Music in Surf Town Typology: Alternative Spaces of a Subculture

This piece looks at a Floridian touristic surf town named Cocoa Beach to investigate the role of music in urban space appropriation. This relatively new town, established in 1925, has built its socio-cultural heritage and thriving tourism industry on a singular surf lifestyle anchored in the United State’s Southern culture and the Caribbean. The town has enabled the conveyance of the surf lifestyle by allowing representational and inclusive aesthetic dynamics to strive through local enterprise. Among the many instances that illustrate this point, we look at how a Cocoa Beach-based sunscreen company named Sun Bum has dedicated its space to musical performances to promote a local surf lifestyle associated with the surf town. While acknowledging the historical heritage of Californian surf music, Cocoa Beach surfers have developed a musical scene that reflects their laid-back approach to surfing and allows them to define their local community in a global surf culture collectively. As a result, imported and local musics are integrated into the feel of the town and are used as a platform that contributes to marking local identities and economies by promoting a singular “surfanization.” Sun Bum’s office space usage as a stage is a way to relocalize surf music: it is displaced, branded, and displayed as a Cocoa Beach surf lifestyle and identity. Local surfers see it as validating their singular identity while tourists associate these musical events with the surf town. Infrastructures developed by aesthetic, social, and geographic communities have enabled the growth of a subculture inherited, commodified, and reorganized according to local codes. The process allows the activation of know-hows and clarifies the space-music-activity relationship and the interconnectedness of the global and the local.