Love what you love

I'm going to go ahead and drop the 'guilt' from my guilty pleasure

If you haven’t watched the HBO Yacht Rock “dockumentary,” and if you, like me, have spent a goodly portion of time car singing along with Michael McDonald or George Benson or Donald Fagen, I urge you to watch it as soon as possible. I say this without irony, and with love in my heart. At last.

Because maybe you, too, have felt a little shame reaching for the volume knob when Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind” starts to play on the radio, or really any song that falls into this genre often prefaced on the radio by a silky lady voice announcing “soft hits of the 70s and 80s.” Smooth-cruisin’ tunes like Al Jarreau’s “We’re in This Love Together,” danceable dee-lites such as Santana’s “Hold On,” or the breezy weirdness of ELO’s “Sweet Talkin’ Woman”.

For a long time, I tried to keep it low-key about loving music associated with rollerskating rinks, the dentist office, and my dad handing out kitchen utensils as microphones before putting the needle on The Spinners record. It’s a nostalgic love I mostly keep to myself and the interior of our family vehicles.

But the Yacht Rock dock was a two-hour affirmation of just loving whatever it is that you love. I’m shallow to have needed it. People whose musical opinions I’ve always held in high esteem declared this music to be corporate, which is the GenX equivalent of devil music, and that most of the bands were just session players who came together for the paycheck. As a working writer who spent many years working on pretty much anything just to, say, eat food and live somewhere—from how to decorate with felt, to exposing an insurance company’s shady treatment of breast cancer patients, to ideas for good patio layouts, to advice about your kid’s head lice—I get it. But I got it quietly, furtively even. In the shower, or on the back porch with the lights off, making my spouse dance with me to “Cool Night” by Paul Davis.

Having Questlove and Thundercat weigh in on the significance of, let’s face it, Easy Listening, made me feel unabashedly validated. I still admire my bin-digging friends who own the original London Calling vinyl, or know every word to “Rapper’s Delight.” Groundbreaking music. World-changing. Me, I’m an Ambrosia stan, soundtrack of a small-town river kid dreaming of dramatic and complicated love affairs while shaking down the couch pillows for change to buy a candy bar down at Stockton’s.

Evaluating books or writing—this is my comfort zone. I scan texts with sureness, I embrace certain styles, dismiss others, argue (with craft notes) for books or stories that have been overlooked and underrated. This is my whole life and always has been. Fiction or non, soft lifestyle or hard news, doesn’t matter. I was born to read and to write and I have known this since I was old enough to cipher letters. There I’m comfortable with the push and pull of opinion, shade doesn’t bother me, I enjoy the volley of hot takes in my book club’s group chat.

But in music, I’m only an appreciator. I’m not so confident, and it’s just not that deep for me. I have often felt bad for not liking Sonic Youth, for example. But why? Having Kenny Loggins on regular rotation isn’t a style thing, or about artistry. It’s about physical memory, holding onto good moments or important ones, and that matters as much as dwelling on deep political issues or the pain we’re endlessly patching just to get through the day. Loggins rejuvenates me. I ought to be grateful to Loggins.

Anywhere we are, you and I have always been, forever and ever.

I’ve written here a lot about the value of having a good many years behind us, of experience as a salve, and maturity as something to savor. But even with age, we can’t be free of all our baggage or life wouldn’t retain its lovely traction of sorrow, pain, vanity, heartbreak, embarrassment. I need certain kinds of music, and musicians need fans, so it’s time to knock it off and just face it that I once threw a garage sale that played Steely Dan for 72 hours straight. (Thanks to Micah, Theo, Logan, and Sam for the brilliant idea. That sale was a fever dream.)

