Changed my avatar back to my original Yacht Rock Kenny Loggins just a day before noticing this documentary on HBO Max. I really enjoyed it. It breezed right by, a hint of summer on a cold winter's eve such as this.

Three minutes in, though: oh, no, not Molly Lambert! I guess she had some time in between episodes of a podcast about Heidi Fleiss being an epic girlboss to sit down and be interviewed for a documentary about 1977-1984 soft rock. Like, what were her credentials, that she watched the original Yacht Rock series 20some years ago? So did I. No one called me.

After that, however, lots of good interviews with Michael McDonald, Loggins, Christopher Cross, the surviving members of Toto, ?uestlove, and even oh hi, Hollywood Steve. The one thing I really disagreed with Hollywood Steve on, however, is the inclusion of Steely Dan as "yacht rock." He lays out a compelling case for why they are, which is that the various session men from Pretzel Logic through Aja turned up on all the yacht rock releases to come and thus they're sort of an ur-text of yacht rock, but the part I can't get over is that yacht rock was always Los Angeles through and through, while Steely Dan was always two New Yorkers who may have wound up in L.A. but never seemed to be 100-percent thrilled about it. There's also the fact that yacht rock, when you scrape away the layers of hipster irony that have been slapped onto it since 2006, was just the adult-contemporary schlock that people went to progressive FM stations to escape, and when they did, they found mumbling DJs playing the whole first side of Aja. Without spoiling the end of the movie too much, I suspect one of the relevant parties agrees with me.

I didn't end up watching the original series until summer of '07, and it didn't really occur to me at the time that it actually predated YouTube by a couple of months. It was hosted on some other video site originally (and originally at some hilariously low resolution, as I recall). There were a few clips of it in the movie, just enough to remind you what a silly low-budget and amateur affair the whole thing really was. You can't deny it had heart, and some pretty clever writing, but any average jamoke on YouTube today is working with better production values, and to look at it now, there's a real "kids-screwing-with-a-camcorder" feel to it. And yet look what it wrought: all these ironic yacht-rock tribute bands, non-ironic yacht-rock tribute bands, a channel on Sirius, a channel on Music Choice for those who still have cable, and this documentary. And they probably haven't seen a dime from any of it!

Anyway, it was fun and worth watching if you liked the show and/or Steely Dan.

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i was a bit perturbed by J.D. Ryznar not getting his due respects for coining this phrase in 2006. At least, i'm giving him that birthright. Yacht Rock is a thing now, it's been a channel on Sirius between June-September and it does hold up to its name with the playlists.

I thought something was up when CH changed his avatar back to LOGGINS; maybe I should give this a chance but i was really turned off by the fact that "yacht rock" has become part of the lexicon but only in the way that chuck norris facts did.

i do have a lot of drinking to do through these holidays so...we'll see.

That's an interesting comparison, because Yacht Rock and Chuck Norris memes both come from the same hazy pre-YouTube era of internet culture--the Homestar Runner era, for lack of a better term. But while Chuck Norris memes had a pretty normal meme trajectory, it seems like this yacht rock craze resurfaced out of nowhere. I don't think people were crowding to hear ironic Doobie Brothers covers by guys in sailor hats in, say, 2015. But here's Bill Simmons producing a documentary based on music that was parodied on a little-seen web series 19 years ago.

Speaking of Homestar Runner, this is another piece of web content that has stuck in my reference bank forever. "This is gonna be some good-ass banana bread," "make him an irrelevant joke," and "yer shitty music made me barf."

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I believe Steven Hyden is the story director for this documentary. I enjoy his Indie Cast podcast more than the current iteration of Sound Opinions and his Pearl Jam biography was solid. I'm hoping his book on Born in the U.S.A. us under the tree this year.

I think a permission structure was created via branding. "Yacht Rock" was a guilty pleasure for many of us. Who doesn't like "What a Fool Believes"? If he were honest Albini would have admitted he liked "Kid Charlemagne." There's a reason it's also called "Easy Listening."

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I would like to think that most of us don't need a permission structure when it comes to music. Sure, when you're in your teens and early 20's, you're going to take a lot of guff if you admit that you like "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," but by the time you've lived a little and had your priorities re-balanced, people realize that type of thing doesn't really matter.

