Daryl Hall Says Yacht Rock Is a ‘F—ing Joke’ That ‘Suddenly Became a Genre:’ ‘It’s Just R&B With Some Jazz in There’

Daryl Hall is finally taking a stand against yacht rock. In a recent interview with Justin Richmond and Rick Rubin’s “Broken Record” podcast, the Hall & Oats singer railed against the concept of dad-oriented boat music, saying he resents his inclusion in the pseudo-easy listening genre.

“This is something I don’t understand,” said Hall. “First of all, yacht rock was a fucking joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre. I don’t even understand it. I never understood 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.”

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The jerk-offs Hall is referring to are likely J. D. Ryznar, Hunter D. Stair and Lane Farnham, whose mockumentary web series “Yacht Rock” coined the now-infamous term. The web series eventually inspired Garrett Price’s 2024 “Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary.” (Not to split hairs, but Price doesn’t think Hall & Oates qualify as Yacht Rock because they weren’t West Coast-based.)

According to Hall, his band’s inclusion in the so-called “yacht rock” subgenre is because they didn’t fit into conventional genre labels: “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. And none of it, none of it really describes anything that I do, really.”

John Oates, the other half of the Hall of Fame-inducted rock duo, gave Seattle Weekly a slightly more generous assessment of the genre in a 2007 interview. “I think Yacht Rock was the beginning of this whole Hall & Oates resurrection. 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.“

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