The New York Review of Ideas » Profiles | June 2009
Professor of Punk
Vivien Goldman proves that punk doesn’t have to lose its edge to go academic.
By Frances Pollitzer
Traffic was blaring outside the Lower East Side café where Vivien Goldman had just been made a life-changing offer. Across the table, waiting for an answer, sat a young music historian, Jason King, Artistic Director of New York University’s Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music, a scholarly training ground for music industry professionals. Outside construction workers were taking down the big whale on the corner of Houston and Broadway, one of Goldman’s favorite New York landmarks. By the end of that year, 2003, the whale would be replaced by yet another architecturally undistinguished building. The sight of individuality being squeezed out of the area and everybody being squeezed into glass-fronted boxes brought on a eureka moment: it was time to revive the Punky Reggae Party.
The Party in question was a moment in cultural history when the possibility of change filled the air, and Goldman was one of those who threw it. The venue was London, the date 1977; and for the first time disaffected multiracial youth were coming together, their shared outsider status providing a starting point for a more harmonious future. So affecting were the spirits of hope and unity filling the air that Bob Marley, at the time exiled in London, commemorated the Punky Reggae Party in a song of the same name.
Rejected by society
Mistreated with impunity
Protected by my dignity/I search for reality…It’s a punky reggae party…No boring old farts will be there.
Fast-forward 35 years to that downtown café, and Goldman had an answer for King: Yes. Despite having never taught before she would take up his offer to join the department’s faculty. The kids of today needed punky reggae. King was delighted. He had been looking to get Goldman on board ever since a visit to the New Museum of Contemporary Art to view a panel discussion on the life and work of Fela Kuti, a globally revered Nigerian musician and inventor of Afrobeat. To King, who put hip-hop on the NYU curriculum, Kuti was moreover one of the last great socially conscious artists, dedicated to fighting corrupt politics and institutionalised brutality in sub-Saharan Africa. So revered was the self-styled Black President that, in 1997, 150,000 people gathered in Tafawa Balewa Square, Nigeria, to follow his funeral procession.
“I was blown away,” King remembers, “Vivien is one of a kind, a real pioneer. She could talk poetically and poignantly about knowing Fela and visiting him in Nigeria [as a journalist], giving you a real sense of who he was as a human being. And second she could, at the same time, contextualize him historically as a musical and political icon. Usually people can do one or the other, but not both at the same time.”
Then again nothing about Goldman’s path to NYU could be described as usual. Daughter to the last in a long line of professional violinists, Goldman spent the 60s “locked away” in an Orthodox Jewish household where classical music filled the halls. With the 70s came a swift escape from North London to the University of Warwick, where Goldman tumbled into popular music and the nascent punk scene. Punk logic appealed to Goldman. It represented the coming together of youth in rejection of the dreary futures laid out for them by a post-recession, anachronistic society. Particularly for women, punk stood for freedom from the limited options offered by religious or traditionalist elders. Yes, women had been making music before punk, but men wrote their scripts and cast the molds: madonna or whore, case closed. In popular music, women were viewed as consumers or groupies, not active participants. The new punk order allowed young musicians like Goldman (following in the footsteps of the Slits, the Raincoats, the Mo-dettes) to challenge the ideas that had kept them off the stage.
Her most notable success was 1981’s Launderette. It is a slinky tale about a humdrum male: abstractly instrumented, experimental and infectious, the lyrics are a refreshing counterpoint to saccharine 60s pop and a reminder that love is not always sugary sweet, nor is pleasing a man woman’s absolute priority.
I can’t complain we went down the drain
Seems like I can’t get away from you even in the launderette
Now my socks see your socks in the dryer? And my jeans run into your shirt.
For the time being, however, Goldman was an English and American literature student. At Warwick she studied under the guard of famously swashbuckling feminist Germaine Greer. “Forceful and rather grumpy” is her not-so-fond recollection of the controversy-courting professor, “she was harder on women.” The strictures of Judaism had prepared the young rebel somewhat for being treated differently on the basis of gender; post-university, however, it would become an issue she was constantly reminded of.
Upon graduating Goldman joined Island Records in London, as Bob Marley’s PR. The role marked the beginning of a lifelong friendship with the reggae icon, and opened the music fan’s eyes to the currents of social consciousness that form the lifeblood of reggae music. Seven months later Goldman left Island to become a full-time music journalist, and by the close of the 70s had become punk and reggae authority to all members of the holy trinity of the English music press: New Musical Express, Sounds and Melody Maker (her career has outlived the last two).
“Music was the air I breathed, my absolute energy” Goldman wistfully remembers. Her characteristically racy, emphatic style of writing stands testament to that passionate relationship (“Yeah, that and the amphetamines,” she chuckles.)
It took some good old Jewish chutzpah to climb the all-male career ladder however: “I pinned the guy [Alan Lewis, editor of Sounds magazine] against the wall,” Goldman laughs, “Who around here is actually going to be better than me? I demanded.” Lewis relented, knocking the qualifying prefix off Goldman’s title of acting features editor. The rise in status brought with it greater access to the artists she admired. Although that didn’t equate to respect: