I’ve never been on a yacht. This is literally a journey of discovery out to sea and over the horizon into the unknown.

The good news is that you don’t have to know your aft from a hole in the hull to pontificate about the Yacht Rock genre. There’s no seamanship required.

In fact, most of the people that spend their time on yachts would be sunk in a debate about Yacht Rock with the rest of us. The classification defies logic. It can’t be defined, categorized, or captured without first feeling it. And that, my friends, is the very nature of this music.

Yacht Rock is the very fortunate subset of rock music that was renamed from soft rock, also known as mellow gold or easy listening. I’ve heard that some artists bristle at the moniker, but shouldn’t the guys that raised Yacht Rock from the depths of the Caribbean Sea be on the Christmas card list of everyone formerly labeled soft rock, mellow gold, or easy listening?

All glory goes to the online comedy quartet of J.D. Ryznar, Hunter Stair, Lane Farnham, and David Lyons who first floated the term and gave it an amusing back story. They created something like a party boat full of improv players that crashed into a finely-tuned America’s Cup racer. Something like, “Hey, you spilled your Mai Tai on my nautical charts,” for all those old enough to reminisce on a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup reference.

They kept it light and fun, but put real thought into developing their theory of what is and what isn’t Yacht Rock. That’s why this mutiny feels so wrong, but sometimes you just feel the need to be the captain of your own voyage, and it’s so much cheaper to hijack someone else’s yacht than to build your own.

So this is my own take on what is Yacht and what is Nyacht, and it is much more feel than fact. I’m going to argue that the geographic, subject matter, family tree, and time period parameters that define the genre are too rigid. And you’re probably going to argue with that, and that’s what keeps this discussion afloat. So when you feel the need, fire one across the bow. 

There are a couple of rules I have pirated, and others I have thrown overboard that I believe are necessities in keeping the yacht on course.

The music formerly known as easy listening indeed has an era, and that is easily the most reliable statistical determinant of whether a song is in or out. For the sake of sanity, I stuck with the generally accepted idea that Yacht is mid-70s to mid-80s. I tried to discount what seems like an artificial time barrier, but it seems as critical to the genre as oversized pointed collars and ascots.

I say song – singular – because one key truth for me is that bands are not fully Yacht Rock or not. Some are of course much more seaworthy than others, with a larger seafaring catalog, but it truly is a song-by-song decision.

Yacht Rock has guardrails. On one side you have folk singers and songwriters. The ones who laid the foundation for the lyrical genius of Yacht Rock, but without the desperate barfly dance moves at last call that give Yacht Rock its sticky smooth groove. 

On the other side is truly smooth R&B. Sure, Yacht Rock is smooth, but it leaves a sticky sheen behind. When sticky smooth turns to just smooth then you’re adrift at sea, having abandoned ship. You know what I’m talking about. The songs you hear that you love, but don’t feel cool enough to listen to? 

It’s like when Sade “…moves in space with minimum waste and maximum joy,” and you know you don’t. But damn if you can’t bob your head back and forth in the opposite direction of your apparently malfunctioning shoulders to some “Sexy Eyes” by Dr. Hook and feel smooth.

So Yacht is stuck in time somewhere between Gordon Lightfoot’s poignant folk classic – ironically about a boat that sinks – “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and Sade’s mastery of the cool that Yacht could never be in tunes like “The Sweetest Taboo”. Sade is the white linen table cloths, one more fork than you know what to do with, and disapproving stares as you rest your elbows on the table. It’s high class. 

Yacht Rock is TGI Fridays on Wednesday, where you’re caught at happy hour with a Mango Caramel Mojito in one hand, hovering over a Pick 3 Appetizer that you’re reluctant to share with your date.

Yacht Rock proves that there are two distinct types of smooth – uncle Rico smooth, and James Bond smooth. You can guess which smooth the Yachty crew is.

You’d think I looked at Yacht Rock as a joke, but the truth is I am hooked like a marlin in the warm waters off Key Largo. Sure, there was a time when I thought I was too cool for Yacht Rock.

It was the one time my gut was right, before my gut could no longer take black coffee in the morning or spicy curry after 6 p.m. You knew it wasn’t cool then, and you avoided it in favor of Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Van Halen to dodge the humiliation of being called a ladies man when you had no lady.

It hasn’t magically become cool.

But what you’ve surrendered in turning your back on the knowledge of how cheesy the tunes are, you’ve gained in the confidence to not give a damn. That’s actually a sign of maturity.

Today you can achieve cool with a comical edge, and dance in front of everyone knowing the most stinging rebuke will be the eye roll from your wife. Don’t be fooled. She loves it and she loves your new sensitive side. That shirt is just something she tolerates. And face it, she never liked Queensryche like you did anyway, and “Silent Lucidity” was never going to put her in the mood.

So how do you define Yacht? I’m going to argue that the many markers that put a song on the list or not can indeed identify Yacht Rock, but sometimes it’s as simple as the recessive Yacht Rock gene that doesn’t show up in its identifiable features. 

The founders made a valiant effort to make it science, but listen to this music and then look me in the eye and tell me that kind of cheesy groove is really solid science. Sometimes, the year, family tree, geographic connection, and theme make it easy to reel in or throw back a Yacht classic, but sometimes, it just comes down to something you feel even if the matrix tells you otherwise.

On the margins is where the argument begins to fray, right? We know Marvin Gaye is not Yacht. We know Michael McDonald is. But Lou Rawls singing “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine” on Soul Train fits in so many ways, you might want to plug it in and pretend you’re boarding the Love Boat. 

It is not Yacht.

Here’s the difference. Yacht Rock sensations sing about heartache and losing their girlfriends. Lou is the one stealing them. Think it through, it makes sense.

As you plot your Yacht Rock playlist, always ask yourself first, “Is this destined for a three-hour tour, or a song that your dad jokes just insult?” 

Here’s my Yacht Rock playlist, and in my next voyage into the heart of Yachtness I’ll talk about why some songs made the list, and more importantly why some did not.