Most people are reluctant to call modern day surfing hip. With advertising agencies taking interest in wave riding, Wavestorms being pumped out and sold at Costco on the daily, and the general state of competitive surfing (or, at least, the general public’s response to the CT tour), sometimes it feels hard to rally behind the image of the ever elusive “surfer” as even remotely desirable or interesting. Surfing will forever be beautiful, no matter how stretched-thin its representation becomes. But surfers? Who’s to say.
Then again, perhaps these fears are completely unwarranted. Some pretty cool sub-genres within surf culture are very much alive and well, and with them, some pretty interesting characters! Hipster or not, Alex Knost has certainly aided the resurgence of Surf Punk.
This bold – if slightly ironic – claim comes from a discovery I had recently while perusing The Surf Network. Scrolling through the various genres (big wave, shortboarding, documentaries, travel… all the usual suspects) I noticed an unusual category: Surf Punk. The only other time I had seen these two words together was when listening to the iconic band by the same name, and to describe the also quite-iconic Christian Fletcher.
I had to see what this was about. My initial reaction was that this was a genre solely created by Alex Knost. Of the six films available, all six had Knost’s name right at the front of the featured surfers. Scotty Stopnik’s, Kassia Meador’s, and Tyler Warren’s names also appeared in these films.
I was also getting the sense Surf Punk was a little more outside the box style-wise than, say, thruster-setup shortboarding. I imagined the audience of these films to be beanie-wearing, van-dwelling, Bolex-holding hipsters who lurked around the Malibu parking lot telling everyone it was just better a few hours ago, all while complaining profusely that the whole place had been a lost cause for decades.
On a more serious note, I searched “surf punk” in the Encyclopedia of Surfing looking for some real answers. The first entry to appear, and perhaps the most obvious answer here, was the actual band. Matt Warshaw describes the musical duo as a “loud, funny, proudly stupid Southern California rock band of the late 1970s and ’80s,” with their distinct, aggressive sound tying back to the localist vibe happening in Southern California in the ‘80s. And, if you’re wondering what that looked like, someone even put together an edit of Surf Punks’ song “Locals Only,” set to footage of beaches during that decade.
If you listen to a few more of their songs, you can almost imagine Gary “Kong” Elkerton suiting up in a flashy neon wetsuit and throwing buckets with a paper-thin stick.
And Surf Punks indeed seems thruster oriented with its almost laughably anti-hipster lyrics such as “my beach / my chicks / my waves / go home!” My personal favorite is “Somebody Ripped My Stick” which has the angrily belted lyrics “red-blue trim, ultrathin rails, I called it perfection, it never fails. Paper-thin textured deck, king kong core, if anybody finds it, 5$ reward!” All of this over a laughing-gas-sounding giggle fading in and out behind the vocals. Choice entertainment!
Besides being a band and a genre of film, surf punk is also a unique cultural crossroads tying together the seemingly opposed subcultures of surfing and punk. While this seems obvious, (surf punk is surfing plus punk, yeah, duh!) it’s worth delving into.
Surf culture is often portrayed by the general media as being easygoing, positive, healthy, and sun-soaked, while punk culture is seen as angry, crude, egotistical, and shocking. Sure, elements of surfing, such as stripping down in public places, may be shocking, but nowhere near as anarchist or confrontational as punk activities were. Interestingly, though, both surf and punk culture share two strong values: youth and rebellion.
With punk culture, this materialized into political agendas, striking fashion choices (mohawks!), and raucous music events. These events were often held in warehouses, because normal venues wouldn’t book punk bands for fear of the building’s safety.
With surf culture, this played out in surfers leading unconventional lifestyles (rejecting traditional jobs, driving beater cars, camping, and living frugally), growing one’s hair long, and, similarly, raucous music events (the surfer stomp could be plenty destructive)!
At the crux of these similarities lies the context: the time was the 1980s. The place was Southern California. Surf culture was aggressive, rowdy, and bold. The punk scene was alive and well – bands like Black Flag and the Circle Jerks were even playing in USC frat houses! Kids everywhere were surfing and partaking in punk culture. It only makes sense that somewhere in there, the two cultures intertwined a little bit.
Importantly, the Encyclopedia Britannica notes that for punk culture, “After the pastoral concerns of the hippies, punk was a celebration of urbanism, a reclaiming of the inner city.” Sounds a little like surfing’s shift from the 1970s hippie movement including the popular film Morning of the Earth, the smooth, no-frills surfing style, and the return to nature and off-grid living, to the 1980s, where suddenly, power surfing, machismo, and neon wetsuits were king.
There were several different ends to the Surf Punk movement. We got longtime Blink 182 manager Rick DeVoe to weigh in. He was deep in the movement as well, helping it along as it evolved into the ’90s.
“In the ‘80s, I would listen to the soundtrack to Blazing Boards and Beyond Blazing Boards,” DeVoe told The Inertia. “The songs they put on there that put those into fourth gear were from a band called The Untouchables. They were a ska mod band from the UK. They were fast and upbeat and matched Occy’s and Curren’s surfing at the time. That band became my favorite band of all time. Then fast forward to the Taylor Steele era, which was ten years later…Taylor put in his first movie, Momentum, songs by Bad Religion (and Pennywise). He got hold of Brett Gurewitz who was one of the original members of Bad Religion and owned Epitaph Records and he asked if he could put these songs into surf movies. And no one was doing it at that time, it was all grunge. Everyone was trying to put Soundgarden in. It was just a lame time for surf movies at the beginning of the ‘90s. Then come 1993 or 1994, you have this movie Momentum that changed everything.”
All in all, while surf culture and punk culture may seem like two sides of the same coin, they remain quite different. Surfing, while it has its aggressive and localist moments, is a bit more easygoing than punk culture, even if both welcome misfits with open arms. And no matter the exact roots of either one, their modern-day pairing from Knost to Taylor Steele is impressive. Go check out a Surf Punk film and ponder this question for yourself. Are surfing and punk cultures more similar than they are different? Or are they like longboarding and shortboarding: similar, but forever opposed?
