Hall & Oates singer calls yacht rock a joke created by ‘two jerk-offs in California'
'This is something I don't understand,' the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee told acclaimed music producers Justin Richmond and Rick Rubin on an episode of their ' Broken Record ' podcast released on Thursday, May 8. 'First of all, yacht rock was a f—ing joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre.'
The term came up in conversation after Richmond brought up the Doobie Brothers, the San Jose rock band often associated with the genre characterized by its catchy, relaxing tunes.
'It's just R&B, with maybe some jazz in there. It's mellow R&B, smooth R&B. I don't see what the yacht part is,' Hall insisted.
The term was coined by J.D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Star and Lane Farnham, who created the mockumentary web series 'Yacht Rock' in 2005 about the West Coast soft rockers of the 1970s and '80s. Decades later, filmmaker Garrett Price was inspired by the project to make his own, 'Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary,' released in 2024. Other major yacht rock artists include Steely Dan, Toto and Christopher Cross.
Hall and his bandmate John Oates have frequently been linked to the genre. The Philadelphia rock duo had been performing together since the 1970s and experienced a resurgence in the early 2000s when the term yacht rock first started circulating.
But Hall chalks it up to a misunderstanding.
'People misjudged us because they couldn't label us. They always came up with all this kind of crap — soft rock and yacht rock and all this other nonsense,' Hall continued. 'None of it really describes anything that I do.'
Oates, on the other hand, doesn't seem to share Hall's animosity.
'I think yacht rock was the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection,' he said in a 2007 interview with Seattle Weekly. 'They were the first ones to start to parody us and put us out there again, and a lot of things have happened because of yacht rock.'
The two former bandmates fell out in November 2023 after Hall accused Oates of betraying him by trying to sell his share of their joint business venture, Whole Oats Enterprises. They haven't played a show together since October 2022.
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