“If there's one thing in my life that's missing
It's the time that I spend alone
Sailing on the cool and bright clear water
It's kind of a special feeling
When you're out on the sea alone
Staring at the full moon, like a lover”.

- ‘Cool Change’, Little River Band

                                                                ~~~~~

The late great comedian Bill Hicks had a short bit about watching CNN. It went like this- “You ever watch CNN headline news for any length of time? It’s the most depressing fucking thing you will ever do. “War, famine, death, AIDS, homeless, recession, depression, war, famine, death, AIDS”. Then you look out your window and it’s just [sounds of crickets chirping]. Where is all this shit happening man?”

Hicks was already naming the ‘culture of fear in the early 1990’s, and the fear mongering from the MSM has only grown worse since then. The use of fear to rule over people is an old practice going back a long way. Human evolutionary heritage has left us with a powerful flight, fight or freeze response in the face of danger. The amygdala at the base of our brain controls the flight, fight or freeze response, and it’s easily triggered by emotions such as fear, anxiety, aggression and anger. The amygdala “hijacks” the rational brain when activated. Rulers have understood for a long time that stoking fear is a great way to control a population. As H.L Menken once put it, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”. Keeping people in a state of fear, and then presenting yourself as the one who’ll protect them from the ‘imminent danger’, is a devious yet tried and true form of social control. And the small group of elites who own the mainstream media are obviously deploying this tactic to an extreme.

Just take the various things that are going on as of the writing of this article (January 15-30, 2020). After just barely escaping WORLD WAR 3!!!! in the Middle East, we now have an outbreak of a new ‘deadly virus’. Kind of like the many other deadly virus outbreaks we’ve seen over the past twenty years. Whatever happened to Ebola anyway? I can remember the intense fear on my social media feeds as we watched the first patient quarantined in New York. Anyway, while that’s happening the Doomsday Clock was moved closer to midnight. One of the threats moving the clock ahead is of course climate change, which according to politicians like AOC will kill us all in twelve years if we don’t do something about it. Meanwhile, the media can’t stop using the word apocalypse in their article titles. A simple search of articles just this week alone reveals the constant use of this frightful signifier. The Hill reports that wind turbines are causing a “bird apocalypse”.  EcoWatch says that if we act now we can save bugs from the “insect apocalypse”. Forbes magazine writes about the “The Three Horseman of the Food Apocalypse”. TNW had an article called “A Beginner’s Guide to the AI Apocalypse”. It goes on and on. “War, famine, death, AIDS, homeless, recession, depression, war, famine, death, AIDS”. It’s an endless barrage of alarmism that keeps our amygdalas in a constantly swollen state.

Thankfully there’s an antidote to the deluge of fear porn that’s constantly bombarding us. Yacht Rock. That’s right, the smooth sounds of Yacht Rock dissolves the dread machine and lets our amygdalas return to a restful state. I’m being both slightly tongue in cheek and 100% serious when I say this. Yacht Rock is a style of music that really needs to be turned on once in awhile in our doom-laden times, so we can drift away for a time and repair the nervous system. For those who don’t know the genre, Yacht Rock describes a smooth soft-rock style of music that was popular in the 1970s and early 80s. Popular artists in the genre include Christopher Cross, Steely Dan, Kenny Loggins, Hall & Oates, Michael McDonald, and a whole load of one or two hit wonders. The genre wasn’t called Yacht Rock until 2005 when a group of actor/comedians put out a twelve-part show called Yacht Rock on Channel 101. The creators of the web series were fans of this era of music, and at some point they noticed that a lot of the album covers in the genre had guys on yachts, or involved water scenes of some sort (many of the musicians lived in California). So they called it Yacht Rock and the series of the same name was a popular success. And from the success of the show this somewhat forgotten genre of music has had a big rebirth, including a dedicated Yacht Rock channel on SiriusXM. It’s also helped to (re)boost the careers of artists in the genre like Hall & Oates and Michael McDonald, which now have a wave of younger fans showing up in their audiences.

It’s the smooth stylings of Yacht Rock that makes it such good kryptonite against the doomsayers who saturate our media airwaves. The style incorporates soul and jazz and R&B sounds, uses lush arrangements and top-notch production, and has themes of romance and escape and being outdoors is plush natural settings. It pairs well with a good cocktail and its sounds are a natural relaxant. You can almost feel the warm tropical air blowing over you as the keys, horns and background vocals weave their magic. And before we dismiss this genre as just the cheesy music of a bunch of white dudes- and it was mostly white dudes who made it- Hip Hop has used plenty of samples from Yacht Rock songs over the years. Take the song ‘Regulate’ by Warren G and Nate Dogg for instance. Its basic musical bed is taken straight from Michael McDonald’s hit song ‘I Keep Forgetting’, and it fits like a glove. A 2018 article on the site DJBooth talks about “Hip-Hop’s Unsung Love Affair With Yacht Rock”. It mentions a recent song called ‘Show You the Way’ by the artist Thundercat, which actually features Yacht Rockers Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald on background vocals. It appears that the suave soul goodness of Yacht Rock crosses cultural divides.

The reason I think listening to Yacht Rock is so needed in our time is not only because of the culture of fear promulgated by the MSM and corrupt politicians. It’s also because we’re living in a time of major cultural transformation and turbulence, which only amplifies and feeds the fear machine. On one level of analysis, you could say that we’re nearing the end of the current modern world-system. An old order is no longer maintaining coherence and control, and we’ve entered into a time of wild flux and disorder. There’s social unrest everywhere, from France to Chile to Hong Kong, Lebanon and many other countries. Globalist elites are on the ropes from an array of populist movements, and the blackmail networks used to control those elites are being exposed. There’s high strangeness everywhere, and anomalous activity seemingly every day. It’s truly a strange time to be alive.

Seeing as how the media can’t stop using the word apocalypse, let’s turn that concept back against them, especially since they don’t use it properly. The media uses the term to connote cataclysmic world-ending type destruction. But that’s not what apocalypse means. The word apocalypse means to ‘unveil’ or ‘reveal’, and the biblical writers understood it to mean the ending of a corrupt and evil world, and the unveiling of a new more just one in its place. It doesn’t mean the terrifying fiery end of the world, as the media would have it, but an epochal victory of the light over the powers of darkness. In three places the Bible speaks of this epochal period as the ‘Great Tribulation’. According to the Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible, the Tribulation “is an intensification of the battle between good and evil in the last days”. Looking around the world today, that sounds about right, especially as we learn more and more about the sordid habits of the world’s elite. But as we said “the last days” doesn’t mean the destruction of the earth. It means the end of our rule by the wicked and unjust.

I truly believe that we’re in just such a time of tribulation and epochal transformation. Maybe not THE tribulation as the Bible predicts it, but something with just the same flavor. But if we’re going to collectively midwife that next more beautiful world into being, we’re going to need to calm our constantly swollen amygdalas. To achieve this we can do many things, such as turning off the MSM, taking breaks from social media, getting out into nature, resting, reading a book, and much more. And from time to time we can also grab our favorite beverage, kick back, and put on the cool sounds of Yacht Rock. For a few replenishing hours we can steal away and taste the sweet freedom that comes from unplugging the fear machine. So let’s put away the power of nightmares, and drink in the power of Yacht Rock as we go sailing off into our awaiting future.