HBO’s Music Box anthology series returns with Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, which assesses soft rock of the 1970s and early ’80s and the musicians who made it while winking at the sound’s re-emergence as a source of ironic enjoyment. Executive produced by Bill Simmons, Yacht Rock talks to the guys whose jokey early 2000s web series celebrated the music, includes commentary from prominent critics and music writers, and features appearances from Questlove, Fred Armisen, Thundercat, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, and the members of Toto. Of yacht rock, says writer Steven Hyden in the doc, “I can’t really think of another genre that was invented to describe music 25 years after the fact.”
The Gist: Back before YouTube, in the days of MySpace and Real Networks media pop-ups, a cheeky web series appeared that fixated on the smooth grooves of records from the mid-1970s and early 1980s. The “Yacht Rock” guys were dressing up as Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, their spiritual leaders of the genre they’d named, making villains out of the Eagles and their country-rock, and considering the onslaught of Hall & Oates as killers of the yacht rock ethos. Did it matter that besides Christoper Cross’s 1979 single “Sailing,” nothing creators and hosts JD Ryznar and Steve “Hollywood” Huey dubbed “yacht rock” had anything to do with boats? Not really. While they were buying these albums in record store bargain bins, sonically the jams sounded expensive, funky, and oh so smooth.
Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary goes to the source in reclaiming the sound from reductive jokery. It interviews Huey and Ryznar, who explain their metric of “yacht” or “nyacht,” how most yacht rock is soft rock but not all soft rock is yacht rock, and how Steely Dan – who decidedly did not agree to be interviewed for this doc – represent the primordial ooze from whence the yacht rock sound came. It features new interviews with Loggins and McDonald, the musician whose iconic voice remains at the vanguard of the genre. (Questlove calls McDonald’s singing that of a “funky muppet.”) And it gets into the thick of the scene in Los Angeles in the seventies, when expert studio musicians like guitarist Steve Lukather and keyboardist Steve Porcaro played with their understanding of jazz chord changes, tricky signatures, and the influence of Black music to fuel a re-thinking of the pop-rock sound.
Yacht Rock has some fun with how the name came to be, decades on from when the music was made, and pop culture’s embrace of it as a basis for memes and theme parties. But it also strives to present the work as an important part of pop music’s continuing evolution. Yacht rock had its share of cheese, and often elevated slickness to a religion. But the best of it also balanced technical mastery with an enduring groove. “Flawless,” producer and DJ Prince Paul calls a record like Steely Dan’s 1977 opus Aja. “But it still doesn’t sacrifice the soul, and that to me is pretty amazing. How do you get perfection and a soulful vibe at the same time?”
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The 2023 Paramount+ doc Sometimes When We Touch did its own assessment of the 1970s soft rock sound, with interviews of some of the same voices heard in Yacht Rock. And over on Hulu, Immediate Family is a great documentary profile of guys like guitarist Waddy Wachtel and bassist Leland Sklar, crack session musicians who played on a ton of hit music from the era.
Performance Worth Watching: In Yacht Rock, Toto’s 1982 single “Africa” is upheld as both a later example of peak form for the genre, and one of its more bizarre artifacts. White guys in Southern California, who’d spent zero time in Africa, singing about Kilimanjaro rising like Olympus above the Serengeti? Kind of problematic! And yet, the thing grooves. (Just ask Weezer.) “I think ‘Africa’ has that quality of ‘What is this?’” original “Yacht Rock” host Steve Huey says in the doc. “Where did this come from? Why are those the lyrics? Why can’t I get this out of my head?”
Memorable Dialogue: According to Steven Hyden, the Doobie Brothers are a barometer for yacht rock’s emergence and for what happened musically in the 1970s. “You look at the beginning of the seventies, and the Doobie Brothers are like this post-Woodstock, good-time boogie band that bikers listen to in bars. And then by the end of the seventies, they’ve evolved into this jazzy, pop/R&B band, using a lot of chords and playing songs in tricky time signatures. It’s a big, big change.”
Sex and Skin: The sad sack, the heartbroken fool, the torrid romance that never happened in the first place – thematically, another aspect of yacht rock is how a lot of it didn’t subscribe to the typical machismo of the cis-hetero male hard rock ideal. Questlove says yacht rock’s vulnerability and style of sexual expression actually aligns it more with emo.
Our Take: That Steve Huey makes a point in Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary to parse the hate of Steely Dan cultists, who refuse to believe their favorite band is connected to yacht rock, even though the liner notes of the Dan’s records reveal the cross-pollination of the era’s in-demand studio musicians, reveals the documentary’s gleeful music nerd heart. It’s actually full of little deep cuts like this; as it sets out to profile yacht rock’s heaviest hitters, it kind of strings together miniature biographies of each of them at the very same time. Toto, Steely Dan, the Doobies, Loggins – and Michael McDonald, who is not only a very chill interview subject, but someone with a great perspective on both the reality of how and why the music got made, and its re-evaluation through a more ironic lens. Yacht Rock is a breezy watch that manages all the sides of what it’s trying to do really well. Sure, the sound can be a source of humor. The internet is really good at mythologizing something as a joke. But the timeless piano-fied bounce of “What a Fool Believes” is no joke at all, and will likely be your next download after watching this doc.
Our Call: Stream It! Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary is a fun look back at an era of music that probably deserves more credit than to only be listened to as part of a bit. But it’s also a commentary on an influential pocket of internet culture, and how at the end of the day, irony is just another kind of love.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
