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The Music Industry Couldn’t Handle Luther Vandross
He longed for the same acclaim and freedom awarded to his white contemporaries in yacht rock.
It recounts the winking-but-loving reassessment of acts like Steely Dan and Toto — sparked by a whimsical aughts web series that gave the genre its name — alongside interviews with songwriters and session players responsible for staples like Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald’s “This Is It” and Christopher Cross’s “Sailing.” These conversations show how culture perseveres, while audiences of the future come away with different perceptions than artists intended or ever imagined. But like Russell, Vandross longed for greater acclaim than the stream of Grammy nominations for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance, which he was consistently shut out of until the early ’90s, while his white MOR station neighbors made music reflexively supported in the ’80s across diverging radio formats — and, if they worked at it, MTV. Withdecades of ground to cover, Yacht Rock collapses the impact of the first few years of the network into a short span, jumping to the rise of Michael Jackson without getting into the weeds about the fight for videos by Black artists to be aired in the first place (though credit is due for making the Toto guys defensive about the tackiness of “Africa”).
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