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
“I don’t like it when women talk too fucking much! You must listen because I created the earth!” Peter Tosh, original guitarist in Bob Marley’s backing band the Wailers, railed at Goldman in a London carpark. Marley and Tosh, like most reggae artists of the time, were devoted Rastafari. Vis-a-vis women, Rasta doctrine—in short—declared they should cover themselves up and serve their man. “As bigoted as a Sicilian farmer who locks his pregnant unmarried daughter up in a pigpen for the rest of her life” was Goldman’s printed verdict on Tosh’s outburst that day.
In hindsight, Goldman concedes that “it was hard to strike a balance between painting a portrait of the person and the music they were making…and the huge disagreements we might have had over women’s role.” But at the time, Goldman was indomitable in her mission to get black music the press it deserved.
Numerous work-related trips to Jamaica had exposed the bright-eyed journalist to magnificently spirited communities who were also undeserving victims of social inequalities and corruption. Reggae music was an outlet for Jamaicans to speak out against oppression, poverty, apartheid and ‘Babylon’ (island slang for corrupt and unjust institutional regimes). The breakaway success of artists like Marley and Tosh brought much-needed hope to the island, and Goldman knew that underneath the misogyny and “bad boy business” was a heartfelt desire to improve the lives of their countrymen. In her eyes, the music of the Caribbean represented “a whole world view. It’s the music of deconstruction, the music of our fragmented society reassembling itself in a new way.”
But before that could happen, the global success that had made Marley a hero in his homeland had to turn bittersweet. As 1976 drew to a close, an assassination attempt sent the man and his family to London, where he remained in exile for 18 months, recording Exodus (Time magazine’s album of the century). Goldman’s account of that period, The Book of Exodus (2006), is perhaps her best-known work.
It is an intricately detailed account of Marley’s creative process, woven from the threads of Goldman’s incomparable web of contacts and personally recorded interviews from that time. Exodus, she divulges, was Marley’s painstakingly thought-through effort to draw in audiences who’d never appreciated reggae, without alienating the faithful. There was little time for socializing, Goldman reveals, the studio was a round-the-clock workplace people by the world’s best reggae musicians and producers: “Alan Lewis used to grunt when I came into work somewhat on the late side after spending nights with the Wailers as they recorded Exodus up the road from my place in Ladbroke Grove [...] Why would I have chosen to be anywhere else? Just hearing the layers of music find their place and form a thrilling whole was a sensual pleasure. And the buzz, the high, in the studio went beyond the sizeable ganja consumption. People with a sense of doing something positive with their lives are generally happier, I’ve found; and the heady ambience of those Exodus sessions was as loaded with purpose as the sea is with ozone.”
“It took me two and a half years and swallowed up my life,” she now acknowledges, “I haven’t quite come back.” Although Marley’s exile abroad marked a sad state of affairs in his homeland, his presence in London proved a tremendously exciting boost to the city’s Jamaican communities.
London had long had a large Caribbean population, brought to English shores by post-war immigration and former colonial ties. But now, two decades later, there was a first generation of British born black youth in the city. Like their white working class peers they were disaffected with the close-mindedness and limited options society offered. Despite musical differences (punks were noisome, structureless and whip-snapping, whilst reggae was rooted in lilting melodies and bass heavy rhythms) the two tribes started to form alliances first in the city’s music venues, then in the streets. It was the beginnings of the Punky Reggae Party: Goldman’s pioneering journalistic fight to increase reggae’s column inches was paying dividends, and united by shared experiences of alienation, social inequity and the fight for basic freedoms punks and rastas were beginning to form one big tribe.
“It was the dawn of a multicultural society,” Goldman fondly remembers, “you sensed it [here in New York] around the elections, there was an amazing sense of urgency and mission about those times and people felt that if you seized the moment change could come.”
And it did, on a spring day in 1977. Nervously, Goldman strolled into Marley’s Basing Street apartment with a newly pressed copy of Police & Thieves under her arm. The original had been recorded by reggae artists Junior Murvin, this, however, was a cover version by The Clash, fiery famous punk rockers fronted by Joe Strummer, whose inimitable cracked tenor stood poles apart from Murvin’s classically perfect vocals. Marley was suspicious of the young punks he saw in the city’s streets (“Those people always look such a mess, why can’t they have a good wash?” he would frequently complain to Goldman). That was about to change. He listened, reflected, and slowly gave the trembling young woman his verdict: “It’s good, it’s good,” then Marley paused, “I never really like to see those people with the safety pin in their face but I like to see a man who can suffer pain without crying.”