Both genres emerged in the early 1960s, and they do capture something of the history of surfing, especially in California at that time. What Surf Music captures is the mass popularization of surfing that resulted from new technologies of mass-producing lighter boards, not unlike the mass production of electric guitars by Fender, a Southern California company that became the preferred brand of surf rock bands. Surf Music encouraged the global spread of surfing itself and engendered enduring myths about Southern California and a newly white, youthful, and masculine surfing lifestyle. However, naming a popular genre of music surf was a problem for some surfers at the time, and became a problem for many who desired to make music about surfing subsequently. This second issue has only recently been resolved with the popularity of a number of surfing musicians.
If music on the beaches of Hawaiʻi and Southern California is a good index of surfing trends in the first half of the twentieth century, the music used for surf movies is an even better index for the second half of that century. In chapter 3, “Music in Surf Movies,” I survey the music used in a selection of surf movies that were particularly influential in shaping the musical practices of significant groups of surfers. I begin in the 1950s with the first surf movies for which we have the original musical soundtracks and then move through the formative boom years of the 1960s, to the VHS era, and then on to the present-day digital formats. With these movies I show what music was popular among at least some surfers before the named genre Surf Music existed, how some surfers responded to that genre, and the musical directions surfers have taken since the 1960s. The music used in surfing movies illustrates some of the diversity of musicking among surfers, but it also reveals distinct trends. For example, I show that surf-movie production emerged out of New Surfing’s new cultural centers: California and Australia. Surf movies, made by surfers for surfers, were a powerful tool for spreading ideas about surfing culture, especially music, to a growing and globalizing number of surfers.
The next three chapters are focused on the present or near present, and draw from my ethnographic work with living surfing musicians. Chapter 4, “Two Festivals and Three Genres of Music,” is a comparative study of two festivals, one celebrating a genre of music and the other featuring a surfing contest with an attached music festival. Both festivals took place in the summer of 2009 in Europe, and each represented very different approaches to music and surfing. The first festival took place in Italy and centered on the named genre Surf Music. However, there I discovered that the musicians most engaged with surfing were not playing Surf Music but were covering Jack Johnson songs or writing new songs about surfing in a punk rock style. The second festival was in Newquay, “the capital of British surfing,” located 260 miles southwest of London on the wave-grabbing coast of the Cornish peninsula. The music at this festival, which started as a professional surfing contest, tended toward two poles described to me as “mellow and surfy” on the one hand and “heavy and punky” on the other. The two festivals nicely frame three broad genres or styles of music that have emerged as key to my project: Surf Music, punk rock, and generally acoustic singer-songwriter music favored by an influential group of prominent surfers.
Chapter 5, “The Pro Surfer Sings,” asks how it is that some of the most influential and competitive surfers have managed second careers as musicians. It may be, as some surfer-musicians have suggested, an extension of their efforts at expression. Whereas for many of us just catching and riding a wave is an accomplishment (perhaps similar to getting through a piano étude without too many mistakes), the truly skilled surfer is able to move beyond the mechanics of the sport and use the ocean as a canvas for expression. It may also be that, since at least the mid–twentieth century, there has been a myth that surfing is a musical sport—a myth that first led me to this project. This chapter shows that musicking can be an effective way for professional surfers to expand their personal brand. Clearly the surfing body is a desirable commodity in the entertainment industry, and has been since the original Beachboys—the Waikīkī Beachboys, from Waikīkī, Hawaiʻi—appeared in the first half of the twentieth century.
Chapter 6, “The Soul Surfer Sings,” returns to a persistent ideal introduced in chapter 3: the surfer who attaches great meaning to surfing before and beyond any professional opportunities it may offer. The category soul surfer does not exclude professional surfers or musicians, though I do attempt to balance the emphasis given to professional surfers and professional musicians in the previous chapter. Chapters 5 and 6 may appear to construct a dichotomy between the pro surfer and the soul surfer, but as with so many things core to surfing, the boundaries are fluid: all the action is in the liminal zone. Chapter 6 includes ethnographies of surfing musicians primarily from California and in Hawaiʻi. In these locations we find similar ideas about music and surfing, but some distinctions as well. Some Hawaiian surfers focus in their music on Hawaiian issues of significance to them personally. Some California soul surfers also sing about Hawaiʻi and reference ideas from Hawaiʻi. But I propose that the role Hawaiʻi plays in this musicking should be interpreted differently. Taken as a whole, the voices I present in this chapter find surfing profoundly meaningful, even necessary for the maintenance of their souls, and they express some of this through music.
The final chapter, chapter 7, “Playing Together and Solitary Play: Why Surfers Need Music,” draws some conclusions about surfing and music-making as interlinked human practices. Looking again at individuals and groups of surfers who play music together, I draw out two recurring themes: homologies (surfing and musicking can be viewed as the same phenomena or, at the very least, as analogous) and community sharing (musicking allows surfers to form community in ways that surfing alone does not). Key to both of these themes is the belief among some surfers that both musicking and surfing create similar affective feelings or experiences, and that music provides a venue for exploring those feelings and experiences. I conclude with a well-worn and well-worth-rehearsing ethnomusicological finding: musicking is vital in creating community.
CHAPTER 1
Trouble in Paradise
The History and Reinvention of Surfing
Na Kane i hee nalu Oahu
He puni Maui no Piilani
Ua hee a papa kea i papa enaena
Ua lilo lanakila ke poo o ka papa
Ua nahaha Kauiki
Kane surfed at Oʻahu,
And all around Maui, Island of Piʻilani,
He surfed through the white foam, the raging waves,
The top of his surfboard in triumph rose on the crest
As waves crashed against Kaʻuiki.1
These are the opening lines of the third part of an extensive nineteenth-century mele (Hawaiian chant) catalogued in Honolulu’s Bishop Museum as “He inoa no Naihe” (Name Chant for Naihe), which also bears the evocative titles “Deification of Canoe for Naihe” and “A Surfing Song” (audio example 1). Naihe was a chief associated with the Hawaiian royalty, and an accomplished surfer. He was born toward the end of the eighteenth century and died in 1831. Thus this is a late-eighteenth- or, more likely, early-nineteenth-century mele. The mele was later adopted for King Kalākaua,2 the last reigning Hawaiian king, who died in 1891. He was nicknamed “the Merrie Monarch” because of his appreciation of and support for some of Hawaii’s traditional arts, including surfing, mele, and hula, the latter popularly known as a Hawaiian dance style but better understood as visual poetry. The following fragment from the same mele celebrates King Kalākaua’s own surfing prowess (audio example 1):
Kaili Kalakaua i ka nalu,
Pau ka nalu lilo ia ia,
