Sure, what the heck, let’s try reviewing the yacht rock documentary

Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary on HBO is good in the way that yacht rock itself is good: Relaxed, easy-to-digest, and more insistently about the music than you might expect.

It’s also delightfully pedantic, clarifying from the jump that the name “yacht rock”—bestowed retroactively on the genre by a send-up web series from the late aughts—does not reference what you might queue up while sailing, but rather the expense and sophistication apparent in this music’s production.

It also establishes that Steely Dan is not so much yacht rock as it is the progenitor. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s studio craftsmanship and deployment of jazz harmony—plus the specific session guys they enlisted to achieve their vision—wound up seeding the genre. Most of the film is spent retracing the connections between artists like Michael McDonald and the brothers Porcaro while defining the specific sound they created. (One of its pithier observations: The lyrics, in which lovelorn men speak of their follies and foolishness, were trailblazing in their vulnerability.) It concludes by charting a path to the future, in which yacht rock hits turned up in hip-hop samples and ultimately inspired the likes of Thundercat and Questlove, but only after MTV rendered the genre obsolete.

Like any documentary, the omissions in Yacht Rock are as notable as the inclusions. This isn’t Behind the Music, so almost zero attention is paid to the musicians’ upbringings and personal lives. And while the film acknowledges that music from Black artists inspired the genre, it gives only a cursory nod to those who also made music within it, like George Benson and Al Jarreau. Distinguishing between Black and white yacht rock might be a study unto itself.

What you get instead is an obsessive focus on what makes the highly particular sound of yacht rock worth celebrating nearly five decades later. It has nothing to do with nautical attire and sunglasses.