ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Surfing about Music. Timothy J. Cooley
Читать онлайн.Название Surfing about Music
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780520957213
Автор произведения Timothy J. Cooley
Издательство Ingram
The critical scholar in me knows that the “I” and “we” here have very limited experience in the context of globalized surfing. I grew up surfing in Virginia and Florida before moving to California. I also spent about a decade living in Illinois, where I would surf in the chilly waters of Lake Michigan. Once I encountered another surfer at my local Chicago-area break, but only once. Beyond the mainland United States, I have had the pleasure of surfing in Mexico, Hawaiʻi, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Yet my experience with surfing—and with musicking—is individual. My experience is also highly mediated. As with every surfer-musician I interviewed for this book, my experiences are influenced by commercial interests. By this I mean that even the private pleasure of riding a wave is not pure and unaffected by the entertainment industry and other commercial concerns that use surfing as a marketing tool. For example, I am told what I should feel when catching a wave by an old Beach Boys song, just as I am reminded by the latest issue of Surfer magazine that I would look much better in a new pair of boardshorts.
This book asks two interrelated questions: First and foremost, how is music used to mediate the experience of surfing? And second, how does surfing, and changing notions of what a surfing lifestyle might be, affect surfers’ musical practices? Through my interviews and analysis, I find that music is necessary for making sense of surfing, for communicating important information about surfing, and for creating a collective space where surfers communicate together something of the experience of surfing. All of these uses of music by surfers help to form and define surfers as an affinity group.
WHAT DOES MUSIC HAVE TO DO WITH SURFING?
In a feature story in Surfer magazine, Brendon Thomas wrote, “The connection between music and surfing is undeniable,” and Surfgirl Magazine editor Louise Searle described how “[s]urfing and music go hand in hand: like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, strawberries and cream, and vodka and tonic—they’re all better together.”2 Surfing has even been (incorrectly) called the first sport with its own music.3 The notion that music and surfing somehow naturally go together seems to be gaining traction.
Four recent films offer very interesting takes on the topic of surfing and musicking.4 The first is Pounding Surf! A Drummer’s Guide to Surf Music, produced in 2006 by musicians Bob Caldwell, Paul Johnson, and others. Though this film was first envisioned as a primer on playing drums for instrumental rock, it evolved into an elaborate filmic history of early 1960s California surf music and its ties to Southern California surfing culture. Also released in 2006 was Australian surfer Dave Rastovich’s Life Like Liquid, consisting entirely of footage of surfers improvising music together, interspersed with clips of the same people surfing and musing about the relationship between musicking and surfing. In 2008 two additional films were released on the subject. Live: A Music and Surfing Experience, produced by California-based surfing film maker David Parsa, is a wide-ranging look at music and surfing that contains brief comments by leading professional surfers, surfing industry icons, and popular musicians. The fourth film, Musica Surfica, by Australian surfer and filmmaker Mick Sowry, is a curious and at times perplexing meditation on Australian Chamber Orchestra director Richard Tognetti’s genre-expanding violin playing interspersed with Derek Hynd’s quiver-expanding challenge to design and ride finless surfboards. Taken together, these four films spin an intriguing tale about the interweaving of the human performative practices of surfing and music-making. The first sticks close to the named genre Surf Music and captures a key moment in the history of surfing’s reinvention in the twentieth century. (I capitalize the term Surf Music to indicate that I am referring to a specific genre and not all music associated with surfing.) The second is an extended experiment to see what would happen if surfing musicians were cloistered together for some days. The third is an expansive survey of music performed and endorsed by influential modern surfers. The fourth reminds us that both surfing and music-making cannot be limited to the narrow practices celebrated in surfing contests and by popular media.
Music and surfing are mixed and matched in many other ways. Festivals that combine some aspect of surfing and music are popping up around the world in obvious locations like Hawaiʻi and California, but also in places such as the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, Italy, and Slovenia. Surfing magazines routinely list professional surfers’ favorite music, review music albums, promote concerts and music festivals, and publish feature articles on surfing musicians.5 Surfing brands such as Quiksilver promote musicians, include music-related products in their lines, or, in the case of clothing company Rhythm, imply music in their brand name. Much of this is business as usual. Rare is the festival without music, and commercial industries long ago figured out that music was a compelling way to boost and sometimes define their brand images. While this phenomenon is not unique to surfing, the use of music by the surfing industry tells us something about how the industry interacts with and manipulates surfing communities.
More striking, however, is the surprising number of former and even current professional surfers who have second careers as popular musicians. This includes, most notably, the eight-time platinum-album-selling surfer-musician Jack Johnson, from Hawaiʻi; three-time world surfing champion Tom Curren, from California; two-time world longboard champion Beau Young, from Australia; two-time women’s world longboard champion Daize Shayne, from Hawaiʻi; free surfer Donavon Frankenreiter, from California (fig. 1); and other surfer-musicians featured in chapter 5 of this book. There are also professional musicians of all sorts who are passionate about and draw inspiration from surfing, including popular musicians Eddie 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