Living Through Yacht Rock … or Why Yo No Soy Marinero

There is still no shortage of affection for “yacht rock.” Listeners still enjoy Yacht Rock Radio when it comes to SiriusXM’s main channel lineup each summer, along with arguing about what songs fit. HBO’s new Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary remains a hot topic for social-media friends. Some are non-industry listeners who discovered the genre in the retroactive manner in which it was created 20 years ago. Others are the radio veterans whose careers began with playing Kenny Loggins and Christopher Cross as current acts.

“Yacht Rock” as a genre was forged in irony, and one of the big ones here is that its peak era on the radio — 1980 through 1982 — was not a good time for Top 40 radio, either musically or presentationally. Before the nautical metaphor took hold, we had already coined another one — “doldrums” — to describe early-’80s CHR, and, for me, only the early ’90s and late ’10s rival that time as a bottoming-out point. The early ’80s were the first time broadcasters wondered if Top 40 would ever rebound.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy some of the soft rock of the late ’70s/early ’80s now. Like most people, I’m inconsistent — the songs I like sound a lot like the ones I don’t. But throwing on Yacht Rock Radio every summer for an hour at a time is a much different experience than having to hear “Hot Rod Hearts” by Robbie Dupree two songs away from “Never Be the Same” by Christopher Cross in fall 1980. Or “Take It Easy on Me” by Little River Band into “Rosanna” by Toto two years later.

The biggest irony is that even as a genre grounded in R&B and fusion jazz, early-’80s soft rock became the thing that kept all but the most like-minded R&B off Top 40 radio for the best part of three years. Michael McDonald, the ubiquitous voice of pop music in that era, is clearly appreciative of what Questlove calls his “lifetime pass to the barbecue” — R&B cred forged in both multi-format airplay at the time and Hip-Hop sampling later.  But in the yacht rock era, CHR radio was often a regatta de blanc.

There’s one more irony. Early-’80s soft rock was the instrument of the “disco backlash,” but –although few would think of it that way now – in spring 1979, yacht rock’s now-defining song was disco by design. Part of what propelled “What a Fool Believes” then was its 12-inch remix, spurred by a reworking of another Ted Templeman-produced act, Nicolette Larson, a few months earlier. Together, “Lotta Love” and “What a Fool Believes” changed the notion of what kind of song could be remixed. By April, “Fool” was on Billboard’s club chart.

Joining the Rolling Stones and Rod Stewart on the dance floor was part of what restored excitement to the Doobies’ career after a three-year radio cold streak. By the time of July’s “Disco Demolition,” disco had to put on extra shuttle buses to accommodate all the incoming pop acts. The best of the bunch was “I Was Made for Loving You” by Kiss. Often those songs were flyweight (“Goodnight Tonight” by Wings; “Take Me Home” by Cher; “The Main Event-Fight” by Barbra Streisand). David Naughton came from TV and movies, not music, and never tried to have a music career afterwards, but I still regard “Makin’ It” as a moment that sunk the entire genre into self-parody.

That spring, it felt like every act had a disco single, or at least a remix. You might dispute now whether “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman” by Dr. Hook was disco, but in 1979, there was a 12-inch mix playing on the disco stations that had popped up after WKTU New York. By summer, even Helen Reddy had gone disco, covering the same songwriters that Donny & Marie Osmond chose for their foray into disco six months earlier.

When the disco backlash came, many of those pop acts (Rod, Wings, ELO, the Stones, Streisand) changed their sound and kept having hits. (Reddy and Donny & Marie were just leaving anyway.) Some of the rock acts that had started to incorporate disco became part of the peak years of Album Rock radio, even if “Another Brick in the Wall” actually begins with a nod to “Boogie Nights.” Kiss and Cher needed a decade to return to pop radio, but R&B acts such as Chic, Gloria Gaynor, and Sister Sledge never did. 

If you cherry-pick 1980-82, you still find plenty of decent hit songs. It’s easy to put together a good, only slightly revisionary playlist from any year in that era. There was excitement in another sort of bandwagon-jumping, hearing acts such as Billy Joel, Journey, or Linda Ronstadt acknowledge new wave. Through those years, there was R&B on Top 40 radio from Diana Ross, the Pointer Sisters, George Benson, Ray Parker, Jr., Quincy Jones, Stevie Wonder, the Commodores, and Al Jarreau — most of them cheerfully given their due by the creators of Yacht Rock — but the crossovers were generally AC-flavored. 

The subtext of CHR radio from fall ’79 through spring ’82 was that we were going to get away from “Ring My Bell” and back to quality music. Today it’s hard to say how “Never Be the Same” or “’65 Love Affair” by Paul Davis accomplished that. As happens during most of its doldrums, CHR often confuses “quality” with “savorless.” The songs that inspired “Uptown Funk” in that era weren’t the only ones that CHR would have done better to acknowledge. British radio had more disco and new wave; I don’t think the doldrums even existed there. 

In 1980-82, soft rock was still one genre, and even if the creators of “yacht rock” can explain why Air Supply doesn’t qualify, nobody heard them two songs away from Toto and singled out the act with more of a grounding in jazz and R&B. On the radio, they were of a piece, which is why listeners always put songs on their yacht-rock playlists that its official designators would not. And the sum total was often sleepy.

