The Sea in Every Sound: Chasing the Influence of Surf Music in America

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-centur...