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Fun
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Nostalgic
‘Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary’
Ever since the meteoric rise of VH1’s Behind The Music in the 1990s, music documentaries have tended to focus more on the chaos surrounding the personal lives of musicians (drugs, divorces, breakups, and bad times) than the music itself. Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary, the latest entry in Bill Simmons’ Music Box series for the Home Box Office, is a minor revelation precisely because of how seriously it treats the music and musicians that defined this genre (a genre that, up until now, has been largely regarded as deeply UNserious). There’s a great balance here between anecdotes and recollections from the artists responsible for creating the music (Michael McDonald, Christopher Cross, all the dudes from Toto) and insightful cultural contextualization from some of our current era’s premiere pop culture commentators (Steven Hyden, Molly Lambert, Alex Pappademas, and the Channel 101 guys who coined the term “Yacht Rock” in their early Aughts webseries). Clocking in a smidge north of 90 minutes, it never overstays its welcome.
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