A generation ago, a few years before Miami Vice made yachting seem accessible to young police investigators, there was a softer kind of music on radios across North America.
No longer would disco rule the airwaves. A deliberate antidote to excitement, soft rock became known derisively as yacht rock over the last couple of decades.
So Sirius XM joined the yacht rock revolution and earlier this summer started playing soft rock hits of the late 70s and early 80s.
People of my generation grew up on this stuff. I’d frankly be more respectful of my kids, if in a few years, they started liking Christopher Cross and Steely Dan more than whatever heavier rap or metal or New Country flavour of the month is out there at that time. “Body’s like a back road”? More like “body’s like a cool, calm day on the lake."
See, yacht rock isn’t cool to anyone. No one listening to Rupert Holmes’ Escape (The Pina Colada Song) thinks they’re cool. It’s music by affluent, predominantly white musicians for exactly that audience. They’re eminently singable, catchy little numbers with the social impact of a white t-shirt.
So what songs are these? Well, America’s Sister Golden Hair ties with Loggins and Messina’s Vahevala for the most plays in the late July, early August count from the station. Neither of these songs will be inspiring revolutions or are pretending anything other than scientifically designed for future use in elevators. Tied for third on the list is Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, more notable for hooky guitar swells and a seemingly endless saxophone solo, and Canadian Gino Vaneilli’s I Just Wanna Stop, which uses its saxophone solo to grind the slow, prodding ballad to a screeching halt.
Peter Quill, aka Star Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy, will be happy to know that Looking Glass’ Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl) is in the top 10.
Elsewhere in the frequently played list on the station are Cross’ Ride Like The Wind, most notably used in baseball highlight packages from the early 1980s that I always somehow think of. Somehow on a yacht rock station, that gets played more than Cross’ Sailing, which might be the yacht rockiest child ever created. It’s a yacht rock song about yachting, and there is absolutely no way to top that. It should be the national anthem of whoever separates to form Yachtville or Yachtopia or whatever they want to call it.
The most frequently played Toto song on the yacht rock station is indeed not Africa but Rosanna, which is another highlight of yacht rock songs – they need to involve a woman from a previous relationship and either a need to move on or re evaluate what’s going on there, or just wistful reminiscence.
The Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers rate high on the playlist, as does solo McDonald. They can almost make compete sentences if you jam them together. Minute by minute, I gotta try what a fool believes. I keep forgettin’ you belong to me.
Also, Ya Mo Be There.
There’s something to be said about Air Supply when even a specifically soft rock station that has little time for them (like most of us in 2018), but All Out Of Love is the most frequently played song at 48th most popular on the station. Even in their heyday, no one could possibly have named a member of that band.
All bands in the era could have been accused of yacht rock. Fleetwood Mac had Dreams, Gypsy, Everywhere and Rhiannon, for example. Chilliwack had My Girl (Gone, Gone, Gone). The Eagles performed The Long Run and Best Of My Love directly into the ears of those with plenty of time for their yachts and no time to give a hoot about anything else.
Yacht rock may have reached its peak in 1986 when the Beach Boys (or a version of them that had enough original members to qualify) recorded Kokomo, perhaps the softest, least exciting song in the history of music. It’s yacht rock on Ambien, and perhaps somehow the Michael McDonalds’ and Hall & Oates’ of the world knew they could never top it. The genre died like the faded pastels worn by many of its musicians.
And so we stand here a generation later, many of our parents possibly falling in love to these hopelessly inoffensive songs like Rickie Lee Jones’ Chuck E.’s In Love. The artists and songwriters took every Grammy in the era, while this generation of mine defied our parents by willfully ignoring their songs and believing the 70s and 80s belonged to either disco or punk.
Next time you’re on your luxury yacht down at Boundary Dam, crank up the Bertie Higgins or Michael Martin Murphey and remember a time when this lifestyle was just a distant dream.