Bill Simmons connection. Say what you want about Bill but he does know how to produce good documentaries.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Thanks, I was wondering who that was. I tried Google Lens but it was useless.

Yacht Rock is fine for me in small doses but it eventually makes me sleepy.

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"I honestly don't see a good bet on the board here."

Listening to Christopher Cross is like banging a fat chick. It's fun but you don't want your friends to see you doing it.

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Ecclesiastes 5:8

I remember Cross beating out the Wall for Grammy of the year. Aside from that remember me and you discussing Brandy at Arlington? Anyway 70s music is my guilty pleasure.

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Elections have consequences.

Yeah, I made the connection later on. It was still funny that Simmons wedged her in there just to be like "take it from me: yacht rock was pretty good." Thanks, Molly. Also enjoyed Amanda Petrusich saying that yacht rock was so antithetical to punk rock that it came back around and was actually punk rock. Thank you, walking parody of an aging gen-Xer.

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oh hi. i'm hollywood steve. you've caught me murdering a homeless person.

Amazingly, the first time I heard "What a Fool Believes" was on a school bus on WBMX's morning show. (West side radio for those of you who are not natives...) They used to play Hall and Oates as well.

Steely Dan rounded up all the LA session players and several backup singers to play on Katy Lied, The Royal Scam, and Aka. But those guys were playing gigs all over the place. That stupid XM311 Yacht Rock channel plays a lot of other crap from the era like England Dan and his gay friend.

If the genre is anything, it's Donald Fagen's maniacal perfectionism, Jeff Pocaro's sphere of drumming influence and Michael McDonald's singing (both background and with the Doobie Brothers) between the sessions for Katy Lied in 1974/1975 and roughly late 1984/early 1985.

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

See, I just can't lump Steely Dan themselves in there. Yeah, all the musicians got around, but Donald Fagen's songwriting and direction were so integral to Steely Dan, and he himself didn't have anything to do with "Love Will Keep Us Together" or any of that. They have to be partitioned from the rest of yacht rock. Bookish Jews writing songs about homeless heroin addicts and neighbors who show porn to teenagers and therapists who fuck their client's wives, pace JD Ryznar and Hollywood Steve, that's not what yacht rock is all about.

To put a finer point on it: I ironically enjoy yacht rock. I non-ironically enjoy Steely Dan.

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I agree with you. Steely Dan is not Yacht Rock, it's a predecessor. But the influences they had on the session musicians was important. Do the Doobie Brothers recruit Michael McDonald and Jeff Baxter if they aren't previously performing on Steely Dan albums?

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

The sound of Steely Dan resembles Yacht Rock...the musicianship of Steely Dan is too progressive and complex to qualify as Yacht Rock. My contempt for Steely Dan (minus the brilliant "Do It Again") is well documented here....but I think CH is sold me on them NOT being Yacht Rock.

80's Chicago, Kenny Loggins....that is 100% Yacht Rock. Can I add Air Supply into that group?

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Rick Beato just shit over the entire documentary last week.

https://youtu.be/kEYUw2kiRfc

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"When people want their version of the truth, they go find it, no matter how baseless their beliefs." -- Ken Rosenthal

I mean, I agree that Steely Dan shouldn't be lumped in with lesser acts and that Yacht Rock was just a goofy comedy sketch from the very infancy of Web 2.0, but overall, Professor Guitar needs to chill the fuck out.

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If your harshest critic is an old guy screaming "I INTERVIEWED SKUNK BAXTER!" and making Constipated Air Guitar Face to the outro of "Ride Like the Wind," you did all right. You did all right.

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I saw it last night. You have studio musicians like the Wrecking Crew and the Swampers that are celebrated, but these guys never even got so much as a magazine feature until they were accidentally discovered by a random group of people 20 years ago? I find that hard to believe.

Yeah, an unabashed bootlicker for God knows what reason. I half expected Rob Reiner to show up after the air guitar scene.

We need more people gatekeeping Yacht Rock.

MTV produced a similar documentary just a year ago, it was a bit broader encompassing all of "soft rock" so it removes any handwringing over more granular classification

https://variety.com/2022/music/news/som ... 235458074/

It was pretty good and appropriately tongue in cheek. But because this is 2020s Hollywood, it is already removed from Paramount+ and can't be found anywhere