Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary

Editor Garret Price follows up his 2019 directorial debut Love, Antosha, a portrait of the late actor Anton Yelchin, with this surprisingly winning music industry doc. Yacht Rock: A Documentary chronicles the rise, fall, and ironic re-rise of the late 1970s/early 1980s soft rock created by the skilled LA session musicians who formed bands like Steely Dan, The Doobie Brothers, and Toto. These not exactly camera-ready performers, along with distinctively emotive vocalists like Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, and Christopher Cross, dominated radio airwaves for half a decade before MTV began to popularize musical artists with far more visual flare.

One might assume, as I did, that a direct-to-streaming documentary on this topic would focus on how the oft-mocked adult contemporary blend of pop, jazz, and soul was retroactively dubbed "Yacht Rock" twenty-five years later by a group of young comedians who made a pre-YouTube internet series lampooning the practitioners of "smooth music." With its intentionally amateurish aesthetic, the not especially funny proto-web series was so influential it re-branded an entire style of rock music, making it trendy and ironically fashionable across pop culture. The unintended juxtaposition of a lame, poorly crafted, but unquestionably consequential web series with the exceptionally talented but passé and profoundly unhip artists who were the subject of the satire is the kind of thing that could easily result in a dreadful 90-min celebration of something vapid in contemporary culture at the expense of something substantive from the past that fell far out of fashion. Surprisingly, Price devotes little time to the origins of the term "Yacht Rock," opting instead for a deep dive into the musicians and their music along the lines of 20 Feet from Stardom, Muscle Shoals, The Wrecking Crew, Immediate Family, and other recent music docs that champion the unsung session performers who made immeasurable contributions to some of the most iconic rock albums ever produced.

Perhaps, like many who discovered or rediscovered this cheesy yet catchy, immensely enjoyable easy-listening style of music in the wake of the "new" genre's mass adoption, Price and executive producer Bill Simmons set out to make a sardonic exploration but found that everyone interviewed for the project was kinda psyched about the music. The first talking heads we see are director Price, who, in an unforgivably choppy introduction, explains the brief history of the term "Yacht Rock," followed by sketch comedian Fred Armisen weighing in with his two cents. So it's no surprise we enter this picture thinking it will be a lot of hipsters patting themselves on the back for their brilliance at... I don't know, adopting someone else's comic idea and turning it into a meme? The film does include several music journalists and cultural commentators who place themselves above the music they're praising, but their voices are drowned out by those of the actual musicians and the people who the music has influenced. The younger interviewees include several hip-hop artists who scored hits by sampling beats and riffs from these songs.

Unsurprisingly, this movie features wall-to-wall needle drops of the music being discussed. It is a surprise, a pleasant one, that little of the web series that created the term is featured, and what is there is mostly just brief images used to illustrate what interview subjects are saying rather than full clips with sound. I've sat through many episodes of the Yacht Rock web series, created by J. D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair, and Lane Farnham, because one of my local favorite rep-cinemas programmed a series of Smooth Cinema: Films with the Yacht Rock Sound and everyone in the audience (all 8 to 20 of us who populated the 800-seat main theater) had to sit through these tedious, "bad-on-purpose" works of homemade hilarity before getting to see films like FM, Arthur, One Crazy Summer, and Running Scared on the big screen. Like so many early web series, the popularity of this low-grade mockumentary stems from its irreverence and DIY aesthetic rather than clever writing or memorable comedic performances. Still, I must admit that former AllMusic critic 'Hollywood' Steve Huey, whose fake introductions begin each of those webisodes, provides excellent context, commentary, and articulate observations as one of this documentary's most prominently featured talking heads.

Other highlights of the film include a discussion about how instrumental the members of Toto were in shaping '80s music, with most of them playing on (and one of them, Steve Porcaro, contributing a key song to) Michael Jackson's decade-defining album, Thriller. Then there's rapper Thundercat's oral history of what it was like growing up under the influence of bands like Steely Dan and The Doobie Brothers, sampling their recordings for his own work and eventually collaborating live with McDonald and Loggins. Drummer, bandleader, and producer Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson offers several amusing observations; the best is when he describes this style of music as "perfect sitting down dancing music" and then demonstrates the exact movements I was doing while watching this movie. We also get to hear Michael McDonald tell the amusing story of how he first saw the SCTV skit where Rick Moranis plays him, running from recording session to recording session to lay down his unique backing vocals that seemed ubiquitous in the early '80s. Again, it is telling that Price includes a longer clip of this contemporaneous SCTV sketch than he does any of the Yacht Rock web series. But take a look at both and decide for yourself which is funnier.

Fred Armisen returns at the end and provides an answer to a question posed to him that fully justifies his presence in the film. By that point, this movie had long since won me over, but Armisen's inclusion underlined why Price's film worked for me. I have no idea if the director interviewed many other comedians and young celebrities who offered mordant but loving observations of this music, but if they did, those folks didn't end up in this movie unless they had something substantial to say. Price may be a contemporary digital filmmaker who shoots and cuts interviews in the modern multi-camera style that enables faster "smoother" truncating of what interview subjects say, but he is, his clunkily spliced-together intro aside, a skilled editor. It's strange, and a little sad, that of all the movies I've seen in 2024, this and another made-for-streaming music doc, The Greatest Night of Pop, are the two I'm most eager to watch again.