Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe

Rebel Musics brings together the best writing from Vivien Goldman''s career as a trailblazing music writer at Sounds, NME, Melody Maker and other music publications over her four decades on the frontlines of radical culture. From the seventies squats of Brixton and Notting Hill hanging out with The Slits, Dennis Bovell and John Lydon, to downtown New York, the Lagos of Fela Kuti and Kingston, Jamaica in the court of Bob Marley and Lee ''Scratch'' Perry, the pieces in this collection document the career of a writer who was always prepared to embrace the sounds emerging from the streets and the underground, whether that be punk, reggae, funk or Afrobeat. Ahead or her time in so many ways as a radical feminist thinker about music and its impact on the culture, Vivien Goldman''s legacy is one of listener turned evangelist; a writer who has always been hip to the beat whose influence in music writing is evergreen and ever present.

Préface
The selected writings by Vivien Goldman, the

Auteur
Vivien Goldman is a British writer, musician, broadcaster and educator. She has published seven books and was one of the first writers to champion artists like Bob Marley and Fela Kuti. Now she teaches about them and other Rebel Musix as a long-serving New York University Professor.

Texte du rabat

The best writing from Vivien Goldman, the trailblazing, radical, feminist music writer

Résumé

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.