Daryl Hall has spoken out against the popular genre of yacht rock, calling it a “f—ing joke.” In a recent interview on the “Broken Record” podcast, hosted by Justin Richmond and Rick Rubin, the Hall & Oates singer expressed frustration over being associated with the laid-back, dad-friendly music style that has gained a cult following in recent years.
“This is something I don’t understand,” Hall said. “First of all, yacht rock was a f—ing joke created by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre. I don’t even understand it. 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.”
The “jerk-offs” Hall refers to are J.D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair, and Lane Farnham, creators of the web series Yacht Rock, which coined the term and parodied the music style in the mid-2000s. The series inspired the 2024 documentary Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary by Garrett Price. Notably, Price has stated that he does not consider Hall & Oates part of the yacht rock genre, as they were not based on the West Coast, where the genre is often associated.
Hall explained that the label of yacht rock was applied to Hall & Oates because their music didn’t fit neatly into existing genres. “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 said. “None of it really describes anything that I do, really.”
Meanwhile, Hall’s bandmate John Oates offered a more measured response to the genre in a 2007 interview with Seattle Weekly. “I think Yacht Rock was the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection. They were the first ones to start parodying us and putting us out there again,” Oates said. “A lot of things have happened because of Yacht Rock.”
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