The Sea In Every Sound

From Dick Dale’s reverb-drenched guitar leads to the Beach Boys’ wistful odes to California, surf music is historically viewed as a novelty of the early 1960s, sandwiched between the Elvis craze and Beatlemania. Worse, today’s mainstream listeners hear surf music as the sort of sonically straightforward, pleasantly inoffensive music that the Spotify algorithm supplies to any playlist with the words chill or vibes in their names.

Yet if you look more closely at the history of twentieth-century pop culture, you discover surfing at the center of nearly every sonic paradigm shift and boundary expansion in popular music.Hawaiian music, the first to soundtrack the surf dance, introduced the guitar as a lead instrument. Surfers were hip to the unimpeachably cool West Coast jazz scene, and helped define California’s distinctive beach culture in the first decades after World War II. Surfers helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era. Surfing found its way into the punk scene in the Bowery, rode the New Wave, and started the slam pit. Surfers helped build the DIY culture that begot indie rock, brought a melodic form of punk to the masses, and fronted the biggest and most enduring band of the grunge era.

In The Sea in Every Sound, surfer and music journalist Matthew Shaw journeys to the coastal edges of the continental United States—the places where surfing and music collide—in search of the full story of how surfers and surfing influenced popular music and continue to push sonic boundaries. Along the way, he reveals that the spirit at the heart of wave-riding—independent and innovative, noncommercial and nomadic—has turned popular music on its ear over and over again.