I feel it was predated by the “exotica” genre and lounge music in some way. Chill instrumentals that have some pseudo interpretation of exotic caribbean and middle eastern music.

One thing that i think is interesting is that since it started as instrumental music, theres a lot of crazy examples from all over the world (vietnam, mexico, peru, middle east, etc) either as surf instrumentals or as an element of it (i.e. Cumbia Amazónica)