THE SWELL SET
Of the estimated 600 million people who live beside the ocean, none are more intimate with its powerful magnetism than the gamut of moonlighting hobbyists and diehard practitioners who dare to surf its waves. While the ferocity of our ocean has long dominated our collective imagination, from Poseidon to the kraken to Moby Dick to Jaws, our feeble attempts at taming the sea – if but for a brief, glorious moment – on longboards and big guns and twin fins and soft tops have given rise to a distinct, renegade-loving surf culture that has infiltrated every corner of the globe.
The long historical arc of surfing carves a complicated path from ancient Polynesian pioneers to turn-of-the-century legends like Duke Kahanamoku to Anglo appropriation at the hands of clean-cut mid-century Beach Boys and Gidgets and Jan and Deans. Over time, what bloomed as an exotic fad on California shores has blossomed into a bona fide international lifestyle. The ten-billion-dollar industry is serviced by glossy magazines and oddly named brands and a professional league studded with ageless celebrities like the 48-years-young Kelly Slater who have promoted the endless summer from humble Hawaii Five-O B-roll to the spotlight of this year’s Olympic centre stage (although sadly Slater didn’t quite make the cut). Along the way, surfing has developed its own vernacular, fashion, and even its own manner of Dick Dale-inspired guitar strumming, all of it taking cues from surfing’s perennial pursuit of the stoke – that unrivalled sense of freedom you can borrow from the ocean as it envelopes you in the elusive hollow of an ephemeral tube of churning salt water.
As with other countercultures that have floated their way into the mainstream like punk or skateboarding, surfing can often seem like a caricature of itself. And perhaps nothing capitalises on surf stereotypes more than the kitsch 1987 cult classic film North Shore, whose cast of real-life professional surfers like Gerry Lopez and Laird Hamilton gave dramatised credence to the schism between so-called “soul” surfers and those sponsored athletes in it for the contests, money and fame. For all its memorable one-liners, North Shore traffics heavily in just the sort of zinc-smeared, neon-bikinied, locals-only tribalism and shaka-brah bravado later amplified in Hollywood spectacles like Point Break and Blue Crush. Through the cinematic lens, surfers are a monoculture of well-bronzed, half-clad hedonists willing to risk life and limb for the glory of conquering the mercurial perfect wave. Current luminaries have names like John John and Italo and Coco, ply their trade at places like Pipeline and Mavericks and Noosa, and communicate across language barriers via hang-loose hand gestures and mid-ride manoeuvres with a sort of go-with-the-flow ethos that is as literal as it is hackneyed.
But if the mass proliferation of surfing should teach us anything, it’s that the culture transcends the sport. Raymond Pettibon has filled David Zwirner’s Paris gallery with ribald surfing illustrations. The author William Finnegan traded in his New Yorker political writing for Barbarian Days, a Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about a lifetime spent surfing. Aesthetes, luxury brands and even Beyoncé’s now infamous “surfbort” all attest to the ubiquity of surfing’s influence. Surfing is now as much idea as it is activity, ensuring that even the landlocked can adopt its renegade flair. Surfing is a sport, a vehicle and a spirit all at once, ushering us ever closer to a freedom promised by the next swell on the horizon.