Category: Yacht Rock

Tikbalangs, Brucesploitation, and Yacht Rock

The feeling of waiting desperately for something to drop–a song, a book, a film–never gets old, even in my old age, and I can’t wait to get my grubby paws on these. I feel like I live squarely in the overlap of the Venn diagram of this trifecta:

Poster for the 2026 short film BREEDER, directed by Sapphire Sandalo

BREEDER (2026). This is a short film directed by Sapphire Sandalo about a woman being hunted in her home by a Tikbalang. Look, isn’t that all you really need to know?? It’s out in the indie circuit and in the town I live in, I’m sure I’ll come across it sooner or later.

ENTER THE CLONES OF BRUCE (2023) is a documentary about the subgenre of kung-fu movies featuring anyone who could be repackaged as the next Bruce Lee after his untimely death in 1973–Bruce Le, Bruce Lo, Bruce Rhee, Dragon Lee among others, including my personal favorite, Bruce Li. Everything stopped for me when a Bruce Li film showed up on Cleveland’s UHF airwaves on a Saturday afternoon in the 1980s. At least this one is on streaming.

KITE ON A STRING: THE BOBBY KIMBALL STORY is still in production, I believe. It’s a documentary on singer Bobby Kimball, the first lead singer of the band Toto, his decades-long career and his current battle with frontotemporal dementia. You’ve definitely heard his voice, even if you don’t know his name. And the same could be said about the veritable who’s who of Yacht Rock and West Coast AOR musicians they lined up to talk about him!

From the little I’ve read about the timeline of the progression of his condition, Kimball still managed to fit in shout vocals for a song on Chicago’s 2022 album BORN FOR THIS MOMENT. Which I personally found hilarious, the fact that Chicago brought in a longtime friend and collaborator of Bill Champlin (who’s also in the film) who they kicked out of the band for (among other reasons) singing more or less the same way.

Weeknotes S05 E08: Platform Reset

The words "press to reset the world" painted above a crosswalk button.

Pondering the continued enshittification of just about every social media platform, I realized that I’ve got a space that I tend to forget about until I get an email reminder to renew my domain name and webhosting. With money. I bet you can look at my posting patterns and figure out when I get those emails.

So I got it into my head to work on a little platform reset, pinning potential reference material here rather than somewhere I can get a quick like or reply. Hence the recent increase in non-weeknotes posts. Sure, it’s slightly more effort but again, I am paying for ::waves hands:: all this.

Anyway, here are some things that caught my attention last week, currently marinating in my brain:

1
I guess we should bahala na si Batman!!

67.21% of passengers offered their seats in the presence of Batman, or more than two out of three, compared to 37.66% in the control experiment, or just over one out of three.

2
If I’ve ever seen a setup for a DATELINE episode, this is it…

Days after an Atlanta man died in a scuba diving accident in Hawaii, authorities said they found the skeletal remains of his son who had gone missing four years prior in a tree house in his backyard.

3
With the assault from the government on one side and the threat of AI from another, I’ll take all the reminders I can get that art can survive. Unsurprisingly, it takes the form of the legacy of a Black woman completely unknown to me previously.

The arts remind us that none of the current truisms are absolutes—that there are other ways of living, existing, and being. Arts can exist outside of a tech lord’s algorithm.

As you can see, I’ve been playing around with Quotebacks. Jury’s still out, but so far I’m liking the convenience. Anyway, I’m not completely off the socials–you can find me on Bluesky these days–but I’ll be shooting for more cross-over. Let’s see how this goes!

Yacht Rock Imitating Life

To commemorate the 45th anniversary of the release of Yacht Rock classic “Ride Like The Wind” by Christopher Cross in 1980, an official music video was finally produced!

But there are other ways to celebrate the occasion, I guess. Like live-action re-enactment:

A minivan driver fleeing police drove 173 miles across four Southern California counties Monday before escaping into Mexico in a chase spanning more than two hours.

via the Los Angeles Times

And If the Wind Is Right, You Can Sail Away

New school yacht rock meets old school yacht rock!

How could I not love Benny Sings’ vibe? Dutch guy putting a modern spin on Yacht Rock, singing like Barry Gibb on lo-fi tracks? Yes please. I got a couple of his albums, and that was before I knew he was hanging out with bands like Free Nationals. If he’s hip enough for them, he’s hip enough for me.

And to top it off, to get a hold of a Christopher Cross demo to put it on the B-side? :chef’s kiss:

The New Yacht Rock

Tired: Young musicians using the recording techniques and gear of the ’60s to replicate ’60s R&B.

Wired: Young musicians using the recording techniques and gear of the late ’70s/early ’80s to replicate Yacht Rock. (With bonus points for scoring one of that era’s legendary vocalists!)