Oh-oh, Here Daryl Hall Comes to Curse Out Yacht Rock

Yeah, he’s watching you and is pissed off. Daryl Hall, a peripheral artist in the yacht-rock universe thanks to the soulful listening of Hall & Oates, doesn’t find conversations about the genre to be worthy of his time or respect. In fact, he’s playing it Donald Fagen style. “This is something I don’t understand. First of all, yacht rock was a fucking joke by two jerk offs in California and suddenly it became a genre,” he told the Broken Record podcast. “I don’t even understand it. I never understood it.” Hall’s irritation, ostensibly, stems from the haphazard criteria that has come to define yacht rock as we know it. “It’s just R&B with maybe some jazz in there,” he explained. “It’s mellow R&B. It’s smooth R&B. I don’t see what the yacht part is.” He added about Hall & Oates being included in yacht-rock playlists that often feature Toto, Steely Dan, and anything Michael McDonald touches: “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.” Yeah, okay, but what does Oates think?