Yacht rock

Yacht rock is a neologism for a broad music style and aesthetic commonly associated with soft rock, one of the most commercially successful genres from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.

Quotes

• Young people today, when they mention our kind of band, they visualize us on our boats in the ’70s drinking Chardonnay, playing our guitars and sailing past Malibu...I never owned a sailboat in my life.
  • Peter Beckett, who co-wrote Player's 1977 song "Baby Come Back," quoted in "Can You Sail to It? Then It Must Be 'Yacht Rock'", The Wall Street Journal (October 11, 2015)

• These "yacht rockers" that scored my early years seemed to clash with the artists I came of age with in my teens and 20s and were consigned to kitsch silliness along with fondue sets and Jello moulds quivering with mysterious canned fruit.
  • Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, "Cruise control: how yacht rock sailed back into fashion", The Guardian (April 20, 2016)

• Yacht somehow became pigeonholed as an embarrassing relic of the overkill 80s, the silly, sad relative we want to ignore when we see them in public...It was hard to relate to Sailing away, Christopher Cross-style, on a gleaming boat, when you and your peers were drowning in student loans, recession and limited employment prospects.
  • Jennifer Otter Bickerdike, "Cruise control: how yacht rock sailed back into fashion", The Guardian (April 20, 2016)

• Broadly speaking, yacht rock is an ocean of smooth, soft-listening music made in the late '70s and early '80s by artists like Toto, Hall & Oates and Kenny Loggins — music you can sail to.

• • David Dye, "That '70s Week: Yacht Rock" (March 15, 2017)

• There's also a common misconception that just because it's about a boat, or the ocean, or sailing, that it's yacht rock. That is most definitely nyacht true.
  • JD Ryznar, quoted in "That '70s Week: Yacht Rock" (March 15, 2017)