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.

Grey Gardens

During Rufus Wainwright’s show last week at City Winery in Chicago (a great show as always, though far too short), he played the song “Grey Gardens” from his second studio album, Poses.  The performance inspired me to revisit the song, and I’d forgotten that it begins with the following line of movie dialogue:

“It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present, you know what I mean?”

I probably first heard this line around thirteen years ago, but apparently lacked the curiosity to actually look up its origins until last week.  Many of you may already know the details, but for me it was news; turns out the dialogue comes from a film called – surprise – “Grey Gardens,” a voyeuristic 1975 documentary about Edith and Edie Beale, the respective aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who in the 60s and 70s lived a reclusive life in the decaying mansion of Grey Gardens in East Hampton, New York.  A few years prior to the film, the Beales were very close to being evicted due to health code violations until Mrs. Onassis came to the rescue by investing $32K to get the home back up to code.  It could be argued that it wasn’t money well spent; the film shows the mother and daughter living among cats who relieve themselves anywhere they please, papers and food scraps scattered everywhere, and open holes in the plaster through which raccoons and other animals enter (mostly because the younger Beale proactively feeds them).  It’s certainly an interesting film and one that achieved a cult following over the decades, though it’s not for all tastes, and the movie sheds little light on what made these two women decide to live largely cut off from the outside to begin with. 

Luckily, while searching for the documentary (which can be rented on Amazon for $2.99), I found another movie with the same title, a fictionalized version of the Edith and Edie Beale story starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore that first appeared on HBO in 2009 (and can also be rented on Amazon).  This film is outstanding, with pitch-perfect performances by the two leads.  In addition to giving the viewer a (fictionalized) glimpse of what the lives of the Beales may have been like prior to their fall from grace, it meticulously reproduces many of the more poignant scenes of the documentary.  It won three of seventeen Emmy nominations and two of three Golden Globe nominations.

The allure of watching previously wealthy eccentrics living in the shadow of missed opportunities must be somewhat universal, for the Beales's story was even captured in a successful musical, first off-Broadway and then on Broadway itself in 2006, winning three of its ten Tony nominations in 2007 and running for 307 performances. 

So in a nutshell: I learned a great deal and watched two interesting movies all due to a song - yet another example of how music can enlighten our lives.  Thanks Rufus.

If you’re interested in learning a thing or two about Little Edie and Big Edie Beale, a good place to start might be the Grey Gardens website.