1 Researching Surfing Culture and Surf Music in American Studies
Surfing is at once a sport, a lifestyle, and a culture. Born in Hawaii, it was democratized in the 1960s in California, the cradle of surf music. This book examines the impact of the links between this musical construction and surfing culture on the identificatory trends of participants. As the title suggests, this work centered in American Studies was built at the intersection of several human and social sciences since it draws from history, sociolinguistics, ethnomusicology, sports, sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology, and philosophy. I voluntarily transcend dominant disciplinary lines to unveil new dynamics in the study of US surf culture mainly undertaken today from the socio-historical or physical performance points of view. Several scientific fields inspire my approach to examine the potentialities of a universe known to all but whose aesthetics are rarely explored. Galvanized by ambitious scholarship in surf studies, I experiment with new ways of thinking and presenting surfing that are meant to bring it closer to the lived experience of surfers while extirpating it from its fixed ideological canons. I engage the tools of human and social sciences as well as philosophical concepts, such as aesthetics and the ontological and epistemological questions that relate to it to create a passage between the intelligible and the sensible in the exploration of a way of living called the surf lifestyle,1 one of the major components of which is surf music.
I particularly rely on the theoretical tools of sociolinguistics, social psychology, and ethnomusicology to understand the links that surfers maintain with music. This work is not only content with the analysis of empirical data derived from participant observation and interviews but also attempts to interrogate the practices and concepts of the disciplines that transcend it. Sociolinguistic theories are transposed to non-linguistic situations to propose new ways of exploring cultural belonging and identity, while social psychology is criticized upstream to make its tools more effective. Intrinsically linked to the sociocultural history of the United States, surfing examined with the help of these sociolinguistic, ethnomusicological, and psychosocial tools makes it possible to uncover new avenues of research in American Studies, and new perspectives on US society, as well as on surfing culture.
1.1 Situating Research on Surfing
Research on the history of surfing and its multiple dimensions as subculture, art, religion, and commodity is abundant. The literature presented here is not exhaustive, but it aims to illustrate that despite the wealth of writings relating to surfing, very few deal with or draw inspiration from Florida. The majority of these academic studies focus on Hawaii, California, Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, and France to discuss various aspects of surfing. A wealth of research covers the history of surfing in Hawaii in the pre- and post-contact periods, thus touching on issues of coloniality, cultural appropriation, and tourism (Brown, 2006; Clark, 2011; CoĂŤffĂŠ, 2014; Kampion, 2003; Laderman, 2014, 2017; LemariĂŠ, 2016, 2018, Nendel, 2009; Walker, 2011, 2007, 2017). A growing number of scholars have focused on issues of localism, tourism, as well as on the evolution of the sport and its effects on participantsâ imaginary and sense of identity in various geographical contexts (Anderson, 2014; Bandeira, 2014; Beaumont & Brown, 2016; Buckley, Guitart, & Shakeela, 2017; Doering, 2018; Falaix, 2012, 2019, Hough-Snee & Eastman, 2017; Lawler, 2010; Olivier, 2013; Preston-Whyte, 2001; Usher & Kerstetter, 2015; Usher, 2017). Some work has focused on the different approaches or cultures of surfing, on the various styles and expressions of the practice, as well as on its religious and philosophical interpretations (Bennett, 2004; Booth, 2003, 2004; Ford & Brown, 2006; Kampion, 2003; Kreeft, 2008; Kusz, 2004; Rinehart & Sydnor, 2003). An array of scholarship has looked at the commodification of surfing as pop surf culture, including its music and derived forms of arts, as well at its marketing applications (Chiderster & Piore, 2008; Colburn et al., 2002; Cooley, 2014, Lanagan, 2002; Moutinho, DionĂsio, & Leal, 2007, Stranger, 2011, 2013; Warren & Gibson, 2014). The questions of gender, masculinity, race, intersectionality, and national rhetorics have been increasingly investigated in the past ten years (Booth, 2001; Comer, 2010, 2017; Comley, 2016; Evers, 2004, 2009; Gilio-Whitaker, 2015, 2017; Harris, 2007; lisahunter, 2017, 2018; McGloin, 2017; Olive, McCuaig, & Phillips, 2015; Ormrod, 2007). Some have covered the history of surfing through biographical accounts of the sportâs legendary figures (Borte & Slater, 2004; Jarratt & Slater, 2008; Noll & Kampion, 2007; Verge, 2017). Many scholars from the humanities and social sciences have contributed to deciphering the rhetorics and semiotics of surfing as a so-called subculture, also labeled extreme or alternative, with the purpose of articulating its structure and social meanings in late-modernity or post-modernity (Donnelly & Young, 1988; Wheaton, 2004, 2013). I do not refer here to the wealth of research in lifestyles sports broadly understood and in subcultural and post-subcultural studies that will be introduced in Chapter 2 and referred to throughout this work, as needed.
