The Yacht Rock Book: The Oral History of the Soft, Smooth Sounds of the 70s and 80s

If The Wire is the height of pop-culture art, Yacht Rock is mainly a punchline, a lovingly ironic gag about the cheesy hits that dominated the airwaves in the '70s and early '80s. (But greatness lies there too, even in the softest of places.) In no sense is this the definitive book on this difficult-to-define subject. Prato didn't talk to everybody (my god, England Dan & John Ford Coley and Starbuck aren't even mentioned!), and his definition is loose to the point of meaninglessness (Billy Joel?!?), but the beauty of an oral history is that even when the book itself is muddled, you still have the voices, and if you want to know, from the source, how "Baby Come Back" and "Escape (The Pina Colada Song)" were made, and how love finally didn't keep the Captain and Tennille together, you can start here.