Yacht rock (originally known as the West Coast sound or adult-oriented rock) is a broad music style and aesthetic commonly associated with soft rock, one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. Drawing on sources such as smooth soul, smooth jazz, R&B, and disco, common stylistic traits include high-quality production, clean vocals, and a focus on light, catchy melodies. The term yacht rock was coined in 2005 by the makers of the online comedy video series Yacht Rock, who connected the music with the popular Southern Californian leisure activity of boating. It was considered a pejorative term by some music critics.

Definition
The term yacht rock did not exist contemporaneously with the music the term describes, which was produced from 1975 to 1984. It refers to “adult-oriented rock” or the “West Coast Sound”, which became identified with yacht rock in 2005, when the term was coined in J. D. Ryznar et al.’s online video series of the same name. Many “yacht rockers” included nautical references in their lyrics, videos, and album artwork, exemplified by Christopher Cross’s anthemic track, “Sailing” (1979). Long mocked for “its saccharine sincerity and garish fashion”, the original stigma attached to the music has lessened since about 2015.

In 2014, AllMusic’s Matt Colier identified the “key defining rules of the genre:”
“keep it smooth, even when it grooves, with more emphasis on the melody than on the beat”
“keep the emotions light, even when the sentiment turns sad (as is so often the case in the world of the sensitive yacht-rocksman)”
“always keep it catchy, no matter how modest or deeply buried in the tracklist the tune happens to be”

The “exhilaration of escape” is “essential to yacht”, according to journalist and documentary filmmaker Katie Puckrik. She quoted the lyrics of Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind” (1979), “to make it to the border of Mexico”, as an example of the aspirational longing that demonstrates “the power of the genre”. Thwarted desire is another key element that counters the “feelgood bounce” of yacht in the same song. Puckrik identified a sub-genre, “dark yacht”, exemplified in Joni Mitchell’s “accidental yacht rock” song “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” (1975), which described the “tarnished love” of “a woman trapped in a big house and a loveless marriage”.

According to Mara Schwartz Kuge, who worked in the L.A. music industry for two decades, “Soft rock was a genre of very popular pop music from the 1970s and early 1980s, characterized by soft, mostly acoustic guitars and slow-to-mid tempos … most people have generalized the term to mean anything kind of soft-and-1970s-ish, including artists like Rupert Holmes. Not all yacht rock is soft, either: Toto’s ‘Hold the Line’ and Kenny Loggins’ ‘Footloose’ are both very yacht rock but not soft rock.”

Comprehensively defining yacht rock remains difficult, despite agreement that its central elements are “aspirational but not luxurious, jaunty but lonely, pained but polished”. Journalist Jack Seale stated that, as in other “micro-genres”, certain albums of artists who are accepted as proponents are “arbitrarily ruled in or out”. For example, Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1982) is accepted as yacht rock, but Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977) is not.

Yacht Rock creators
Yacht Rock web series co-creators Ryznar, Steve Huey, Hunter Stair, and David Lyons have attempted to apply precision to what is defined as yacht rock, and have been critical of overly expansive definitions of the term. In 2016, they invented the term “nyacht rock” to refer to songs that have sometimes been classified as yacht rock but that they felt did not fit the definition. On their podcasts Beyond Yacht Rock and Yacht or Nyacht?, they have categorized various songs as being either within or outside of the genre.

Factors that the four list as relevant to yacht rock include:
High production value
Use of “elite” Los Angeles–based studio musicians and producers associated with yacht rock
Jazz and R&B influences
Use of electric piano
Complex and wry lyrics about heartbroken, foolish men, particularly involving the word “fool”
An upbeat rhythm called the “Doobie Bounce”

Ryznar and company have argued that many artists sometimes associated with yacht rock, particularly the folk-driven soft rock of Gordon Lightfoot and Eagles, fall outside the scope of the term as originally conceived.[5] They have also disputed the use of the term as an umbrella for any song whose lyrics include nautical references, opting for the term “marina rock” for bands close to the scene but lacking a few elements, such as Rupert Holmes and Hall & Oates. The term’s inventors consider Michael McDonald the most influential yacht rock artist.

Origins
The socio-political and economic changes that contributed to the emergence of the genre have recently been described by journalists like Steven Orlofsky, and by documentary-film maker Katie Puckrik. Orlofsky pointed out that some contemporaneous pop groups such as Fleetwood Mac, Steely Dan, and Supertramp were well-respected by critics and listeners.[23] Yacht rock was art “untouched by the outside world”. By contrast to what followed, it “was probably the last major era of pop music wholly separated from the politics of its day”. Yacht rock represented an “introspective individualism” that emerged after the death of the “mass-movement idealism” of the 1960s. Its “reassuringly vague escapism” was boosted by the rise of FM radio which brought together two consequences of gender emancipation: women who controlled household spending and men who “felt freer to convey their emotions in song”.