None of these essential authors in surf studies focuses on Florida. It was, therefore, necessary to reconstruct a history of Floridian surfing based on scares resources. I relied on the fundamental work of Matt Warshaw (2003, 2010) that explores the global history of surfing, as well as on Paul Ahoâs (2014) photographic collection that provides the most extensive description of surfing in Florida along with a relatively short account of the history of its surf music, written by James E. Cunningham (2014). I completed their work with interviews conducted among local surfers and archival research at the Library of Florida History in Cocoa. Unfortunately, the archive contained almost no documents on the rise and development of surfing in Florida or on the Space Coast.
1.1.1 Entering the Conversation on Surfing and Musicking
Many academic writings deal with music and surfing according to two main approaches: one geo-historical and the other ethnomusicological. The geo-historical approach describes surf music as a successive series of musical scenes constantly moribund and constantly revived by preachers of a historical, or what I call iconic scene that they inexorably connect to California, but that they also claim is doomed to disappear2 (Badman, 2004; Blair, 1995, 2015; Carney, 1999; Chiderster & Priore, 2008; Crowley, 2011; Dalley, 1988). This approach mainly focuses on the canonical artists of Californian surf music from the 1960s to the 1970s (Badman, 2004; Dalley, 1988) and is characterized by the authorsâ temptation to reach a conclusive and definitive appreciation of surf music. The ethnomusicological approach involves understanding the relationship between surfing and music (Barjolin-Smith, 2018; Cooley, 2011, 2014) without being limited to canonical surf music. In Surfing about music, ethnomusicologist Tim Cooley (2014), explores how surfing as a cultural practice accompanied by rituals seems to aggregate into communities through music. The author traces the links between surfing and music through the history of Hawaiian chants (mele) and Californian surf music, but also through the analysis of concerts in Europe and interviews with professional surfers who have become musicians. He brings out three opening themes in his conclusion: first, there is a homology 3 between participation in the musical act and the practice of surfing; second, through surfing and music, surfers create sharing communities; third, music allows surfers to express and share the bodily experience that drives them to the ocean. While his book has provided me with a robust theoretical impetus, my goal is to go beyond the notion of homology and to propose a reflection on aesthetics, cultural appropriation, and identity marking that does not appear in Cooleyâs (2014) fundamental work.
2 Understanding Ethno-Aesthetics of Surfing: A Multimethodological Approach
2.1 Human Exploration Meets Philosophy: Defining Ethno-Aesthetics
2.1.1 Aesthetics as Potentialities and Realizations
The notion of aesthetics is fundamental in this work as it transcends it and articulates it. Aesthetics make it possible first to establish the affective and cognitive links between surfers and their practice, and second, to introduce the criteria of interpretation, authenticity, and evaluation of the representations of what constitutes surf culture, including music. Surfersâ aesthetic relationship with surf music is apprehended as the activation of stylistic choices implemented according to the expressive and representational criteria of the various subcultures of surfing.4 This complex notion set in philosophy opens up a speculative conversation used here to initiate new avenues of research in human and social sciences. The notion of aesthetics raises ontological (potentiality) and epistemological (realization) questions.5 Relying on Edmond Husserlâs (2000) idea according to which all applied sciences have their theoretical foundations in pure sciences, it is possible to justify the crossing of the aesthetic question (speculative) with that of the ethnos (practical). The former gives the latter the necessary tools to overcome its factual and potential limits imposed by its reflexivity in order to uncover sensible realizations. It then becomes feasible to explore the interactionsâwhose existence is objective but whose nature is subjectiveâbetween a culture (ind...