What exactly is yacht rock? Apparently, the term took off thanks to an online video series from 2006. I did not know that. As the term itself has somewhat of a pejorative tinge, you can probably imagine what the show is like. Mallrat's star Jason Lee makes a guest appearance, if that gives you any idea. Chris Rea isn't mentioned, and Giorgio Moroder... well, let's just say that when I read the description of the episode in which he appears on Wikipedia, I shot my best from-not-getting-it-to-being-so-offended-it-that-it-just-got-reeeeally-awkward-in-0.006-milliseconds expression at the monitor. That's a move I learned from Simon, this German exchange student I was friends with in high school... 18 years in the US has forever etched an appreciation for irony in my DNA, so I can't do it right and I'd never actually use it on another human being, but in the hands of a master like Simon it's perhaps the most potent weapon in the fight to keep the Continent irony free.
Although Pat's an American, he's knows the handshake. He's met countless "whoah, are you fucking serious!?!?!"s head on preaching the Gospel of George Michael in that heathen nation. He's so post-irony that if he were a Mortal Kombat character, he'd finish you off with production values. It wouldn't be one of those cutesy friendship finishes either; it'd be bloody as hell and there wouldn't be anything funny or cute or unexpected about it: unslinging the studio reel of "Everything She Wants" from the back of his skull-plated armor, he'd cut your head off with the bass line of the 12" extended mix and you'd be like fuuuuuck, that shit's bad ass. Without even the slightest hint of irony.
The term "yacht rock" started as an internet meme, and it looks like they just kind of ran with it. But now that it's out there, there's a lot of questions that need answering. Judging by the posts to date, Pat looks ready to get down and dirty and tackle the question of what yacht rock and its adjacent genres are. And I can't wait to read it... Drop Aztek is, after all, about pointlessly minute categorization. And if ever there were a musical genre begging to be broken down and classified, it's yacht rock.
According to the Wikipedia article for the abovementioned show, "'yacht rock' is a name used to retrospectively describe the soft rock format that peaked in popularity between the years of 1975 and 1984. In part, the term relates to the stereotype of the yuppie yacht owner, enjoying smooth music while out for a sail." Examples include [it would be pointless for me to list names because you'll be like "I never heard of that song." No, you have, and you probably know large parts of it by heart, you just don't know who sang it or what it's called, so check out the 366 days of yacht rock, where you'll find plenty of videos]. Audiophiles and record collectors in Europe (Germany's Michael Ruetten and Jazzanova, for example) and comments on relevant videos on YouTube refer to something that seems to overlap with yacht rock to a large degree by the acronym AOR, which can either mean Album Oriented Rock or Adult Oriented Rock. Now the first links to the English wikipedia article for Album oriented rock, and the second to the Swedish article of the same name. The definitions differ enormously, with the Swedish entry (which I ran through Google translate, obviously) treating the two AORs as identical and providing a definition of the genre that is almost identical to the definition of yacht rock, except that it allots AOR a slightly broader spectrum that includes hard rock. The English article, on the other hand, defines AOR (here meaning only Album Oriented Rock) as what anyone my age would instinctively call "classic rock", an aspect that plays only a minor part in the Swedish definition (even though the two articles link to each other and are supposed to be about the same thing). Fans on YouTube also refer to AOR as "west coast" (used as a noun), a feature which the Swedish article mentions but which the yacht rock article ignores. Then there's also "marina rock", a cheeky extension of the the term "yacht rock" which would seem to indicate a more working-class version of yacht rock, and would therefore at least partially bridge the gap between the English Wikipedia's definition of AOR and yacht rock. Are yacht rock, the two AORs and "west coast" one and the same thing, or is it like one of those overlapping circle diagrams, the name of which I can't remember right now, with a certain degree of overlap between yacht rock, AOR and "west coast"? If so, how much and which artists get left out of the mix?
I'll definitely follow the 366 days with the aim of being able to answer some of these questions. Oh, and for the music... which is
