Takin' It to the Streets
Andrew Marzoni on Pharrell's latest album, Black Yacht Rock Vol. 1: City of Limitless Access
⛰ Read Gabrielle Sicam’s new fiction, Retreat, here ⛰
🏭 Read Christy O’Beirne in conversation with Lois Stonock of Metroland Cultures here 🏭
📖 Read Ella Fox-Martens on Ian McEwan’s Lessons here 📖
The phrase “Black Yacht Rock” resounds in the brain much like “Mexican Taco Bell” or “Anti-German Zionism”: not an oxymoron, but something approaching its opposite, what Jean Baudrillard might diagnose as the third phase of “the image.” A re-appropriation of an appropriation, this image “masks the absence of a basic reality,” merely playing “at being an appearance: it is of the order of sorcery.”
When it first disembarked from California recording studios in the mid-1970s, what is today known as yacht rock was more accurately called “blue-eyed soul,” an update to the genre pioneered in the preceding decade by the relatively unmelanated ilk of the Righteous Brothers, Dusty Springfield, Van Morrison, and Joe Cocker. As R&B entered its Black Power era, its reprioritization of smoothness and funk lured audiences from the other side of the color line, as African American music always has, and the prevalence of bass-heavy dance grooves, tinkly electric pianos, and state-of-the-art synthesizers, in particular, left the sound susceptible to subversion into lightness, perversion of social consciousness into snark, smarm, and froth. Following the term’s coinage in the 2005 web series that shares its name, yacht rock has come to encompass predominantly Caucasian chart-toppers from Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald-era Doobie Brothers, Hall & Oates, and Christopher Cross to the Eagles, Steely Dan (which eventually relied on a rhythm section of Chuck Rainey and Bernard Purdie, hired away from Aretha Franklin and James Brown, respectively), and Toto, who, prior to blessing the rains down in Africa, served as the house band for Michael Jackson’s Thriller, bringing the dialectical miscegenation more or less full circle—a trend that would continue through the popularity of yacht rock samples among subsequent generations of rappers (Nate Dogg & Warren G, Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz, Ice Cube, MF Doom, Kanye West), royalty-covetous lawsuits notwithstanding.
The Me Decade has long been a reference point for Pharrell Williams, who was born in 1973, in his prolific portfolio as a producer, solo artist, member of the Neptunes and N.E.R.D., and guest star on over a hundred collaborations across the pop music spectrum. His latest release, Black Yacht Rock Vol. 1: City of Limitless Access, quietly uploaded to blackyachtrock.com in April and otherwise unavailable for streaming, is credited to “Virginia,” evoking not only Pharrell’s native state, but those geographically christened mediocrities of classic rock radio: Alabama, Boston, Chicago, Kansas. Though 2014’s Girl remains guilty of traumatizing listeners who hadn’t already seen Despicable Me 2 with one of the most cloying, noxious singles in recent history, its fluent pastiche of Off the Wall-period MJ demonstrated that Pharrell is nothing if not dependable for replicating a vibe. As he has done with Thundercat and Frank Ocean, exhuming post-Motown Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, or with Daft Punk, Giorgio Moroder’s reign of maximalist disco, Pharrell imitates his way through Black Yacht Rock, borrowing the bridge of “Kiss on My List” on “Come on Donna” and recontextualizing the verse melody of “Do It Again” in “11:11” to invite comparison between the nihilism of cocaine’s halcyon days and the narcissistic pull of social media today.
Great artists steal, but who is in the right to claim ownership here? Pharrell’s reworking of the falsetto harmonies and jazz chords of longhaired white nerds by means of autotune and against hip hop beats more readily calls to mind the European rehashings of neo soul by Jamiroquai and early Phoenix, a transatlantic return of the repressed that evinces a universality of the desire to chill, deckside. For the past few years, yacht rock has enjoyed a critical resurgence and newfound appreciation by younger listeners no longer beholden to distorted aggression nor saccharine sincerity, which would render counterintuitive Black Yacht Rock’s delivery with so little aplomb were it not for the acclaim of Cindy Lee’s comparably retrofuturist, download-only Diamond Jubilee in the same month, suggesting that Pharrell is as well attuned to music’s future as he is to its past. Pale or not, I suspect that I am not the only one to hope that the Vol. 1 in its title is intended to suggest that there is more Black Yacht Rock to come.