Summer Means Yacht Rock

"Sittin' In" is a very underappreciated album. And that is a very good driving song.

 

I don’t care what anyone says, this is a great song.

Isn’t half of Starlord’s playlist from his mom yacht rock?

In there is no way in hell we should be pronouncing “yacht” like “yaht.”

 

"Shakedown Cruise" was a Jay Ferguson follow that deserved more airplay. I think the suggestive lyrics hurt it, but great hooks throughout.

 

Fleetwood Mac was really the Beatles of yacht rock.

 

I was running errands the other day and this beaut just landed out of nowhere.

The kind of song my mother would have on the radio while transporting my ass to the orthodontist, in a car filled with cigarette smoke.
1976-84 is my happy zone in American culture.
I long for some return to it in any way that I can see.

 

This was about the time I became interested in music, and it was an interesting time in retrospect. There was a definite hard wall between pop and rock; AC/DC was a pioneer in breaking this wall down. This was also the Urban Cowboy era where country crossed over to pop. This was pre-MTV as well, so few acts from the UK broke through other than the established ones like McCartney, Queen and Elton John (whose "Little Jeannie" is the very essence of yacht rock). And there was the tail-end of disco with songs like Funky Town charting as well.

 

It was a weird time on the charts.
A random scan of 1982 turns up The Cars (New Wave), Juice Newton (pop country), Rod Stewart (dabbled in all genres at all times), Crosby Stills and Nash (Southern rock), Van Halen and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, for fuck's sake.

 

Disco was dead and the second English Invasion hadn't really gotten here in full force yet, so mainstream FM radio was all over the place between 1981-83. In my previous life before actually doing something relevant, I was Midnight Mark, working midnight to 6 a.m. six nights a week at a Bay Area radio station that was Drake Chenault's version of Yacht Rock. Everything from Lionel Ritchie to Spandau Ballet to Kenny Rogers to Sade to Toto to Hall and Oates. If it lulled you to sleep, it was a perfect fit.

EDIT: Drake Chenault was a major radio syndication company that distributed music formats, particularly for automated FM stations.

 

I look at yacht rock this way, did trump listen to it in the early 1980s while cheating on his wife? Did his mistress listen to it?

 

Wut?

 

CSN literally has a self titled album cover with them lounging on a yacht

 

Decidedly non-Southern rock band Thin Lizzy got a ton of airplay on Southern rock stations, as did CSN (and in a good year, CSNY).