A primer on one of the great Jamaican vocal groups, whose sibling harmonies soar through every measure. In 1969, two brothers and a friend booked time at Coxsone […]
Rebel Musix: A new book from Vivien Goldman linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz
Check out a new book from the musician, journalist, reggae scholar, and “Professor of Punk” at NYU.
A founding member of the experimental new wave group The Flying Lizards and a contributor to On-U Sound supergroup New Age Steppers, Vivien Goldman is one of the essential voices to emerge from the early ’80s UK post-punk and reggae movements. Deeply embedded within the scene as both an artist and journalist, the legendary “she-punk” first cut her teeth working closely with Bob Marley & the Wailers at Island Records before becoming a regular contributor to British weeklies such as NME, Sounds, and Melody Maker, where she chronicled the merging of punk and new wave with African and Caribbean rhythms. Goldman’s intimate interviews with Bob Marley, The Sex Pistols, Dennis Bovell, The Raincoats, Aswad, and others opened portals into the lives and worlds of these seminal artists. For a taste of Goldman’s singular perspective, check out a 2021 tribute piece titled “How Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry Forever Changed the Sound of Music Everywhere,” where she remembers a sunny afternoon in 1977 with Marley and Scratch.
Goldman would go on to cover free jazz, hip-hop, Afrobeat, and other pivotal or emerging genres in the following decades, while also co-writing songs for trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack and Yellow Magic Orchestra’s Ryuichi Sakamoto. Not one to rest on her laurels, Goldman has continued to stay incredibly busy in recent years, releasing her debut album Next Is Now in 2021, teaching punk & reggae courses at NYU, and preparing for her first tour with a live band. Next month, she has a new book coming out…
“Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe collects the extraordinary output of Vivien Goldman from 1975 onwards; spanning a time when punk burnt its scalding flame to scorch our musical earth and clear it for new genres, like post-punk and hip-hop. One of only a handful of women writing in the Golden Age of music journalism, Vivien was the first, most elegant and passionate chronicler of reggae, funk, free jazz and Afrobeat; a pioneer when music was a wild frontier business, lawless and exhilarating, with new epiphanies emerging as the counterculture mutated.”
Listen to an interview on The NTS Breakfast Show where Goldman discusses the writing in the book, teaching at NYU, living in Jamaica, recent favorites and more with Flo Dill:
“Punk was our great experiment of liberation, our forum of total communitarianism and inclusivity, and Vivien was a light which made manifest the ideals of its truth. She said it loud from the beginning – one love, one music. The power is in the words.”
Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth)
REBEL MUSIX, SCRIBE ON A VIBE: Frontline Adventures Linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz will be released November 7th via White Rabbit publishing.
More on the book: “The sheer breadth of pieces here is overwhelming, from early encounters with Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt and Can; to rebels like Britain’s first she-punks, The Raincoats and The Slits; covering British groups like the Sex Pistols, The Clash and Aswad; America’s Public Enemy, Curtis Mayfield and George Clinton; and Jamaica’s Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Dennis Brown. They rub up against contemporary profiles of New York’s downtown royalty (Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Richard Hell), alongside legendary interviews with Vivien’s friends Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman and Bob Marley, who reigns over this collection like a benign and timeless deity.”
If that’s not enough to convince you to pick up the book, here’s Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore:
“For those of us coming of age in the mid 70s, in love with rock and roll, our brains were lit on fire not only by new radical voices emerging from the fallout of hippie, but the writers turning us on to it all. Vivien Goldman’s byline in whatever weekly rock mag she’d set foot in would ring as significantly potent and evocative as any pop star she felt excited to share a perspective on, be it Brian Eno or The Raincoats, in fact she seemed that much cooler than the people she was scribing about. She was even cooler than Lester Bangs who duked it out on the same pages with such hip sticks of dynamite as Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. Like contemporary Patti Smith, Vivien found equal value in writing about music as she did in performing it, completely free from any creepazoid hoary old patriarchal permission. Punk was our great experiment of liberation, our forum of total communitarianism and inclusivity, and Vivien was a light which made manifest the ideals of its truth. She said it loud from the beginning – one love, one music. The power is in the words. Read them and sing out” – Thurston Moore
Read Vivien Goldman’s primer on dub legend Dennis Bovell, titled Dennis Matumbi in dub: A Step by Step Guide.