If “yacht rock” didn’t exist as a term in 1980-82, that didn’t mean that all things Michael McDonald hadn’t become at least a sub-genre. In 1986, the radio researcher Rob Balon was quoted in the trade publication Radio & Records about the danger of genre burnout — radio’s penchant for overindulging and then destroying any hot sound. Even though he wasn’t quoted about it until five years later, Balon said he first saw the phenomenon when listeners began complaining about too many Doobiesque songs. By spring 1982, the Doobies were broken up, McDonald’s solo debut was still a few months out, and there were plenty of second- and third-wave soundalikes, always a sign of an overindulged genre.

Ironically, there was a radio station in 1981-82 where the Yacht Rock coalition, as we understand it now, took shape. That was WDRQ Detroit, in a market where rock and pop always fused. Around that time, then-programmer Rick Torcasso took an AC station and began filtering in things like “Is It Love That We’re Missing” by Quincy Jones and the Brothers Johnson that had never been pop hits, along with plenty of Al Jarreau and other compatible R&B of the moment. Eventually, WDRQ evolved to R&B outright.

The “yacht rock” era on CHR wasn’t helped by the overall sterility of Top 40 itself in that era. In 1979, programmers were already embarrassed by the screaming mid-’70s era of the format, and trying to take the mellower lead of AOR radio. Now, they were trying to replicate the burgeoning AC FMs of the time. But hearing “Private Eyes” by Daryl Hall & John Oates sounded much more exciting between the hyperkinetic jingles of “Hot Hits” WCAU-FM Philadelphia, the station that reignited CHR radio in fall ’81.

I appreciated DOCKumentary more for the depth of its interviews than its analysis. The end of “yacht rock” is presented as a direct result of the rise of MTV and the sidelining of anybody like Cross who didn’t look like a rockstar. But key to the Top 40 revival of 1983-84 was the excitement of hearing R&B on the radio again after two years of heavy sedation. “The Other Woman” by Ray Parker Jr., “Sexual Healing” by Marvin Gaye, and finally “Billie Jean” and “Little Red Corvette” were the change agents. For all its association with Michael Jackson now, MTV came on board grudgingly.

That yacht rock — forged in R&B — was often what radio played instead of R&B chart hits at the time falls on its radio programmers of the time, not its artists. And now it’s impossible to avoid noting that the top two CHR records of 2024 to date are by Jack Harlow and Teddy Swims, two artists as sincere in their love of Hip-Hop and R&B as McDonald and even better received on the Hip-Hop/R&B charts. It’s pop radio that has a hard time looking past them.

At this writing, you have to get to No. 22 on the CHR chart before you find any song — the Weeknd & Playboy Carti’s “Timeless” — shared with Hip-Hop/R&B radio. More than four decades later, the R&B audience is again more generous with reverse crossover than CHR is with crossover. Kendrick Lamar certainly has the potential for multiple pop hits, but seven months ago, it felt like Beyoncé did, too.

In early summer, CHR radio felt like it might be rebounding thanks to the excitement of its summer hits. A few months later, product is again a trickle, and Nielsen’s national ratings for the format show only further slippage. I’ve recently cited Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars’ “Die With a Smile” as a beloved consensus hit that CHR could have taken further advantage of, but by itself, it’s very much a doldrums hit — two comeback artists waltzing through a downer lyric with musical grounding in ’60s MOR. It’s less satisfying when there are so few other megahits.

Today’s unavoidable artist now heard on multiple formats is Jelly Roll. Look beyond the tattoos and he recalls Kenny Rogers — an artist who found a home at Country after stops elsewhere, but who couldn’t be contained by one format. (At the moment of peak yacht rock, Rogers had just followed up his Lionel Richie collaboration by remaking a deep soul song featuring Gladys Knight & the Pips.) But Jelly Roll is also McDonald-esque in his willingness to collaborate with other artists and his current ubiquity.

In 1981, there were other places that Top 40 could have taken music from. More from the R&B charts and more of the new wave on the UK and Canadian charts would have made things better sooner. Now, Country crossovers dominate because Hip-Hop and Alternative radio are ratings-challenged, and Alternative is heavily gold-based. This generation’s yacht rock now comes from streaming, from “Bad Habit” by Steve Lacy to the current, appropriately named “Sailor Song” by Gigi Perez.

Today’s soft streamers are proof that every generation seeks its own chillout music of some sort. That “yacht rock” resonates now proves that every generation eventually broadens to enjoy similar music from other eras. You’ve probably heard “The Way You Look Tonight” at weddings in recent years, but now we’re about to hand over the radio and Billboard’s Hot 100 to Frank Sinatra (and Bing Crosby and Johnny Mathis) for a month. 

In every era, chill turns to deep freeze after a while. I enjoyed DOCKumentary, especially because of McDonald’s affability. I’m glad you’re enjoying the hits of that era again — it’s part of my job as a researcher to bring people together with the music they enjoy. But listeners really loved the thaw that followed, too, and those are still the songs we play on Classic Hits radio. Understanding that is key to at least trying to right the ship again. Instead, we keep forgetting.