Daryl Hall has had a distinguished career. He has had six number-one singles on the Billboard charts and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (for those who care about such things) in 2014. He is the epitome of a blue-eyed soul, but he also respects the R&B pioneers who came before him.
He also has strong opinions about music. He needs to. Any musical artist worth their salt should know what things should sound like. That drives their music and helps them create something unique. Making quality music is one thing, but making quality and being unique is rare. Hall is rare.
But there is one subgenre that he despises with passion. In a recent interview on the Broken Records podcast, the singer said that the people who made up the term "yacht rock) are "jerk-offs" who coined the term that many people accepted. What exactly was and is yacht rock? That can be debated.
Daryl Hall delivers a very harsh phrase for the creators of the term "yacht rock"
The term for the subgenre was coined in 2005 when comedians JD Ryznar, Hunter Stair, and Lane Farnham discussed a kind of soft R&B on their podcast series. It was meant as a joke, but the term is now used to describe the type of music Hall and Oates never were.
This is why Hall is irritated with the term. He doesn't appreciate labels put on his music. In other words, there are only two kinds of sounds: Good and bad. For fans of Philadelphia soul, there is no doubt that Hall and Oates are that. But the yacht part? That seemingly goes against what the duo was trying to be.
Hall said, "This is something I don't understand. First of all, yacht rock was a (expletive) joke by two jerk-offs in California, and suddenly it became a genre. I don't even understand it. I never understood it.”
He shouldn't have to. The term "yacht rock" implies that only wealthy people and their friends listen to the drivel of soft 1970s and 1980s R&B mixed with light jazz. No one should be listening to that kind of music. Hall and Oates were so much more valuable than the term implies.