it's 2018. It describes how people listen to it now. I don't think anyone would have described Black Sabbath or Pentagram as "doom metal" or "stoner metal" in 1973, but they fit into these contemporary genres nicely. Nobody in the mid-70s would associate Neil Young or Blue Cheer with grunge—or even know what that term means—but both are now seen as architects of that sound. (And do you really think Gerry Rafferty was "mediocre soft rock"? That's crazy talk, man.) "Yacht rock" is an evocative phrase, but the reality is that the music had nothing to do with yachts, and very few of its creators or listeners had a yacht connection. (I can't imagine Donald Fagan spending more than a few minutes on a yacht without kvetching that he was seasick.) OK, so this has been discussed about 15 times in this thread, but the TL;DR version is this: Yacht Rock has NOTHING TO DO WITH LITERAL YACHTS. The yacht tag was a convenient narrative thread that the creators of the original series used to tie the story together; it was based in Marina Del Rey, everyone got together at the marina, it provided tons of funny metaphors ("sailing the seas of smooth," and the classic "When a friend is drowning in a sea of sadness, you don't just toss him a life vest, you swim one over to him."), and it captured the overall vibe of the era. The term is intended to metaphorically convey the sound—smooth, urbane SoCal opulence—it could have just as easily have been "Champagne Rock," "Malibu Rock," or "Porsche Rock." And really, do any genres specifically, literally describe the music? Look at, say, Heavy Metal—is it music performed by foundry workers? What does it have to do with literal metal? Do you think Steve Albini would describe his music with Big Black as "pigf@ck"? What does that even mean? And yet… There wasn't really a Yacht Rock "scene." Actually, there was, although they probably weren't aware of it. Michael McDonald, Donald Fagan, Kenny Loggins, David Foster, Jay Graydon, Steve Lukather, the Porcaros, and a group of other studio musicians were constantly working with each other on projects, and conversely, people outside this circle were rarely invited in—that's a scene. But, as I said in the very first sentence of this entire thread, none of this really matters. While I have very specific ideas about what this genre is—and if you plug in certain variables, it gives you an objective, consistent result—it doesn't keep me up at night. My concern about this is pretty much limited to this thread and what I put on my personal playlists. So if you don't like yacht rock or don't think it's a valid genre, that's fine. If you want to create a yacht rock playlist that's nothing but Jimmy Buffett and "The Pina Colada Song," that's cool with me. My only point is that I think it is a genre, I'm not alone, and I can objectively back up my opinion.
I got it--I was thinking of "freakbeat." I guess a lot of genre names are probably retrospective, but that one came to mind as something entirely ex post facto.
Since I love Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, and Toto, I guess I love "yacht rock"! However, I don't see the need to create a special label for that music. I just call it "'70s pop music". Odd that the idea for that genre surfaced only recently--why is it needed now? By the way, Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, and Toto are very different bands; it's difficult to imagine how they could share space in such a narrowly-defined genre.
Which, again, is fine. But defining the genre is helpful if you like a specific kind of '70s pop music. For instance, "'70s pop music" could include anything from The Osmonds to "Disco Duck" to Styx. Yacht Rock provides a constraint so that you can create a list with a particular sound. And while you suggest that Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, and Toto seem too dissimilar to share the same genre, the reality is that they're all essentially the same band—the personnel overlap is remarkable. Kenny Loggins is a bit of an outlier, but he and Michael McDonald were frequent collaborators, often contributed to each other's albums, and sometimes recorded different versions of the same song. They're A LOT more similar than you think. And conversely, bands that might seem similar, such as the Eagles, actually share almost no musicians, producers, or songwriters with the Yacht Rock bands. So the genre isn't needed, no, but it is helpful as a limiting factor. And if you plug in the variables—certain musicians, certain producers, certain songwriters, a certain era, and certain locale—you will notice that it results in a very particular, specific sound. Which I happen to really like.
I'm looking to pick up some Japanese CD reissues from Sony's "AOR City 1000" and Warners' "AOR Best Selection 1300" series. Has anyone purchased these? How do they sound, and how do they compare to earlier CD reissues? As with most others on this forum, I'd like to avoid loud/compressed releases!
I applaud your detailed and well-reasoned response to my post, which was more an expression of visceral dislike of the phrase than an impeccably logical argument. (Indeed, I knew that my claim that there was no yacht rock scene was at least somewhat dubious.) Just two quick thoughts/elaborations: I'd argue that most widely used terms describing musical genres and subgenres were coined and/or commonly used shortly after the "birth" of the genre. Bop, fusion, surf, country-rock, power pop, prog, punk, alt.country, heavy metal, minimalism, postrock, the seemingly endless list of dance music subgenres -- all of these terms were used within a few years of the genre's seminal music. In fact, I've having trouble of thinking of genres that were named decades after the fact (maybe "sunshine pop"?). Why does the timing of a descriptive label matter? I can't articulate why it matters to me, other than to say that a contemporaneous label somehow seems much more valid to me. I know, and I get the metaphor...I just don't particularly like it. Am I to understand that my opinion on this matter doesn't automatically override the opinions of the hundreds of thousands of people who like the term? Alright, I've had my say. Carry on!
So, I was a little lit, and was listening to some tunes. My wife says, "You're a Yacht Rocker." I realized that I have been listening to Paul Davis. Could this be true about me? Paul Davis was killer! In my defense, right before the Paul Davis album, I had some Arthur Brown on, 1972's Kingdom Come. Is there some sort of support group for this condition?
What I don't understand is that, how come then that there are quite a number of artists and musicians OUTSIDE of the usual Yacht Rock 'suspects' who captured so faithfully in many of their tracks and albums the sound and vibe of these same Yacht Rock artists, without any collaboration whatsoever or shared releases on their part, if it is such a particular musical genre with strict specifications? And we are talking about artists of the time (NOT 2000s) from as far as Scandinavia, Brazil and Japan, who have nothing to do with Jay Graydon, Kenny Loggins Michael McDonald, or any of the Porcaros of the 'fleet'? Without having to name some examples, when you listen to their music, it really can get any yachtier as if it was produced in a studio in Marina del Ray. And these tracks have been yachtskied by the creators of the genre scoring points in their 90s.
Could it be then that it is not so much the studio musicians but the overall sounds and vibe of the time?
The creators of "Yacht Rock" would categorize "tropical keyboards" as strictly "Nyacht." And I would agree.
