Beato Gets Offended: Yacht Rock and Genre Labels
Few have done more to promote music education and music appreciation than Rick Beato. I’m a fan of his YouTube channels and I’m in awe of his talent. That said, he flew a bit off the handle in a recent video about the retroactively applied label of yacht rock to identify a specific type of music that was produced more or less in the late 70s through the early 80s and has been popular as of late. Every major city in America seems to have at least a few bands sporting captain’s hats and playing the smooth sounds of Christopher Cross, Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald. A few months ago, the film Yacht Rock: a DOCKumentary dropped on MAX, and after close to a dozen of my musician friends recommended the film to me, I finally watched it a few weeks ago and enjoyed it, especially the ease with which the aforementioned musicians went along with the silliness of it all, recognizing that they’re lucky to still be relevant over forty years after their primes.
Beato watched the film as well, and while ultimately saying that he had no problem with the documentary, he claimed that the term yacht rock is “not only offensive and derogatory, but it’s a complete oversimplification of the diverse music that’s talked about in the movie.”
I’m going to overlook his conclusion that yacht rock is “offensive” because, well, that’s ridiculous. I’m offended by many things on Planet Earth, but the term “yacht rock” is not one of them, and I think if Beato were pushed, he’d probably back off on that. But the latter point of the genre being an oversimplification needs to be addressed.
What are genre labels for?
Genre labels are used to communicate with each other. When I tell people about the fabulous band Black Pumas and they ask me what kind of music they play, I can’t just say “good music.” I have to communicate some kind of musical style so that my friends have a clue about whether this is a band they’d like to pursue. When asked about Black Pumas, I’ve always answered, “swampy Austin soul.” What does that mean, exactly? Well, hell, I don’t know, but somehow it seems to accurately convey the style of music they play. It may very well be that the band would disagree with this categorization, but that’s okay. It’s just a way to communicate. It’s why radio stations and record stores also identify genres. Just as you don’t want to tune into a station expecting to hear country only to hear a rap song instead, you don’t want to walk into a record store and have Metallica, Bing Crosby, Beyonce and Loretta Lynn all lumped in together. There is a point to all of this.
All genre labels are reductive. They’re all oversimplifications. Hell, the most reductive label of all is the term classical to describe over five centuries of extremely diverse music. Does a Bach prelude really have anything in common with a Stravinsky symphony? Not really. It probably has as much in common as Buddy Holly and Megadeath do. But it’s helpful to describe Buddy Holly’s music as 50s rock and roll and Megadeath’s music as metal. To call both of them “rock and roll” does us no good whatsoever. Genre labels help, as reductive as they might be.
I played in a yacht rock band for three years, and when people asked me what yacht rock was, I said, “smooth soft rock from the 70s and 80s.” THAT’S also an oversimplification! But what was I to say? We can’t perfectly describe music without being overly verbose and boring our audience. At some point we have to generalize. And to a lot of people, the term yacht rock is perfectly identifiable, allowing them to know exactly what type of music they can expect on a Saturday night at the local nightclub.
Prog rock is also an oversimplification. So are AOR, punk, easy listening, power pop, rap, hip hop, R&B, jazz, fusion, bebop and a dozen of other genres. On my podcast 1000 Greatest Misses, my partner and I often struggle to identify a band’s style: “It’s sort of punkish rockabilly with a little extra grit.” But at least the genre labels give us a place to start.
So I say to Rick Beato and others who’ve gotten their undies in a twist about something so inconsequential, just relax and go with it. The guys who coined the phrase yacht rock should be thanked and then thanked again by every artist who’s still making bank for songs they wrote in the 1970s.