Robert Palmer was the puppet master of the beautiful, drugged, stylish, vacant mannequins in his video for "Addicted to Love." The song is anonymous 80s meat. The video deliberately exaggerates a misogynistic aesthetic, complementing the droning guitars and drug-pun-rich lyrics. This vacuous fascist fashion is how Robert Palmer is remembered, if at all.

Speaking of remembrance, I was struck, upon Palmer's death in 2003, at how anticlimactic it was. I didn't expect his death to cause global mourning as with Frank Sinatra, George Harrison, Jerry Garcia, or even Warren Zevon, but I thought he might merit a bit more than this cursory, loveless obituary. No tears for a craven 80s schlockmeister, I concluded.

You knew it was coming! With SiriusXM's limited-run YachtRock channel burning up the airwaves, Yacht Rock hasn't been this popular since 1983. We're talking, of course, about the smooth sounds of Michael McDonald, Captain & Tennille, Christopher Cross, and other late 70s/early 80s soft rock giants. Music to chain-smoke to. Music to "not get civil rights" to. Music to play in the background while you spend idle days on a yacht. It's not necessarily music for the wealthy, but it is music for people who don't try very hard.

Is Yacht Rock fascist? Of course! But don't make the mistake of conflating Yacht Rock and fascist music into one. Yacht Rock is a type of fascist music - and yes, all Yacht Rock is definitionally fascist - but doesn't represent the full breadth of fascist music. Fascist music includes post-prime rock by legacy artists, aggressively power-hungry music, selling out, corporate music, facelessness, suffocation, and more. Yacht Rock represents a great dimension of fascist music: the brown-stained, corporate, sinister, idle, daft music of the shittiest 10 years of the 20th century. But there's more.

Enjoy the waning days of the YachtRock channel on SiriusXM. Then check back in with us to see what fresh hell we can get into.

Ah, the ludicrous stylings of Toto. As a preliminary matter, it's worth noting that the band itself is supremely fascist in concept and execution. With Toto (Latin for "total"), we have a collection of faceless Los Angeles-based "ace session musicians" who decided, amid the most fascist era in rock history (the late 1970s, which was so overwhelmingly oppressive that it gave rise to punk) to max out the corporate card. Toto's music is so self-evidently fascist that there's not much novel insight to share.

The album art merits comment, however. First thing you notice: They like swords. On their eponymous 1977 album, the sword is exalted in space, framed by some kind of medieval family crest, and shrouded in purple steam. This album cover so completely hews to fascist principles that it seems to anticipate the existence of FASCISTMUSIC.com. (Side note: What was the space fascination in so many late-70s albums? No wonder two generations thought corporate rock was for losers. Millennials, of course, don't collect albums, so they can enjoy Journey's and Boston's tasty jams without the disqualifying images.)

The sword theme continues on their most popular album (the one with "Africa"), IV, and so does the enwreathment theme, with golden rings surrounding the sword against a blood-red background. If there's one thing a fascist likes as much as violence and oppression, it's golden rings. We feel the impulse to genuflect before this album cover.

Don't you worry: There are swords on most of Toto's remaining albums, including its greatest hits packages. But I wanted to show some other sides to Toto. The "Africa" single initially seems like a refreshing blast of liberty, and in some ways it is. Look, it's the guys! Yes, it's nice to see some faces. But there are six of them, not a great sign (in toto, 45 souls have cycled through this "band"), and who knows who any of them are, and they look like Scarface extras. Still, that's the look of the era, so let's be generous. And look, Africa! They care, right? Well, let me stop you there. They blessed the rains down in Africa. Gods of a primitive continent, right? Is there another interpretation? And look at that "Africa" font, stamped like a C.A.R.E. package. We need to move on.

Finally, we have Toto's sad 1999 effort -- aren't they all? -- Mindfields. This Matrix agent is peering into your mind, of course, and the world is warped, and all he sees in your mind are fields. There's some Asian writing for some reason. All this is disturbing, albeit in a stupid way. Toto is again trying to intimidate us with their fascism, and the fact that they fail does not detract from the darkness of their attempt.

The gold standard. The system crushes the individual.

Mindless repetition of shapes, icons, and slogans. From the claustrophobia-inducing center -- where "JAZZ," in pink, the stand-in for humanity, is evidently trying to escape -- one encounters choking circles, one after another. If you are somehow able to escape the inner rings, you soon confront another, different set of rings. There is no end, no escape, as the rings gradually become infinitesimally close together.

The album's title is cruelly ironic. Jazz is the freest, most organic 20th-century musical form. Its language is abstract and improvisational; its images are colorful. With its computer-generated black and white circles, this is the furthest thing from jazz.