Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe (ePub)

Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe collects together the extraordinary output of Vivien Goldman from 1975 into the early 1980s (although later pieces also appear); a time when punk burned its scalding flame to scorch our musical earth and clear it for new genres, like postpunk 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 at a time when writing about music was a wild frontier business, lawless and exhilarating, with new epiphanies emerging every week as the counterculture mutated.

The sheer breadth, depth and calibre of pieces here is overwhelming, from early encounters with Eno, 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 Perry and Dennis Brown. They rub up against contemporaneous profiles of New York's downtown royalty (Patti Smith, Talking Heads, Richard Hell), alongside legendary writing on and interviews with her friends Fela Kuti, Ornette Coleman and Bob Marley, who reigns over this collection like a benign and timeless deity.

Vivien Goldman single-handedly changed the course of music writing and Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe re-shapes 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/nickname as 'The Punk Professor' will live on.