The analog value of freely loving what we love—I see you, Britney fans—is the absolute physical joy of songs we adore for mysterious reasons. They stir time. For me, Yacht Rock is my evenings-and-weekends job at the local radio station in high school, where I spun these songs on the FM side. It’s the release of spontaneous chair-dancing and the joy of volume-up. It’s belting it out on the way home, so you arrive there in tact. When “I Just Wanna Stop” by Gino Vannelli comes on, maybe I’m thinking about that guy from the town over who held out his hand to me under a sparkling disco ball, back when skating on a Saturday was all that I wanted, the flare of his lovely nose, feathered hair crisp with gel, clean nails. Jackson Browne’s “Somebody’s Baby” puts me back on my 10-speed as a car passes by with the windows down and I catch a whiff of Hawaiian Tropic.

Songs that endure because they’re real and universal, whether it’s the words or something about the sound (“Boys of Summer” by Don Henley—not Yacht Rock—is the kind of energy I’m talking about). The memories they carry to us stoke up old feelings that remind us that who we once were is still who we are. I can be in a Mercury Lynx on a gravel road within the first strains of Bill Withers’ “Just the Two of Us.” I’m on my way to the grocery store, sitting on my hands so the vinyl seats don’t sear the back of my legs with the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat.” Memories so ordinary, I wonder why my mind holds on to them.

But now I wonder: Where did all these musicians go? You’ll see a few in the film. Michael McDonald plays a big part (as he did in practically every song produced in this era). Carlos Santana was a Kennedy Center Honoree in 2013. We’ve all heard from Stevie Winwood and Elton John (yes, “Philadelphia Freedom” is Yacht Rock, though I don’t know why). But where are England Dan and John Ford Coley? Who was Firefall? Or the Sanford Townsend Band? Why was 10cc so weird about letting his girlfriend know he loved her? Walter Egan had one song, you guys. One. Does “Magnet and Steel” endure because it’s allegedly about him and Stevie Nicks? These are questions not covered in the film.

It’s music that stays with us, whether you feel sheepish about it or not. Here’s Questlove: “Somehow, we had a space in our heart for this Yacht Rock series, which gave people this sort of newfound look at this music that no one wanted to claim as their own, but we loved it all along. We were just afraid to let you know…”

Thundercat got to the point faster: “I've always looked at it from the inside being like, ‘Dang, that's just amazing songwriting.’”

It is. I mean, it mostly is, considering lines like “I can’t go for that. No can do.” But try not to sing that Dave Mason song, “We Just Disagree.” Let’s give it a little poetry punctuation, just for drama:

So let’s leave it alone ’cause we can’t see eye to eye/
There ain’t no good guy, there ain’t no bad guy/
There’s only you and me and we just disagree.

Okay, maybe that’s not the best example—but sung, or wailed when you’re mad at someone, that’s some fine falafel. Turn on Gerry Rafferty’s “Right Down the Line” next time you’re roadtripping on a Saturday afternoon and you’ll see what I mean. Lucius covered that song really well, by the way.

And the fearless use of flute! “You Are the Woman” comes to mind. Though, speaking of women, the genre included very few. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Tennille, who was half the band with the Captain. Some schools of thinking would include Fleetwood Mac, but I’m not among them, though Stevie did do “Whenever I Call You ‘Friend’” with Kenny, effectively launching his career. Brenda Russell’s “Lucky” is considered Yacht Rock. But generally, take all this gentler masculine energy for what it is—catchy love songs for musical lightweights who just want to feel something when they’re unloading the dishwasher again.

Come to the film for nostalgia, stay for the bands’ tender feelings about the somewhat snarky monikers for what seems like about 74%-sincere songs. (Ambrosia lead singer David Pack had such a sweet-sad quote at the end of the movie about this.) Toto’s Steve Lukather cuts to the chase with lines like “Where’s my fucking yacht? I played on all those records!” That crab-ass Donald Fagen has the final word of the film, and it’s everything you’d hope it to be.

Maybe Yacht Rock isn’t your own guilty pleasure. Maybe it’s Hallmark movies. Breezy genre romance. Happy Meals. Positive affirmations on Facebook memes. It just feels good to love things. I will tell you, my dumb Spotify handle aside, this has been one of my most joyful playlists to assemble. Feel free to open and follow it—I’ve found it sprinkles its silly magic on family dinners, a game of Wingspan, or a dance party on the back porch, lights off, remembering when.