His music might be considered by some to be archetypal of the genre, but Daryl Hall has no truck with the concept of yacht rock, or the idea that he’s part of it.
When it was put to him during an appearance on the Broken Record podcast that music of the kind that he made with Hall & Oates has now been classified as yacht rock, Hall said: “This is something I don't understand. First of all, yacht rock was a fucking joke by two jerk-offs in California and suddenly it became a genre. I don't even understand it. I never understood it.”
An audibly exasperated Hall went on to explain: “It's just R&B, with maybe some jazz in there. It's mellow R&B. It's smooth R&B. I don't see what the yacht part is.”
The ‘yacht part’, of course, has nothing to do with how the music is made; the suggestion was that music of this type - soulful, jazzy, high production values and showcasing great musicianship - is what’s favoured by the Californian boating community. The term was coined in 2005 via the eponymous Yacht Rock web series, and has been gaining traction ever since.
Hall, though, says that, even in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, when he and John Oates were having their biggest hits, labels were being attached to artists that didn’t really make sense.
“People misjudged us because they couldn't label us,” he insists. “They always came up with all this kind of crap - soft rock and yacht rock and all this other nonsense - and none of it, none of it really describes anything that I do really.”
If it makes Hall feel any better, it seems that Yacht or Nyacht? - the website that was created by the inventors of the yacht rack term and seeks to differentiate between yacht rock songs and those that are nyacht/not - kind of agrees with him. By their reckoning, only two Hall & Oates songs meet the criteria - 1979’s Time’s Up (Alone Tonight) and 1980’s Kiss On My List - with the rest of the duo’s big hits falling outside of the category.
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