Photo Credit: Daryl Hall by Becky (transistr_sistr) / CC by 2.0
Daryl Hall airs his grievances with the term when discussing the genre during his appearance on the Broken Record podcast last week.
When it comes to the term “yacht rock” to describe his music, Daryl Hall can’t go for that. The singer pulled no punches during his appearance on the Broken Record podcast last Thursday with host Justin Richmond.
Richmond brought up the Doobie Brothers being retroactively dubbed “yacht rock” for one of their albums that leaned more R&B and wasn’t nearly as successful in the mainstream. Hall was more focused on the terminology than on the plight of the Doobie Brothers.
“This is something I don’t understand,” said Hall. “First of all, yacht rock was a f—ing joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre, and I don’t even understand it. I never understood it.”
He added that he was glad Richmond referred to the album as R&B. “It’s just another—with maybe some jazz in there—it’s mellow R&B. It’s smooth R&B. Yeah, I don’t see what the yacht part is.”
According to Hall, people misjudged him and his former partner John Oates’ music, including them in playlists that widely featured the easy listening genre, “because they couldn’t label us.”
“They came up with all this kind of crap, soft rock and yacht rock, and all this other nonsense,” he said. “And none of it, none of it really describes anything that I do, really.”
Notably, Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen spoke similarly about the genre in 2024’s “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary.” During an interview with director Garret Price about the genre, the 77-year-old Fagen said simply, “Oh, yacht rock. Well, I tell you what. Why don’t you go f— yourself?” So Daryl Hall isn’t the only artist that takes exception with the genre classification.
The term “yacht rock” was born about 30 years after the music it describes, thanks to a web series in the early 2000s, aptly named “Yacht Rock.” That series poked fun at the music and the musicians who created it during the late ‘70s in Southern California. The music of artists like Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, and Toto are described as such, featuring smooth beats and catchy hooks that are ideal for “relaxing, sitting back, and drinking.”
Content shared from www.digitalmusicnews.com.