The roots of yacht rock can be traced to the music of the Beach Boys, whose aesthetic was the first to be “scavenged” by acts like Rupert Holmes, according to Jacobin’s Dan O’Sullivan. Captain & Tennille, who were members of the Beach Boys’ live band, won a Best Record Grammy in 1975, for “Love Will Keep Us Together”, a song that composer Neil Sedaka acknowledged was inspired in part by a Beach Boys riff. O’Sullivan also cites the Beach Boys recording of “Sloop John B” (1966) as the origin of yacht rock’s predilection for the “sailors and beachgoers” aesthetic that was “lifted by everyone, from Christopher Cross to Eric Carmen, from ‘Buffalo Springfield’ folksters like Jim Messina to ‘Philly Sound’ rockers like Hall & Oates”.

Some of the most popular yacht rock acts (who also collaborated on each other’s records) included Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, and Toto.

Resurgence
Around 2016, positive reappraisals of the genre began to appear in The Guardian, The Week, and on BBC Four, which broadcast Puckrik’s two-part documentary, I Can Go for That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock, in June 2019. (That documentary is a play on the 1981 Hall & Oates song “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)”.)

Orlofsky has argued that the genre’s resurgence is partly due to its function as an antidote to the negativity of the Trump era in the US just as in its original context, when yacht rock created “the perfect soundtrack for listeners trying to ignore Watergate and Vietnam”, it now again represents “a defiant, fingers-planted-firmly-within-ears disregard of any and all political unrest”.

New yacht rock bands have formed to cater to fans. Among the bands are Young Gun Silver Fox from London,[30] Yacht Rock Revue from Atlanta, and Yachtley Crew from Los Angeles.

Radio format
The yacht rock radio format can be found on both terrestrial radio and satellite radio stations. SiriusXM offers a yacht rock channel seasonally to subscribers, and also streams the channel year-round via their Sirius XM mobile application.

The format has also been adopted by several commercial radio stations, either as a variant of soft adult contemporary, or as a standalone format. Self proclaimed yacht rock stations include WKEY-FM in the Florida Keys, WWMK in Northern Michigan, WINX-FM, KZOT 1180 AM, Omaha, NE, and WTWV-FM in Virginia Beach.

Reception and legacy
A 2012 Jacobin article described yacht rock as “endlessly banal, melodic and inoffensive, fit to be piped into Macy’s changing rooms”. The article describes the popularity of yacht rock as reflective of a regressive Reagan-era American society and “about the garden of nightmares America had become”. According to the Jacobin article, yacht rock served as “an escape from blunt truths” about sociopolitical issues of the day. In an article in The New Inquiry, music scholar J. Temperance stated that yacht rock “sterilized the form of its soul and blues elements and instead emphasized disinterested, intentionally trite lyrical themes”. In a uDiscovermusic article, Paul Sexton expressed how yacht rock as a genre seemed to “exude privileged opulence: of days in expensive recording studios followed by hedonistic trips on private yachts”.[38] According to writer Max McKenna in a 2018 Popmatters article, the lack of political messaging in the yacht rock genre is a “conservative gesture(s) flying under the radar in a climate of poptimist reappraisal”.

In response to the Jacobin article, music scholar J. Temperance wrote in The New Inquiry that, rather than being a reactionary genre, yacht rock was essential to the growth of pop music in a time of “cultural darkness”, “serving as a dialectical pole to progressive rock as well as to punk, postpunk and even proto-postpunk, spurring drastic retrenchments”. J. Temperance attributed the “smooth” sound that is characteristic of yacht rock to an indifferent approach to capitalist culture and a “regressive tolerance of allegedly transgressive music with a truly liberatory anality” by using existing symbols rather than create new anti-establishment symbols that are eventually added into the establishment symbols. The New Inquiry article describes the role of yacht rock as a genre that would help people differentiate music appreciation from status by using common symbols and “rendering the popular into the smooth”.

Yacht rock had also faced racial criticism, given the genre’s associations with “the revival of white rock forms” as writer Max McKenna stated in the 2018 Popmatters article.[39] Wesley Morris compares in a New York Times op-ed piece the recognition given to black artists and white artists who possess the “absurd” quality of blackness in their music. Due to its perceived lack of political involvement and borrowed elements from black music genres, yacht rock has garnered the perception of racial ignorance amongst certain critics of the genre. The Jacobin article described Michael McDonald, a musician well known within the genre of yacht rock, as a “bleached, blue-eyed soul cracker”.

Yacht rock is listed as a genre on Spotify, Amazon Music, AccuRadio, and Pandora. Since 2015, there has been a “Yacht Rock” channel alongside one for “Yacht Soul” on Sirius XM Satellite Radio. The channel reverts to the off-season channel after summer, but is available year-round on the SXM app. iHeartRadio also has a dedicated “Yacht Rock Radio” station that airs this format 24/7 on its website and app.

