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Ocean Mix Vol. 1

Smooth, expensive, faintly nautical, and for about twenty years deeply unfashionable. Yacht rock has had the last laugh, and one hundred tracks explain why.

The most maligned music of the seventies, reconsidered

"Yacht rock" is a retroactive genre — the term was coined in 2005 for a web series, not by anyone making the records — but it describes something real: the immaculately produced, jazz-and-R&B-inflected soft rock made largely in Los Angeles between roughly 1976 and 1984. Session-musician precision, sophisticated chord changes, close vocal harmony, and lyrics about longing delivered without any of rock's usual aggression.

It was critically dismissed for decades, mostly for being pleasant. The reassessment came when a generation of listeners raised on hip-hop sampling and modern R&B production noticed what was actually happening in these records: the harmonic language is closer to jazz than to rock, the arrangements are extraordinarily detailed, and the players — Steely Dan's revolving cast, the Toto musicians, Michael McDonald — were among the best in the world.

What to listen for

The Doobie Brothers' "What a Fool Believes" is the genre's masterpiece and its central text: Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins wrote it, and the piano figure alone is worth the price of admission. McDonald returns solo with "I Keep Forgettin'," whose bassline Warren G later turned into "Regulate."

Christopher Cross appears twice — "Sailing" and "Ride Like the Wind" — and his 1980 self-titled debut swept the Grammys in a way that has never quite been forgiven. Ambrosia's "Biggest Part of Me" and Player's "Baby Come Back" are the genre's platonic forms.

The R&B side is where the reassessment really bites. Bobby Caldwell's "What You Won't Do for Love" has been sampled endlessly and was, famously, marketed without his photograph. Grover Washington Jr. and Bill Withers on "Just the Two of Us" is one of the most perfectly constructed records of the era. George Benson's "Give Me the Night" was produced by Quincy Jones. Michael Jackson's "Human Nature" was written by Toto's Steve Porcaro.

And then Queen's "Cool Cat" shows up, which is either a curatorial joke or a genuinely astute call. Probably both.

One hundred tracks. Open a window.

Go deeper

The genre's real masterworks are Steely Dan's Aja (1977) and Gaucho (1980) — records so obsessively made that Becker and Fagen reportedly burned through dozens of session players hunting for single solos. If you want to understand why musicians revere this era, start there.

Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers (Minute by Minute), Toto IV, and Bobby Caldwell's self-titled debut are the other pillars.

For the afterlife: the sampling trail runs everywhere. Warren G's "Regulate," large parts of Japanese city pop, and the whole vaporwave and modern-funk revival owe this music enormous debts. Thundercat put McDonald and Kenny Loggins on Drunk and made the reappraisal official.

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