Popular from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, the west-coast sound has sailed back into fashion
LISTEN TO yacht rock, and an image starts to form in your mind: one of ocean views from California’s Highway 1, cold beers and blood-orange sunsets. The sound is smooth, with a soft bassline and minimal drums, and it combines elements of funk, jazz and R’n’B. The piano carries the melody, but often gives way to gentle guitar or saxophone solos. The songs’ lyrics might explore what it means to live a carefree life, but melancholic themes recur, too—particularly yearning or foolish love.
Now it has come back into fashion again. An online series, released in 2005, dramatised the careers of American “soft rock” stars and coined the term “yacht rock”. An official playlist on Spotify has hundreds of thousands of followers. Toto’s “Africa” enjoys enormous popularity: it has been played nearly 600m times on the music-streaming service; its video, first released in 1983, has been watched more than 500m times on YouTube.
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