User:Taekimbuedu/Yacht rock

Political Messaging
After the term yacht rock was popularized by the web series of the same name, yacht rock has garnered negative academic and critical reception reasons such as its lack of deep political messaging within its lyrics.

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 popularization of Yacht rock over alternative genres of music 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 was a music genre that attempted to act as "an escape from blunt truths" as opposed to engaging with the sociopolitical issues prevalent in the Reagan era. Johnny Black shared a similar sentiment of yacht rock lacking in any profound lyrical content in a 100.9 The Eagle article by stating that yacht rock was a genre defined by "too much production, over-processed vocals, and non-threatening lyrics". In an article by 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." According to writer Max McKenna in a 2018 Popmatters article that 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."

Independent music scholar J. Temperance wrote an article in the New Inquiry as a response to the 2012 Jacobin article criticizing the lack of profound lyrical substance in most of the yacht rock genre. According to the New Inquiry article ,yacht rock was essential to the growth of pop music in a time of "cultural darkness" and "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 the people differentiate music appreciation from status by using common symbols and "rendering the popular into the smooth."

Racial criticism has also been prevalent for yacht rock with the genre's associations with "the revival of white rock forms" as writer Max McKenna stated in the 2018 Popmatters article. Wesley Morris compares in a New York Times op-ed piece the recognition given to black artists and white artists that 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".

Inspired music
Yacht rock bears strong similarities to the Japanese genre of city pop in that they both peaked in the early 1980s, featured jazz and R&B influences arranged and produced by elites in their fields, and gained newfound popularity in the 2010s through the Internet. The link between city pop and yacht rock was made explicit in 1984 when Tatsuro Yamashita, one of Japan's most influential city pop artists and producers, traveled to California to record the album Big Wave, a mix of Beach Boys covers and original English-language compositions written in collaboration with Alan O'Day.

Yacht rock had some level of influence on the creation of progressive rock, punk rock, postpunk, and even proto-postpunk.

Elements of yacht rock have been adopted by new acts such as Vampire Weekend, Foxygen, and Carly Rae Jepsen while the vaporwave genre of electronic music, which began in the 2010s, appropriated the "nautical iconography" of yacht rock.

The 2017 album by Thundercat, Drunk, featured a song that included guest vocalists Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, entitled "Show You the Way" (all performed the song together on an episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon the same year).

The band Sugar Ray's 2019 album Little Yachty is a conscious homage to yacht rock; it includes a cover of the 1979 Rupert Holmes song "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)", which lead singer Mark McGrath has called "the torch bearer of all things yacht rock".


 * “The Birth of the Uncool: Yacht Rock and Libidinal Subversion.” The New Inquiry, The New Inquiry, 4 Sept. 2012, thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-birth-of-the-uncool-yacht-rock-and-libidinal-subversion/.
 * Black, Johnny. “What Is 'Yacht Rock' and Why Do We Love It?” 100.9 The Eagle, Alpha Media LLC, 28 July 2020, www.1009theeagle.com/what-is-yacht-rock-and-why-do-we-love-it/.


 * McKenna, Max. “Reactionary Rockism: The Dangerous Obsession with ‘Authenticity’ in Indie Rock, PopMatters.” PopMatters, PopMatters Media, Inc., 13 Aug. 2018, www.popmatters.com/reactionary-rockism-2595467402.html.


 * Morris, Wesley. “Why Is Everyone Always Stealing Black Music?” The New York Times, The New York Times, 14 Aug. 2019, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/music-black-culture-appropriation.html.


 * Sexton, Paul. “Yacht Rock: A Boatload of Not-so-Guilty Pleasures.” UDiscover Music, Universal Music Group, 18 Sept. 2022, www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/yacht-rock-history/.


 * “The Yacht Rock Counterrevolution.” Jacobin, Remeike Forbes, 9 Apr. 2012, jacobin.com/2012/09/the-yacht-rock-counterrevolution/.