The Music Industry Couldn’t Handle Luther Vandross
Popular music of the ’70s and ’80s mixed and matched parts assembled earlier in the 20th century, borrowing from the melisma of soul, the locomotion of rock and roll, the improvisational verve of jazz, and the compositional depth of classical music. The sudden shift flummoxed the music industry, which had inherited a profoundly prejudiced business structure from the totalizing predation of Jim Crow. For decades, Black music was tracked and marketed under the catch-all “race record” banner, fomenting the birth of rhythm and blues. But by the ’70s, a tsunami of Black acts like Stevie Wonder and Earth, Wind & Fire leaned into amorphous songwriting, which yielded intricate, diffuse albums bristling at the thinness of the categorization and prestige available to them. In the meantime, white artists weaned on this music smudged the primary colors in their own songs and a stately but showy easy-listening revolution, later known as “yacht rock,” began in earnest.
HBO’s Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary is an intergenerational narrative charting the titular scene’s peaks and valleys. It recounts the winking-but-loving reassessment of acts like Steely Dan and Toto — sparked by a whimsical aughts web series that gave the genre its name — alongside interviews with songwriters and session players responsible for staples like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald’s “This Is It” and Christopher Cross’s “Sailing.” These conversations show how culture perseveres, while audiences of the future come away with different perceptions than artists intended or ever imagined. The yacht-rock acts never heard the term until after they started to become eligible for induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and the fluidity of their oeuvre runs counter to attempts to hem them in. Ongoing debates about the field and its boundaries struggle to muster the concise definitions that metal subgenres enjoy. “We’re closet jazzers making pop records,” Jay Graydon (Airplay, Al Jarreau) says in the film. Elsewhere, Ambrosia’s David Pack (“How Much I Feel,” “Biggest Part of Me”) opts for a more terse though no less layered tag: “progressive R&B/pop.” “Yacht rock has to be conscious of Black music,” web series star Steve Huey explains. Yacht-rock discourse, as is the tendency of rhetoric about genres, searches for punchier banners than the ones the actual artists use to self-identify.
Terrestrial radio has long preferred to sprinkle all of this music and more into potpourri formats like adult contemporary and “middle of the road,” better known as “MOR.” Genre, and the wider web of audience perception it figures into, sounds like a nuisance for the artists in Yacht Rock, and comes across as particularly limiting in another documentary covering an artist whose work flourished on the same adult-contemporary radio stations as hits from the Doobie Brothers’ 1987 blockbuster Minute by Minute. CNN’s Luther: Never Too Much documents the drive and untimely demise of Luther Vandross, a man of astounding talent and extreme contrasts. One of the greatest love-song writers to walk the earth, he privately ached for a bond like the ones he seemed to sing intimately about, and faced a business structure with little faith in the marketability of a singer of his size and complexion. Yacht Rock and Luther make a compelling double feature. One film celebrates a wave of beautiful pop songs from dyed-in-the-wool lovers of Black music who sought to incorporate some of its compositional zestiness into their own work, and the other says their Black contemporaries did not all enjoy the same luxuries.
Luther captures the struggle to be seen and heard. Vandross sang in television commercials, on Sesame Street, and in any session he and his friends could land. Guitarist Carlos Alomar attests to putting the singer in contact with David Bowie to provide contributions for 1974’s “Young Americans.” But while artists like Graydon recall a welcome reception for such collaborations in Yacht Rock — “I never had any problems ’cause as soon as they heard the white kid play, the white kid’s accepted” — Vandross and Black singers like Brenda Russell had to fight constricting perceptions: “It was hard to cross over into the pop thing because people had a preconceived idea of what you’re supposed to sound like.”
Vandross famously took a bubbly ballad from Russell’s self-titled debut and turned it into a standard, as was his knack. His “If Only for One Night” is a gobstopping showcase for a velvet-soft instrument, as are labyrinthine covers of songs Dionne Warwick and the Carpenters made famous. He cruised through gray areas between soul, funk, jazz, and pop, sometimes grazing territory now demarcated as yacht rock. “Better Love” from 1982’s Forever, for Always, for Love is a funkier iteration of what “This Is It” is going for. The cover of Stevie Wonder’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale jam “Creepin’’” on 1985’s The Night I Fell in Love and “There’s Nothing Better Than Love” with Gregory Hines from 1986’s Give Me the Reason both descend from the same tree the white rockers were perched under. But like Russell, Vandross longed for greater acclaim than the stream of Grammy nominations for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, which he was consistently shut out of until the early ’90s, while his white MOR station neighbors made music reflexively supported in the ’80s across diverging radio formats — and, if they worked at it, MTV.