In 2018, Jawbone Press released The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s by author Greg Prato, which explored the entire genre’s history.[43] The book featured a foreword by Fred Armisen (who would later spoof the genre on an episode of the Emmy Award-nominated mockumentary series Documentary Now with Bill Hader as the fictional band known as The Blue Jean Committee and released the

Tracks in the Yacht Rock Top 100

1	The Doobie Brothers	What a Fool Believes
2	Kenny Loggins	This Is It
3	Christopher Cross	Sailing
4	Christopher Cross	Ride Like the Wind
5	Player	Baby Come Back
6	Seals & Croft	Summer Breeze
7	Gerry Rafferty	Baker Street
8	Rupert Holmes	Escape
9	Toto	Rosanna
10	Boz Scaggs	Lowdown
11	Ambrosia	Biggest Part of Me
12	Michael McDonald	I Keep Forgettin’
13	Steely Dan	Peg
14	Toto	Africa
15	England Dan & John Ford Coley	I’d Really Love to See You Tonight
16	Looking Glass	Brandy
17	Steely Dan	Hey Nineteen
18	Atlanta Rhythm Section	So Into You
19	Robbie Dupree	Steal Away
20	Little River Band	Reminiscing
21	Ace	How Long
22	Jay Ferguson	Thunder Island
23	Bobby Caldwell	What You Won’t Do for Love
24	Pablo Cruise	Love Will Find a Way
25	Little River Band	Cool Change
26	Daryl Hall & John Oates	Kiss on My List
27	Eagles	I Can’t Tell You Why
28	Bertie Higgins	Key Largo
29	James Ingram & Michael McDonald	Yah Mo B There
30	Starbuck	Moonlight Feels Right
31	Lionel Richie	All Night Long
32	Fleetwood Mac	Dreams
33	10cc	I’m Not in Love
34	Al Stewart	Year of the Cat
35	Daryl Hall & John Oates	Sara Smile
36	Orleans	Still the One
37	Firefall	You Are the Woman
38	Bob Welch	Sentimental Lady
39	Paul Davis	Cool Night
40	America	You Can Do Magic
41	Kenny Loggins	Heart to Heart
42	Boz Scaggs	Lido Shuffle
43	Bill Withers & Grover Washington, Jr	Just the Two of Us
44	Daryl Hall & John Oates	Rich Girl
45	Al Stewart	Time Passages
46	Ambrosia	How Much I Feel
47	Nicolette Larson	Lotta Love
48	Steely Dan	FM
49	Steely Dan	Deacon Blues
50	Orleans	Dance with Me
51	Crosby, Stills & Nash	Southern Cross’
52	Jackson Browne	Somebody’s Baby
53	Michael McDonald	Sweet Freedom
54	America	Ventura Highway
55	The Alan Parsons Project	Eye in the Sky
56	Poco	Crazy Love
57	Kenny Loggins with Stevie Nicks	Whenever I Call You Friend
58	Chicago	Saturday in the Park
59	Herb Alpert	Route 101
60	The Doobie Brothers	Minute by Minute
61	Dr. Hook	When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman
62	George Benson	Give Me the Night
63	Ambrosia	You’re the Only Woman
64	Climax Blues Band	Couldn’t Get It Right
65	George Benson	Breezin’
66	The Sanford/Townsend Band	Smoke from a Distant Fire
67	Olivia Newton-John	Magic
68	Christopher Cross	Arthur’s Theme
69	Fleetwood Mac	You Make Loving Fun
70	Air Supply	Lost in Love
71	Earth, Wind & Fire	After the Love Has Gone
72	Michael Jackson	Human Nature
73	Gerry Rafferty	Right Down the Line
74	Gino Vannelli	I Just Wanna Stop
75	Steely Dan	Do It Again
76	Blues Image	Ride Captain Ride
77	Donald Fagen	I.G.Y.
78	Chuck Mangione	Feels So Good
79	Seals & Croft	Diamond Girl
80	Al Jarreau	Mornin’
81	America	A Horse with No Name
82	Daryl Hall & John Oates	I Can’t Go for That
83	Exile	Kiss You All Over
84	Todd Rundgren	I Saw the Light
85	Elvis Bishop	Fooled Around and Fell in Love
86	Bread	Make It with You
87	Dave Mason	We Just Disagree
88	Bill Withers	Lovely Day
89	Dr. Hook	Sexy Eyes
90	Paul Davis	I Go Crazy
91	Firefall	Just Remember I Love You
92	Walter Egan	Magnet and Steel
93	Christopher Cross	All Right
94	Pablo Cruise	Whatcha Gonna Do?
95	Andrew Gold	Lonely Boy
96	Boz Scaggs	JoJo
97	Steely Dan	Dirty Work
98	The Beach Boys	Sail on Sailor
99	Smokey Robinson	Being with You
100	Gary Wright	Dream Weaver
101	America	Sister Golden Hair
102	Herb Alpert	Rise
103	Billy Ocean	Caribbean Queen
104	Toto	Hold the Line
105	Benny Mardones	Into the Night
106	Gino Vannelli	Living Inside Myself
107	George Benson	Turn Your Love Around
108	Bread	Baby I’m A Want You
109	The Doobie Brothers	It Keeps You Runnin’
110	Christopher Cross	Never Be the Same
111	Carly Simon	You Belong to Me
112	Michael McDonald	I Gotta Try