City Pop is Yacht Rock

I grew up listening to a lot of the music featured in Yacht Rock: A Documentary. I have very vivid memories as a kid of driving around with my dad listening to Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers. If you’re up on your Idolcast lore, then you know my dad is also a giant Frank Zappa fan and—though I didn’t realize it at the time—what unites Zappa with Steely Dan (and the Doobies) is 1) incredible musicianship, 2) jazz influence, and 3) pursuit of technical perfection in the studio.

As a kid, Zappa was bombastic and too loud and Dan and the Doobies were boring old Dad Rock. But as my own musical tastes matured as a teenager and then as a young adult, I grew to appreciate the work of Frank Zappa. He had a contrary nature and counterculture streak that never dimmed and I found that extremely relatable as a teenager, even if I couldn’t parse all the chord and rhythm changes. Steely Dan, the Doobies, Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, Toto, on the other hand, well, these guys were all jokes. Easy Listening, AOR, Dad Rock, or whatever you want to call it. This stuff was considered lame and passé. To my young adult circle of artsy, punk-adjacent musicians, the idea of doing eighty takes to get a guitar solo technically correct was painfully uncool. To us, in the early 2000s, Steely Dan’s ambitious jazz changes and technical perfection was something to be scoffed at, not admired. Here’s a telling bit from Barney Hoskyns, Dan-ologist [emphasis added]: 

Steely Dan have always split people down the middle. On one side sit major dudes like William Gibson, who delight in the apparent disjunction between their slick grooves and their mordant humour. On the other are elder statesmen like GLR's Charlie Gillett, who once visibly grimaced when I asked him to cue up a Steely Dan track on his Saturday night Ping-Pong show.

To the Gilletts of Planet Pop, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are too jazz-funk-tasty, too close to the Boy Racer Fusion of Level 42. As cyberpunk eminence Gibson himself told me in 1993, "a lot of people think of Steely Dan as the epitome of boring 70s stuff, never realising this is probably the most subversive material pop has ever thrown up."

This scene from The 40-Year Old Virgin (2005) should give you an idea of how this “boring 70s stuff” was received by young people at the time: 

And there was clearly something in the collective unconscious because 2005 is also the year that the Yacht Rock web series began streaming online. This was pre-YouTube (if younger readers can even imagine that!) and I remember the series being shared around my online music dork circles and thinking it was hilarious. The series riffed on the VH1 Behind the Music style documentaries and created low budget, over-the-top caricatures of various AOR musicians of the late 70s and early 80s like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald, giving their songs—which had been the aural equivalent of wallpaper to many kids of my generation—ridiculous back stories.

The Yacht Rock series not only gave all this “boring 70s stuff” a brand new label of “Yacht Rock”, it also gave it new life outside of the local soft rock FM radio station. The “smooth” songs like Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” took on a new life via the series. Suddenly they weren’t just the dull “best of the 70s, 80s, and today” AOR that our parents listened to while schlepping us around in the car but were part of a trendy inside joke. It was cool to listen to Michael McDonald.

Over the past twenty years, Yacht Rock has since turned into a minor cottage industry with bands like Yachtley Crew pulling crowds, a Sirius radio channel, and Yacht Rock themed cruises departing from your local marina nationwide.

But some of the “Yacht Rock” artists have come out publicly against the label. Rick Beato gives a very good explanation why: 

And I don’t disagree with Rick. “Yacht Rock” isn’t a helpful label when looking at this music critically. It doesn’t describe a musical genre, a sound, or a scene that existed at the time. The humorous moniker clearly feels dismissive and belittling to guys like Donald Fagen and I totally get that.

But at the same time, I’ve also come around on “Yacht Rock” as it exists in Current Year.

The documentary only touches on this but I think it’s a huge part of the appeal of the genre today—Yacht Rock is the swan song of an era where visuals didn’t matter, only your chops did. Pre-MTV, a schlubby guy like Christopher Cross could be a Top 40 hitmaker. Post-MTV… he was banished to the AOR FM station. And while early MTV got a lot of shit for being very white, a lot of these “Yacht Rock” acts were racially integrated and crossed back and forth between “white” and “Black” radio. They were the best guys (or gals) for the job; it was pure meritocracy and all that mattered was if you could play.

Maybe we callow youth needed that extra distance from “boring 70s stuff” and an extra couple decades of being completely oversaturated with visuals and autotuned and computer perfect pop music to appreciate the real emotion and humanity of those “boring” and visually schlubby Dan and Doobie records… we needed to be free again.

But something struck me watching Yacht Rock: A Documentary that I’d never considered before:

What is the City Pop phenomenon but simply Yacht Rock from Japan?

“City Pop” (like Yacht Rock) is a contemporary label given to a wide swathe of musically diverse artists from the 70s and 80s. The “genre” isn’t musical as much as it is one of feel. It’s smooth music and impeccable musicianship from artists like Saijo Hideki, Yumin, and Takeuchi Mariya and Yamashita Tatsuro. Like Rick Beato with “Yacht Rock”, I’d initially been kind of insulted by the “City Pop” label. It didn’t really describe anything meaningful when looking back at the era and it seemed dismissive to roll up the extraordinary career of someone like Yumin under a lame label like “City Pop” but I think that like “Yacht Rock” it does have some value in re-introducing these very talented, pre-visual musicians of the 1970s and 1980s to a younger generation who might otherwise have never found them, except scrolling by accident across an ancient AOR FM station.

The Yacht Rockers found a second life via hip hop sampling (I find it impossible to listen to “I Keep Forgetting” without hearing “Regulate”), the City Poppers have found a second life via Vaporwave (with some Yachty overlap!) And while we haven’t seen Kenny Loggins or Michael McDonald tapped to collaborate with any Current Year pop stars (Taeyang, give them a call!), Yamashita Tatsuro and Takeuchi Mariya were responsible for one of my all time favorite Arashi tracks, 復活LOVE (Fukkatsu LOVE) from 2016: