Many "yacht rockers" included nautical references in their lyrics, videos, and album artwork, exemplified by Christopher Cross's anthemic track, "Sailing" (1979).
[6][3] In 2014, AllMusic's Matt Colier identified the "key defining rules of the genre:" The "exhilaration of escape" is "essential to yacht," according to journalist and documentary filmmaker Katie Puckrik.
"[14] Comprehensively defining yacht rock remains difficult, despite agreement that its central elements are "aspirational but not luxurious, jaunty but lonely, pained but polished".
[20] The socio-political and economic changes that contributed to the emergence of the genre[21] have recently been described by journalists like Steven Orlofsky, and by documentary-film maker Katie Puckrik.
Its "reassuringly vague escapism" was boosted by the rise of FM radio which brought together two consequences of gender emancipation: women who controlled household spending and men who "felt freer to convey their emotions in song".
[15] The roots of yacht rock can be traced to the music of the Beach Boys, whose aesthetic was the first to be "scavenged" by acts like Rupert Holmes, according to Jacobin's Dan O'Sullivan.
[23] O'Sullivan also cites the Beach Boys recording of "Sloop John B" (1966) as the origin of yacht rock's predilection for the "sailors and beachgoers" aesthetic that was "lifted by everyone, from Christopher Cross to Eric Carmen, from 'Buffalo Springfield' folksters like Jim Messina to 'Philly Sound' rockers like Hall & Oates".
[12][25][26][10] Around 2016, positive reappraisals of the genre began to appear in The Guardian,[27] The Week,[3] and on BBC Four, which broadcast Puckrik's two-part documentary, I Can Go for That: The Smooth World of Yacht Rock, in June 2019.
)[13] Orlofsky has argued that the genre's resurgence is partly due to its function as an antidote to the negativity of the post-Obama era in the US just as in its original context, when yacht rock created "the perfect soundtrack for listeners trying to ignore Watergate and Vietnam,"[15] it now again represents "a defiant, fingers-planted-firmly-within-ears disregard of any and all political unrest".
In an article in The New Inquiry, music scholar J. Temperance stated that yacht rock "sterilized the form of its soul and blues elements and instead emphasized disinterested, intentionally trite lyrical themes".
[34] According to writer Max McKenna in a 2018 Popmatters article, the lack of political messaging in the yacht rock genre is a "conservative gesture(s) flying under the radar in a climate of poptimist reappraisal".
The New Inquiry article describes the role of yacht rock as a genre that would help people differentiate music appreciation from status by using common symbols and "rendering the popular into the smooth".
[41] Yacht rock bears strong similarities to the Japanese genre of city pop in that they both peaked in the early 1980s, featured jazz and R&B influences arranged and produced by elites in their fields, and gained newfound popularity in the 2010s through the Internet.