From the New York Times magazine, I'm Nicole Hannah Jones. This is 1619. This week, Wesley

Morris on the Birth of American Music.

So, last fall, I am at my friend's house. We are making dinner. I'm chopping vegetables,

and I asked my friend Brett, who was cooking with me. Can you put on some music? And he said,

what do you want to listen to? And I said, have you ever heard of Yacht Rock? And he said,

what? I said, Yacht Rock, have you ever heard of this? And he goes, no, I have not. So he finds the

Yacht Rock station in Pandora, which I don't know why or how he's still a Pandora guy with all

due respect to Pandora. He is one. And he finds the Yacht Rock station. At some point,

Brett has to go run an error. And I think I might have sent him on one. I don't remember. But he's

gone. So I'm alone, just me with the vegetables. And Yacht Rock. It gives me plenty of time to really

think about the songs I'm hearing. We're talking about music made between the years of, I don't know,

I would say like 1975 to about 1983. Things like, aces how long, seals and croft doing summer breeze,

I'm hearing things like, steal away by Robbie Dupreeze. And the Dubie Brothers, what a full believes.

He can't go somewhere, back in a long ago. He said, I'm ever, food don't see trying

it hard. It is like our soft, rockest period in American popular music. The joke of Yacht Rock is

that whoever invented it and whoever's making a playlist out of these songs is basically saying

that they're inconsequential and that what's in them doesn't matter. But what I know I'm hearing

is something bigger and deeper than that. Every song has something about it that is similar to the

other songs. I'm hearing things like Rosanna by Toto, which seems perfectly banal has a really good

beat. This sort of builds to its chorus. I'm hearing the great duop harmonies of the 50s and 60s.

There is something jazz like in the syncopated music of something like Steely Dan.

You can hear in somebody like Michael McDonald. That is like a gospel breakdown.

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