Lucy O’Brien in conversation with the ‘Punk Professor’, Vivien Goldman

About her new book, Rebel Musix: Scribe on a Vibe:

Frontline Adventures Linking Punk, Reggae, Afrobeat and Jazz

DJ: Tessa Pollitt (The Slits)

 

White Rabbit Books presents a conversation between two pioneering female music journalists about Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe, a new collection of Vivien Goldman’s legendary writing 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.

 

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.