Music Box: Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary

In the late 1970s and early 1980s a group of Los Angeles musicians made a pop obsessed with studio craft, smooth and full of jazz chords. Christopher Cross, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan, Toto. At the time it had no name; in the 2000s an online parody series called it yacht rock, and the name stuck. Garret Price's documentary covers three phases: the rise, the mid-1980s collapse into being a punchline, and the return thirty years later that began as irony and ended in earnest. The musicians themselves speak, and most of them first encountered the label online. What makes the film interesting is how it shows the line between mockery and admiration disappearing. Who it's for: Anyone interested in pop music of the 1970s and 1980s, session musicianship, and how genres get named. Who it's not for: The musical analysis stays on the surface and the telling slides into celebration. It makes no persuasive case to a viewer who does not like the music.