Since the days of Gidget and the explosion of surfing into the public consciousness, the sport has been a cultural signifier of “youthful cool” to the mainstream.
Want to make a character in a TV show seem rebellious? Stick him on a surfboard. Want to imbue your shitty novel with a sense of alternative cool? Then why not populate it with long-haired beach dwellers (who say things no real surfer would ever say)?
“The world of pop music has produced some stinking nuggets of pseudo-surf shit over the years…”
But while mainstream culture has committed many crimes against surfing, there can be few worse than this abomination. The world of pop music has produced some stinking nuggets of pseudo-surf shit over the years, but none quite comes close to Surfboard, by Cody Simpson.
Here’s why:
1) Lyrically this ticks every cliché in the book. And that’s just in the first two lines. She’s “caught up in that new California luuuuuuuuuuurrrrve” and he’s “the outta town boy”… And it goes on like that for three unholy minutes.
2) It totally bastardizes a genre we quite like – surf rock – and somehow manages to make it shite. Listen the Surfaris-style guitar in the intro and the pick scrape at 0.28. Even the harmonies at 0.19 are a deliberate (and rubbish) rip off of the Beach Boys.
3) It then breaks into cheese-step, the horrible mash-up of dubstep beats and tinny pop production that’s must be the only thing in the galaxy that’s less pleasant to listen to than Vogon poetry.
4) The auto-tuned “surfboard-board-board-board-board” chorus is enough to make you want to stick a sharpened pencil through your eardrums every time you hear the word.
5) And then there’s that video… I mean look at this bellend!
6) Need we say more?
7) At some point a clueless record company exec decided it’d be a good idea to make a “legit” surf version of the video, which lead to this – a collection of shots of small waves, jellyfish, and girl’s arses (obviously).
They shouldn’t have bothered, trying only makes it worse. Honestly, the only good thing you can say about this is it’s not Bieber. Actually scrap that, I’d take Bieber over this any day…
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