Being halfway ’round the world and therefore chronically nescient of au courant vagaries in the common culture — in just one recent example, I hardly knew young troubadour Robert Kelly had now moved into making the operetta “Trapped in the Closet” — word has only now reached my Oriental covert about the jesters contriving their own brand of chortles with the Yacht Rock project.
This serial manages to tickle, mauger low levels of thespian prowess and shoddy aural reproduction. But naught for mere irony nor reference back to former jukebox platters of our salad days. We, my compatriots, have swam into a new ken (forgive me, Keats) of “Heracles comedy” in which jokes cease to be things within themselves, but mere reflections upon the preposterous and astounding efforts of the creators. Just as Colossus at Rhodes bewildered ancient Greeks solely through an intimidation of size, our delight with Yacht Rock must stem from the makers’ incredulous erudition about extremely unctuous popular songs (in their cant, “smooth”) verdant in the mid ’70s to the early ’80s — including such bygone hit-makers as Steely Dan, the Doobie Brothers, Toto, Hall & Oates, and Loggins & Messina.
Whether it be rockist sensibilities denouncing all deviation from the traditional neo-lyre/bass-lyre/kettledrum arrangement or an objective disapprobation of the songs’ hollow constructions, this genre has fallen out of favor, like Leon Czolgosz in Anarchist circles post-Buffalo, out of sight and mind, with nary a paladin coming forward to bequeath a posthumous legitimacy. First and foremost, unlike punk and prog and new wave, this Yacht Rock field created few scions in the fag end of the century. Not even a plash of this production vocabulary carried on into later musical evolutions, nor did bastards materialize to carry the tricot into the dawn without official blessing. A comparison to the “Soft Rock” of the ’60s may be apropos, but the Grover Cleveland beards, overall malaise of the stagflated political and social climate, and embarrassing transgressions of the movement’s alumni tend to put posterior eulogizing beyond the pale. (We now apperceive Kenny Loggins as the man sailing into the Top Gun “Danger Zone” — not as the dapper youngster on a docked yacht singing with Jim Messina.) For anyone with aught sense of risibility, Christopher Cross would be the butt of myriad jokes — if we could remember who in Hades he was!
Indeed I laugh at the queerness of the “smooth” oeuvres and their newfound classification — a celebration of our Linnean prowess to attribute sporadic cases of a terse past outbreak as a new strain of consumption, dengue, or impetigo. But moreover, I go goobers over the very idea of excess knowledge about the mundane, that someone out in the world would fashion and form plot details based on true-life Yacht Rock trivia — e.g., that Van Halen was produced by the Doobie Brothers’ producer, a morsel used in Episode Nine. Bully to anyone who can remember that Michael McDonald was mercilessly pommeled on SCTV and then employ this historical crumb to attribute human motivations for Toto “pacifying” Michael Jackson with “Human Nature.”
In our futurity, we may decline to relish craft, and instead, rejoice from these new International-Network wonders of the human spirit. Yacht Rock’s Toto may not be funny in toto, but the idea of such blithe dedication to forlorn music may keep us exulting in the morrow.
