The yacht rock playlist on Spotify has more than 1.6 million followers, SiriusXM dedicates an entire channel to yacht rock, and tribute bands, themed cruises, and documentaries continue to propel yacht rock’s resurgence.
But what exactly is yacht rock? Crosby, Stills & Nash’s “Southern Cross,” an ode to open-ocean sailing, is not yacht rock. Nor is the Beach Boys’ island-hopping anthem “Kokomo.” And none of Jimmy Buffett’s songs, with their laid-back tropical vibes, qualify either.
While these songs may appear on some yacht rock playlists, they don’t meet the narrow parameters defined by those who retroactively popularized the term.
"'Yacht Rock’ as a term, phenomenon, or mini-genre didn’t exist at all until the mid-00s,” explains Christopher Cwynar, an assistant professor in Communications at Trent University.
Yacht Rock Genre Coined After the Fact
Yacht rock is a 21st-century concept popularized by a group of music-obsessed friends—JD Ryznar, Hunter Stair, Dave Lyons, Lane Farnham, and Steve Huey—for the online comedy series Yacht Rock on Channel 101 in 2005, which coincidentally was the same year YouTube launched, helping it become a viral sensation.
“Fusing softer rock with jazz and R&B, very polished production, and being centered around that studio musician culture in Southern California in the late '70s and early '80s are the three main defining elements of yacht rock,” says Huey in The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s by Greg Prato. “To us, it’s not just soft rock; it’s a specific subset of soft rock that ideally has those elements.”
“Apparently, we weren’t the first people to ever put those two words together. But it was popularized by the internet series, so as far as 99 percent of America is concerned, that is where the phrase came from,” Huey explains.
“In essence, the show invented a genre that was hiding in plain sight but never previously had a name as they devised it,” says Chris Molanphy in his Slate podcast, Hit Parade. “The yacht was meant to be a metaphor about the high-end quality of the music. But on the internet, folks took the nautical idea literally, even though Ryznar had named the music for playing while on a boat, not about the boat per se.”
The original series idea, about a couple of jewel thieves who lived on a boat and listened to yacht rock, didn’t take off. But its spin-off—a comedic take full of goofy hijinks about the artists behind the genre—became a hit, spawning several podcasts (Yacht or Nyacht, Beyond Yacht Rock) and a space in the music lexicon.
When Was 'Yacht Rock' Music Created?
Tony H. Grubesic, a professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of California at Riverside, has analyzed social networks to explore the development and transformation of yacht rock’s collaborative musical network over time. According to Grubesic, the bulk of yacht rock coalesced around a handful of studio musicians in the late 1970s, peaked in 1981 and 1982, and began to fade away in 1985.
A critical moment for the genre, says Grubesic, was when Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan, who would go on to record the yacht rock hits “FM (No Static at All)” and “Peg,” moved to Los Angeles in the early 1970s.
“Fagen and Becker wanted to blend R&B, rock, and jazz elements,” Grubesic explains, and through “recording with most, if not all, of the major studio musicians in Los Angeles,” they increased the likelihood that these musicians would go on to collaborate with one another.
Another pivotal moment was the development of Boz Scaggs’ album, Silk Degrees, says Grubesic. Besides producing the yacht rock hit “Lowdown,” Silk Degrees was the first time the core nucleus of what would become the band Toto—with David Paich on synth, David Hungate on bass, and Jeff Porcaro on drums—recorded in a studio together, Grubesic explains. Toto would eventually go on to produce the seminal yacht rock hits “Rosanna” and “Africa.”
A Reaction to Hectic 1960s
Yacht rock, while only defined as such more than two decades later, was very much a product of its time.
“The counterculture had burned brightly with tremendous emotion and fervent action, but it was pretty exhausted as a cultural and political force in many respects by the mid-'70s,” says Cwynar.
“It’s fair to say that listeners were ready for something a bit easier to digest sonically and thematically after how hectic the late '60s and early '70s had been.”
“As the United States started the process of leaving Vietnam, healing from the race riots of the 1960s and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., people needed a break. Not just from these traumatic events but also in their music. The music we label as yacht rock today provided that break,” says Grubesic.
