LITMIR.BIZ

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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 “alternative sports,” “new sports,”¹² and, especially in the United States, “extreme sports,” as promoted in ESPN’s X Games.¹³ Windsurfer and sports scholar Belinda Wheaton prefers the term lifestyle sport because in her ethnographic research she found that this is the term that participants themselves used and that they actively “sought a lifestyle that was distinctive, often alternative, and that gave them a particular and exclusive social identity.”¹⁴ My ethnographic work with surfers agrees with Wheaton’s—play (playing music, sports play, and so forth) and lifestyle choices are ultimately about core issues of identity. For example, surfing musician Brandon Boyd of the band Incubus does not like to consider surfing a sport but rather a lifestyle.¹⁵ Similar debates about whether surfing is a sport or an art have been going on since at least the 1950s.

      To take on a surfing lifestyle is a voluntary proposition; it is to enter an affinity group. Affinity groups form around volunteer participation in cultural practices rather than through the genetic, heritage, or location ties (sometimes called “involuntary affiliations”) that drive most discourses on ethnicity. In some cases, affinity groups may become ethnicities over time; for example, certain religious groups tend toward this progression. Other affinity groups briefly burn brightly and then disappear or move into a subcultural scene. Individuals may move into affinity groups at will, perhaps lingering for some time and then moving away, reframing their identity with other affinity groups, or even as former members of an earlier group: “I used to be a surfer . . .” Surfing is demanding, however, in that a reasonably high level of fitness must be maintained if one is to participate. As Wheaton notes, with most lifestyle sports active participation is key. Still, even deep involvement in a sport may be just a part of any individual’s multiple identities. This is an important quality of what I am calling affinity groups. An individual may move in and out of several affinity groups, even daily. For example, seeking job security, I hid my identity as a surfer from my colleagues in the music department during my first years as a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, but then would surreptitiously shift into my role as a surfer as I walked the few hundred feet from my office to Campus Point to go surfing. As we all do in our everyday lives, I performed different versions of myself—or foregrounded certain identities—depending on the demands of the moment.¹⁶

      There are three primary characteristics of affinity groups as I am using the term. First, a cultural practice draws the group together: a particular type of musical practice, a penchant for dog shows, a love of gardening, or a singular dedication to participating in a sport. Second, the most salient feature of an affinity group is that the individuals in the group are connected by desire—not by obligation born of family ties, religion, place of origin, shared history, or anything

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