Steely Dan Is Yacht Rock. Deal With It.

When the director of the HBO documentary "Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary" called Donald Fagen to tell him about the film, Fagen's response was immediate and unambiguous. "Oh, yacht rock," he said. "Well, I tell you what: Go fuck yourself." Then he hung up. Then, at some later point, he or someone acting on his behalf licensed a substantial number of Steely Dan songs for inclusion in that same documentary. This is the most Steely Dan thing that has ever happened. It is also, whether Fagen likes it or not, a tacit acknowledgment of something the man has spent fifty years refusing to say out loud: Steely Dan is yacht rock. They basically invented it. The genre would not exist without them. And the reason their fans get so furious about this label is that they have confused the label with an insult, when the actual insult is pretending the connection does not exist.

What Yacht Rock Actually Is

Yacht rock is not a moral category. It is not a judgment about artistic seriousness. It is a description of a specific sonic and cultural phenomenon: highly polished, jazz and R and B-influenced soft rock, made primarily in Southern California between roughly 1976 and 1984, by an interconnected community of elite session musicians and studio obsessives who passed the same players around like a repertory company. The smoothness was the point. The production values were the point. The sophisticated chord changes lifted from jazz were the point. If that description does not fit Steely Dan, nothing fits anything.

Yacht rock began as a comedy web series in 2005, which is important context. J.D. Ryznar and his collaborators created it as an affectionate parody, not an attack. The genre label that emerged from it was never meant to be derogatory. It was meant to describe a feeling: the sensation of hearing a perfectly produced, effortlessly cool piece of music that makes everything seem manageable. "Hey, it's going to be OK." That is comedian Fred Armisen's definition from the documentary. That is also a reasonable description of what it feels like to hear "Peg" or "Deacon Blues" come through a good set of speakers. The problem is that Steely Dan fans heard the word "yacht" and pictured Christopher Cross in a captain's hat, and decided that association was beneath them.

The Session Musician Case Is Airtight

The strongest argument for Steely Dan's yacht rock membership is not aesthetic. It is personnel. Yacht rock as a genre was not just a sound. It was a community. A specific group of Los Angeles session musicians played on essentially every record in the canon, moving from studio to studio and band to band, creating a unified sonic signature that tied the whole era together. Those musicians are the connective tissue of the genre.

Steely Dan is at the center of that network. Michael McDonald, who sang backing vocals on multiple Steely Dan records including "Kid Charlemagne," became the defining voice of yacht rock through his work with the Doobie Brothers and as a solo artist. David Paich and Jeff Porcaro, two of the founding members of Toto, played on Steely Dan sessions. Toto is so central to yacht rock that its members are credited as the genre's architects. Michael Omartian, who arranged and played piano on Steely Dan albums, produced Christopher Cross's debut record, the one that contains "Sailing," which is the single most emblematic yacht rock song in history. Larry Carlton, whose guitar defines the sound of The Royal Scam, appears throughout the wider yacht rock catalog. When Steely Dan fans say their band has nothing to do with Christopher Cross, they are literally not reading the album credits. Cross's records are full of people who learned what polished sounds like by working for Becker and Fagen.

The Dark Lyrics Defense Is Overrated

The argument Steely Dan fans make most often goes like this: The lyrics are too dark, too cynical, too literary to belong to a genre associated with breezy escapism. "Kid Charlemagne" is about an LSD manufacturer based on the real-life chemist Owsley Stanley. "Deacon Blues" is about a man who drinks scotch whiskey all night long and plans to die behind the wheel. "The Royal Scam" is about immigrants destroyed by the American Dream. "Don't Take Me Alive" is narrated by a man holed up with dynamite and a death wish. This is not Christopher Cross humming about the wind in his hair.

This argument would be convincing if yacht rock were defined by its lyrical content. It is not. It is defined by its sound. The Eagles wrote dark, cynical lyrics too. "Hotel California" is a horror story about spiritual corruption dressed up as a pop song. Nobody argues the Eagles are not part of the Southern California soft rock continuum because of it. The darkness in Steely Dan's lyrics is real and it is one of the things that makes them great. But it does not change what the music sounds like. "Deacon Blues" is, sonically, one of the most sumptuously produced, gorgeously arranged, warmly played pieces of music of the 1970s. The man in the song is drinking himself to death. The song itself sounds like expensive whiskey going down smooth. That tension is exactly what makes it a masterpiece. It does not exempt it from the category.

Becker and Fagen Built the Template

Here is what is actually true: Walter Becker and Donald Fagen did not set out to make yacht rock. They set out to make the most technically perfect, harmonically sophisticated, studio-refined rock records possible. They spent obscene amounts of time in the studio chasing a sound they described as "sounds good to us." They hired the best session musicians in Los Angeles on rotation, burning through guitarists until someone played the solo exactly right. They abandoned touring because the live environment could not reproduce what they were building in the studio. Every decision they made was in service of a single goal: sonic perfection.

In pursuing that goal, they created the template that every yacht rock record would follow. The premium session players. The obsessive production values. The jazz harmony vocabulary applied to pop song structures. The smooth surfaces concealing complicated interiors. The bands that came after them, the ones who made the records more people actually associate with the yacht rock label, were doing a less extreme version of the same thing. They were making Steely Dan records without the literary pretension and the neurotic perfectionism cranked up to eleven. Calling Steely Dan "too good" for yacht rock is like calling the Velvet Underground too good for indie rock. You cannot be too good for a genre you helped invent.

The Fagen Contradiction

Donald Fagen is one of the great musical minds of the twentieth century. He is also, by most accounts, a man of considerable and carefully maintained opinions about what Steely Dan is and is not. The refusal to accept the yacht rock label is completely in character. Becker and Fagen spent their entire career refusing labels, rejecting categories, firing managers, abandoning tours, and telling anyone who tried to tell them what they were doing to find another line of work. The "go fuck yourself" response to the documentary director is not surprising. It is quintessentially them.

But then the songs got licensed. And that matters. Whatever Fagen says about yacht rock, whoever controls the Steely Dan catalog decided that appearing in a documentary about the genre was acceptable. Maybe it was about the money. Maybe someone overrode Fagen. Maybe Fagen himself came around. The reason does not particularly matter. What matters is that the music is in the film, sitting comfortably alongside Christopher Cross and Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, sounding exactly like it belongs there. Because it does. Steely Dan is yacht rock. They are also jazz rock, art rock, and something that genuinely has no good category name at all. Genres are not cages. They are descriptions. And the description fits.

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