With decades of ground to cover, Yacht Rock collapses the impact of the first few years of the network into a short span, jumping to the rise of Michael Jackson without getting into the weeds about the fight for videos by Black artists to be aired in the first place (though credit is due for making the Toto guys defensive about the tackiness of “Africa”). The narrative says image-conscious music-video culture swept schlubby soft-rockers under the rug, adding an extra layer of requirements for success in pop at the dawn of the ’80s. Luther speaks to colorism and fatphobia making a great singer less of a priority for his record label throughout the ’70s, though, portraying a world prior to MTV in which image didn’t just affect how music got filed but also the artist’s pool of opportunities. Success fueled scrutiny and complaints: He weighed too much, or suddenly didn’t; he refused to dignify rumors about his sexuality with the requested specificity.
You were free to make whatever music you wanted in the ’70s and ’80s but selling it to the masses meant surrendering to nervous bean counters in the business, and their requisite biases. It’s difficult to uncouple this dimension of the story from the insinuation that Christopher Cross upstaging Barbra Streisand at the Grammys in 1981 presented a brief but massive industry sea change. A class of pop upstarts arrived that didn’t look like their predecessors. But the ruddy resemblance to the average American was something they had working for, not against, them.
Yacht-rock discourse through the years tells upbeat stories about feel-good music. But we should never forget that their setting is the same ’70s America of Disco Demolition Night fame, where implicit anti-Blackness and anti-queerness went Fahrenheit 451, and the ’80s America that pushed early rap stars and established R&B acts to the margins on terrestrial radio and television. Tied up in the yacht-rock creation myth is a pining for a lost air of meritocracy in the music business. For a little while, the pen and the playing were paramount. Yacht Rock and Luther, taken together, test the universality of the postulate, revealing how important it is to the audience to develop a fixed sense of image, art, and predilections. They’re case studies in the divergent courses of navigation through the music industry for performers with vast talents and interests from different backgrounds. The husky Black man from the Bronx toiled for every inch of respect, beset by toxicity and misinformation, as hairy white folk-rock and boogie-band alumni pushed similar buttons to become the de facto bards of the everyman.
Not everyone’s complexity gets celebrated in its time as erudition. It’s possible to spend an entire career confusing people who don’t realize they’ve tucked you away in the wrong folder in their minds. It’s sort of kismet that the Luther Vandross song that ultimately shattered the General Field category ceiling he felt at the Grammys was 2003’s “Dance With My Father,” tech-friendly pure-R&B remembrance and a hit pitched straight through the sweet spot in his extensive musical wheelhouse. The recognition he pined for came without pandering. It’s a shame that Vandross, who died in 2005 of complications from a stroke, didn’t get to participate in the clear-eyed, holistic reappraisal he’s gotten with Luther, to quibble with his admirers and critics like Toto in Yacht Rock. It would have been a hoot.
Yacht Rock is most intriguing as a chronicle of the cat-and-mouse relationship between artists’ creativity and the language fans and brands use to describe and promote it. It also nails the tone of the forums and YouTube comment sections where hypothetical micro-genres take hold. But it doesn’t tangle enough with the lay of the land undergirding a largely white male pop revolution, or the timeless conflation of the adaptation of Black musical trends for mainstream audiences with sophistication. Why did Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’” get to straddle R&B, pop, and adult-contemporary charts? Luther highlights the pre-existing hierarchies that persisted in the era celebrated for session whizzes blurring boundaries and pop stars coming in unlikely packages. It mattered what Vandross looked like, and this is a liability in any account of the era seeking to paint it as a playground for unsung musical properties noisily crossing over. In tandem, the documentaries relay the nebulousness (and sometime nefariousness) of the partitions we rely on to think and speak about music, and their still-racialized underpinnings. Yacht rock celebrates pop’s repurposing of Black artists’ ideas, conferring the air of wealth on the extraction without unpacking life on the business end of the fangs in a vampiric arrangement. It stokes conversation about differences in the music of Hall and Oates and Michael McDonald but doesn’t involve Chicago or the Isley Brothers or mature ’80s R&B that scratched similar itches. It yearns to condense what does not ache to be neatly contained. It’s a deeply aughts rhetorical convention, a descriptor that, like the decade’s overuse of “hipster,” better conveys relationships between people and places than artistry and artists. It is past time for a new lens. More fun than quibbling about the particulate contrasts between these songs is the party that happens as you play them all in a row.
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