The dusky heat of Miles Davis’s trumpeting. It brims with call and response, layers of syncopation and this rougher element called “noise,” unique sounds that arise from the particular hue and timbre of an instrument - Little Richard’s woos and knuckled keyboard zooms. Black music is a completely different story. Chromatic-chord harmony, clean timbre of voice and instrument: These are the ingredients for some of the hugely singable harmonies of the Beatles, the Eagles, Simon and Fleetwood Mac, something choral, “pure,” largely ungrained. “White,” “Western,” “classical” music is the overarching basis for lots of American pop songs. The purity that separation struggles to maintain? This country’s music is an advertisement for 400 years of the opposite: centuries of “amalgamation” and “miscegenation” as they long ago called it, of all manner of interracial collaboration conducted with dismaying ranges of consent.ĭiana Ross and the Supremes with Paul McCartney in London in 1968. Americans have made a political investment in a myth of racial separateness, the idea that art forms can be either “white” or “black” in character when aspects of many are at least both. It’s proof, too, that American music has been fated to thrive in an elaborate tangle almost from the beginning. If blackness can draw all of this ornate literariness out of Steely Dan and all this psychotic origami out of Eminem if it can make Teena Marie sing everything - “Square Biz,” “Revolution,” “Portuguese Love,” “Lovergirl” - like she knows her way around a pack of Newports if it can turn the chorus of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me” into a gospel hymn if it can animate the swagger in the sardonic vulnerabilities of Amy Winehouse if it can surface as unexpectedly as it does in the angelic angst of a singer as seemingly green as Ben Platt if it’s the reason Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait” remains the whitest jam at the blackest parties, then it’s proof of how deeply it matters to the music of being alive in America, alive to America. It’s the conflation of pride and chagrin I’ve always felt anytime a white person inhabits blackness with gusto.

Playing black-music detective that day, I laughed out of bafflement and embarrassment and exhilaration. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative. The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. He sounds as if he’s baring it all yet begging to wring himself out even more. What bowls you over is the intensity of his yearning - teary in the verses, snarling during the chorus. But Loggins delivers the lyrics in a desperate stage whisper, like someone determined to make the kind of love that doesn’t wake the baby. “This Is It” was a hit in 1979 and has the requisite smoothness to keep the yacht rocking. Then Kenny Loggins’s “This Is It” arrived and took things far beyond the line. Which artists would saunter up to the racial border? And which could do their sauntering without violating it? I could hear degrees of blackness in the choir-loft certitude of Doobie Brothers-era Michael McDonald on “What a Fool Believes” in the rubber-band soul of Steely Dan’s “Do It Again” in the malt-liquor misery of Ace’s “How Long” and the toy-boat wistfulness of Little River Band’s “Reminiscing.” I started putting each track under investigation. I had to laugh - not because as a category Yacht Rock is absurd, but because what I tasted in that absurdity was black. But as the hours passed and dozens of songs accrued, the sound gravitated toward a familiar quality that I couldn’t give language to but could practically taste: an earnest Christian yearning that would reach, for a moment, into Baptist rawness, into a known warmth.

With two exceptions, they were all white. “A tongue-in-cheek name for the breezy sounds of late ’70s/early ’80s soft rock” is Pandora’s definition, accompanied by an exhortation to “put on your Dockers, pull up a deck chair and relax.” With a single exception, the passengers aboard the yacht were all dudes. I’ve got a friend who’s an incurable Pandora guy, and one Saturday while we were making dinner, he found a station called Yacht Rock.

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