Vivien Goldman – författare

Here is an unforgettable portrait of Bob Marley and an acutely perceptive appreciation of his musical and spiritual legacy.

Reggae superstar Bob Marley is one of the world’s most important and influential artists. Exodus, named by Time magazine as “Album of the Century,” is Bob Marley’s masterpiece of spiritual exploration. Recorded in London after an assassination attempt on his life sent Marley into exile from Jamaica, Exodus is the most lasting testament to his social conscience.

Vivien Goldman was the first journalist to introduce mass white audiences to the Rasta sounds of Bob Marley. Throughout the late 1970s, Goldman was a fly on the wall as she watched reggae grow and evolve, and she charted the careers of many of its superstars, especially Bob Marley. So close was Vivien to Bob and the Wailers that she was a guest at his Kingston home just days before gunmen came in a rush to kill “The Skip.” Now, in The Book of Exodus, Goldman chronicles the making of this album, from its conception in Jamaica to the raucous but intense all-night studio sessions in London.

But The Book of Exodus is so much more than a making-of-a-record story. This remarkable book takes us through the history of Jamaican music and Marley’s own personal journey from the Trench Town ghetto to his status as global superstar, as well as Marley’s deep spiritual practice of Rastafari and the roots of this religion. Goldman also traces the biblical themes of the Exodus story and its practical relevance to us today, through various other art forms, leading up to and culminating with Exodus.

Never before has there been such an intimate, first-hand portrait of Marley’s spirituality, his political involvement, and his life in exile in London, leading up to his triumphant return to the stage in Jamaica at the Peace Concert of 1978.

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.