Netflix & Chill #108: Yacht Rock A Dockumentary

Am I a yacht rock superfan? Not really. I know the music and when the mood takes me, I'll throw on a playlist on Spotify and jam out a little, but little more than that. Did I know where the term came from? No. Did I know how it developed when it did? No. But the new documentary on MAX, Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary gave me all the answers to my questions and then some. I'll be honest: I watched this more out of curiosity than anything else. I'm glad I did.

Yacht Rock developed from a web series that started around 2005 or so and basically, a bunch of friends would raid the $1 bins at the local record store and found themselves listening to a lot of the artists that came to make up the 'yacht rock' genre and dubbed it that because it sounds like 'music that makes you feel like you were on a yacht.' (The super crazy aspect of all this: this is a web series that predates YouTube. It's now on YouTube of course, but if you want to talk about a 'deep cut' of the internet, this would qualify.) 

It seems like this started as a fun project for them to do, but the more they listened to the music, the more fascinated and appreciative they became of it, which, I think more than anything else, led to this documentary. You don't think about the artistry involved in the music you listen to all that much these days-- I mean, I'm sure some people do, but yacht rock came about not from the people at the front of the band, but rather the folks in the background. In the late 70s, there was a core group of session musicians that cross-pollinated their way across multiple albums and artists, most notably Steely Dan. They were, as a group, dedicated to their craft and Steely Dan especially drove an obsessive pursuit of perfection- they had to get every chord and every note just right. (The documentary diverges into a meditation on the importance of Steely Dan's album Aja and how stereo salespeople used it to demonstrate how good speakers could be-- which is part of the reason why I have it on vinyl.)

Some of these artists from that core group of session musicians started branching out on their own while at the same time continuing to work on seemingly everything. (There's an old Rick Moranis SCTV sketch that seems to be pretty damn accurate based on this documentary.) Michael McDonald and the Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins (post-Loggins and Messina), Christopher Cross lead the way, and eventually Toto and more beyond them.

What killed the genre? Ironically enough, MTV. We think of MTV as being a channel that just plays reruns of Ridiculousness these days but the arrival of the music video turned music into a highly visual medium and a lot of these fellas weren't all that visually appealing or interested in crafting music that way. They were after the right notes and the right chords and making the best music they possibly could. But their background as session musicians kicked back: Toto (or various members of Toto) wrote and performed on Thriller, but it seemed like the peak of yacht rock was over.

Then hip-hop exploded and with it, sampling. 

I think that one of the more underrated aspects of this documentary was how non-racial appreciation for this music is. They feature QuestLove and Thundercat, and there were artists like Brenda Russell who were in on the action themselves. There was enough crossover with R&B and Soul that it's not really surprising. But with sampling came a new resurgence in appreciation for this music. Warren G used a Michael McDonald song for 'Regulate.' De La Soul used some of Steely Dan's 'Peg' for one of their tracks and now, of course, with the web series, this became a genre all its own. 

Overall, this is a tight, taut little documentary. It's an hour and a half, it covers all the bases and many of the original artists involved that are still around feature and are very generous with their time. Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, and Kenny Loggins all feel like really chill dudes that you'd love to hang out with, even today. (Though I like finding out that Christopher Cross sold a lot of weed to finance his first album and wrote 'Ride Like the Wind' traveling between Austin and Houston while on acid and still seems like a pretty chill dude today.) The punch line to all of this, of course, belongs to Donald Fagen of Steely Dan. Steely Dan is generally treated as the progenitor of the genre, but when the director- doing what a good director should, calls and asks him for a comment, he tells the director to 'go fuck himself' and then hangs up. My Grade: **** out of ****