Vedder, Jackson Browne, Tristan Prettyman, Ben Harper, Chris Isaak, Brandon Boyd of Incubus, and Metallica’s Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujillo.
FIGURE 1. Surfwear company Billabong’s “Only a Surfer Knows the Feeling” ad, featuring surfer-musician Donavon Frankenreiter, that appeared in the Fall 2010 issue of the Surfer’s Journal. Reprinted with the permission of Burleigh Point, Ltd. dba Billabong USA.
But is there anything inherently musical about surfing? Is the relationship between music and surfing—taken for granted and celebrated by insider surfing media and films—real and meaningful, or is it a myth propagated by that periodically revived genre labeled Surf Music from the early 1960s (the Beach Boys: but more to the point, that “King of the Surf Guitar” Dick Dale)? Or are these the wrong questions?
They are the wrong questions. Rather than asking if the connection made by some musical surfers between musicking and surfing is real or mythical, it is more satisfying (not to mention ethnographically appropriate and productive) to accept those connections as meaningful cultural constructions that must be taken seriously. Surfing is a cultural practice; its development, style, and, ultimately, meaning are all expressions of human creativity. Making and listening to music are also cultural practices that, like surfing, are expressive of the human condition. Yes, listening to music is an expressive practice; it is an activity not that far removed from making musical sounds oneself. In many ways music is in the listening. The same sound may be heard by one person as music and by a second as noise. Choosing what music we listen to, get into, dance to, worship to, compose, and share with our friends is one of the ways we create who we are as individuals and as groups. The decision to play in the water, to lie, kneel, or stand on a surfboard, and the riding styles we imagine and achieve are also part of who we are as individuals and groups. We can spin this out indefinitely: the size and shape of the surfboard you choose suggest something about your style and skills (or aspirations), as do the color and cut of your boardshorts or bikini. Likewise, the instrument you play and the outfit you wear when performing suggest ideas about the sounds you intend to make even before you begin making music.
Let’s stick to surfing and music generally for the moment. Any individual’s and group’s ideas about meaningful relationships between these cultural practices and others form part of that individual’s and that group’s cultural identity. It is part of who they are and the identities that they create for themselves. When an individual proclaims that he or she makes music this or that way because of religious beliefs or ethnic heritage, we tend to take that seriously. Surfing may or may not hold similar cultural weight for any given wave rider, but we owe it to surfers to take seriously the connections they make between their musicking and surfing. The music that surfers associate with surfing is key to what surfing is, or rather the many things that surfing is, as well as to who surfers are and aspire to be. This is what this book is about. This is why making music about surfing and surfing about music is serious business.
AFFINITY, COMMUNITY, AND THE SURFING LIFESTYLE
Since the essence of surfing is one person dancing with the power of an ocean (and occasionally smaller bodies of water), the sport lends itself to individualization. Yet while a modern trope is that the surfer would just as soon surf alone, surfers (like all other humans) seek communities of like-minded people. Sometimes in some societies this may begin by surfers saying what they are not. As Belinda Wheaton notes in the introduction to her book Understanding Lifestyle Sports, surfers and participants in other lifestyle sports may deliberately seek to challenge existing orders by being transgressive.6 Yet even transgression seeks company. Challenging and transgressive behaviors soon form the basis for a new identity group and even a community of sorts.
Surfing did not start out as transgressive behavior; it originated with seafaring islanders who probably first enjoyed the boost from waves when they returned to shore with a vessel full of fish. Before Europeans and North Americans sailed to Hawaiʻi, surfing was practiced and celebrated by all segments of Hawaiian society. In the early nineteenth century, Calvinist missionaries to Hawaiʻi instilled the still-prevalent view that surfing was unproductive and a waste of time, necessitated nudity, and was thus sinful. Much less common in Hawaiʻi at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century than it was a century earlier, surfing quietly took root in California and then spread around the world, but it carried with it some of the taint of transgression given it by missionaries in Hawaiʻi. Of course that hint of danger and rebellion suited some midcentury surfers, and later became an attractive (to some) quality of skateboarding and snowboarding, both descendent board-sports first developed by California surfers. Globalized surfing today continues to cultivate the image of danger, independence, and subcultural edginess.
Embraced by some but resisted by others, a term frequently used by surfers today to refer to a surfing community is tribe.7 The term captures some of the tensions between individualism and a desire or even need for community. Tribe sounds a bit out of place in many modern societies, and suggests a collective that is somehow different from—and slightly threatening to—any given mass society. A tribe is only slightly more respectable than a gang in popular usage. Yet tribe also suggests desirable qualities. A tribe is inclusive (women, men, and children of all ages are welcome and needed in a tribe), has some sense of heritage and history, and of course has rituals. An e-mail message I recently received from the California Surf Museum promised such a tribal ritual. It began: “Join the tribe—come celebrate Surfer magazine’s 50 years . . . ” The celebration would be a gathering of the tribal leaders, yet even lowly villagers like me were invited. By attending the celebration, one could ritually reaffirm one’s own membership in the surfing affinity group—the tribe—and at the same time distinguish oneself for a moment from the rest of society.
Surfing is all about balance. Navigating the inherent individuality of surfing itself and the human need to form communities requires balance. Any discussion of surfing communities must seek to balance the contradictions and contrasts that make them what they are. In his book Dancing the Wave, Jean-Étienne Poirier writes with poetic power of these contradictions: “Surfing is the center of a sphere where some values evolve in one direction while others move in the opposite: sometimes the image of surfing is gentle and romantic, with a setting sun and surfers with magnificent smiles; sometimes it is war-like and violent, with illustrations of titanic waves that leave no room for refinement and delicate dance moves. . . . Because opposing forces together create gravity, surfing remains in motion.”8 Surfing communities need the solitary surfer seeking empty waves,9 as well as the local surfer who surfs the same spot whenever the waves are up with the same group of friends, and even the surfer who rarely gets wet but who dreams of the perfect ride. All are part of a surfing tribe; the internal contrasts and oppositions are part of what keeps that community vital.
Frankly, I also need there to be some sort of vital community for this book to make any sense. To approach music as an ethnomusicologist, I need a group of people making and consuming music. As the prefix ethno- suggests, the discipline of ethnomusicology is very concerned with group identities, often defined as ethnicities. My study of music and surfing is in part a critique of my discipline’s obsession with the increasingly problematic divisions of individuals into politically defined ethnic categories.10 The posited global affinity group of surfers that I am writing about here challenges the sorts of subjects that make up the stock-in-trade of ethnomusicology: groups that form around shared heritage, religion, regions, occupations, and so forth. Here I find more useful recent theories of elective communities—from “cultural cohorts” to “affinity groups” and “lifestyle sports.”11
Surfing is arguably the prototypical lifestyle sport—a sport that can be distinguished from what are called in sports studies “achievement sports.” Achievement sports are those typically taught in institutions (for example, football, rugby, baseball, track, and wrestling), and they emphasize teamwork and competition. Lifestyle sports are also called many things, including
