REBEL MUSIX, SCRIBE ON A VIBE
Frontline Adventures Linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz
Vivien Goldman
White Rabbit (November 7, 2024)
ABOUT THE BOOK:
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.
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.
Vivien single-handedly changed the course of music writing and this collection reshapes some of her major pieces into a new narrative of the principal radical artists of the late twentieth century, in the process reaffirming that her reputation as ‘The Punk Professor’ will live on.
PRAISE:
“People talk ABOUT Brian Eno, Robert Wyatt, Can, Betty Davis, The Sex Pistols, George Clinton, Grace Jones all the time—but Vivien Goldman actually spoke TO them. Whilst they were making that music we are still talking about. Essential reading: the making of history as it was happening. Vivien was there (and “Launderette” is one of the best singles ever). Read it.”
Jarvis Cocker, musician, broadcaster, author
“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, musician and author
“No-One’s More Punk than Vivien Goldman,”
Pitchfork Magazine
Praise for Revenge of the She-Punks:
“Essential…With personal encounters running parallel with themes such as identity and protest, Goldman makes excellent points about punk’s ‘liberating aspect on the less-privileged sex,’ framing it as the ‘primal yowl of a rebellious underclass [that] has always specially belonged to girls.’”
Irish Times
“The language [in Revenge of the She-Punks] is urgent, often furious, sometimes funny and full of piquant turns of phrase…While Goldman isn’t especially interested in trying to define punk – there is plenty of literature on that already – her understanding of it is wide-ranging and determinedly global, travelling way beyond the old DIY cliches.”
Fiona Sturges, The Guardian
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Vivien Goldman is a writer, educator, broadcaster, and a musician, too. A Londoner, she has lived in Paris and Jamaica and now resides in New York. Since she started out in the vigorous British rock press of the 1970s, often working with Bob Marley (the subject of two of her books,) her can-do attitude and outernational insights have been on wide display: journalism, books, radio, television, university teaching, multi-media lecturing, museum dialogs, the recording studio, the stage, and her beat still goes on.Revenge of the She-Punks, Goldman’s award-winning sixth book, (University of Texas Press, 2019) won Rough Trade’s Book of the Year in the US and the UK, and earned her the Best Music Journalist Award from Germany’s Reeperbahn Festival. It has been translated into seven international editions
In a unique career move, Goldman released her first album, ‘Next Is Now,’ in 2021, produced by Youth (Killing Joke, The Orb, Paul McCartney, Poly Styrene.) Brooklyn Vegan made it LP of the Week and The Washington Post, Forbes magazine and Pitchfork, among others, enthused about what Lucie O’Brien called “a moving statement on love, exile, struggle and companionship.. Goldman sings with a sense of musical liberation.” (Mojo)It was a remarkable renaissance for the post-punk music Goldman made in the early 1980s as part of The Flying Lizards, and solo with members of PiL,The Raincoats, Aswad and Robert Wyatt. When this scattered work was re-issued in a 2016 compilation album, “Resolutionary,” it prompted HBO to use her cult classic “Launderette” in their series, “The Deuce.”
The Afrobeat Artist, a book on the work of Lemi Ghariokwu, the visual artist whose sleeves projected Fela Anikulapo Kuti, the creator of Nigeria’s Afrobeat sound, will be published by Hat & Beard Books in 2022. A long-time Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recording Music, Tisch, her lecturing life has taken her to London, New York, Los Angeles, Munich, Bilbao, Lagos and beyond.
RIGHTS INFORMATION:
Please contact subagents for the following languages and territories:
| Language/Territory | Subagent |
|---|---|
| China, Taiwan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam | Big Apple Agency |
| Dutch | Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency |
| English outside North America | David Grossman Literary Agency |
| French | Deborah Druba Agency |
| German | Paul & Peter Fritz AG Literatur Agentur |
| Greek | Read n' Right Agency |
| Hebrew | The Deborah Harris Agency |
| Italian | Berla & Griffini Rights Agency |
| Japanese | The English Agency (Japan) Ltd |
| Korean | BC Agency, or Korea Copyright Center |
| Portuguese | RIFF Agency |
| Russia/Baltics/Eastern Europe | Prava I Prevodi |
| Scandinavia | Sebes & Bisseling Literary Agency |
| Spanish in Latin America | MB Agencia Literaria |
| Spanish in Spain | MB Agencia Literaria |
| Turkish | Anatolialit Agency |
For all other languages/territories, please contact Roam Agency.