Yacht rock is not a real genre of music. It's a label that was retroactively applied to a certain form of smooth, mellow '70s and '80s pop music, and it comes from a series of comedy videos that started in the '00s. Some of the artists depicted on that series, like Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, have embraced the term, playing yacht rock tours and appearing in the HBO documentary on the subject. Others, like Steely Dan's Donald Fagen, are not into it. Add Daryl Hall to the latter group.
The music that Daryl Hall made with his extremely estranged ex-partner John Oates often appears in yacht rock playlists, and Hall was portrayed as an antagonist figure in the old Yacht Rock videos. Now, Hall is saying how he feels about that, and he's not holding back. In the most recent episode of the Rick Rubin-produced Broken Record podcast, Hall talks to interviewer Justin Richmond. As American Songwriter reports, Hall takes that opportunity to go in on the entire idea of yacht rock:
This is something I don't understand. First of all, yacht rock was a fucking joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre. I don't even understand it. I never understood it... It’s just R&B, with maybe some jazz in there. It’s mellow R&B, smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is...
People misjudged us because they couldn’t label us... They always came up with all this kind of crap, soft rock and yacht rock and all this other nonsense. And none of it, none of it really describes anything that I do, really.
I really thought that Daryl Hall could go for that, but it turns out he can't.
UPDATE: Questlove chimed in on Stereogum’s Instagram. He thinks that ship has sailed.
