Vivien Goldman: An interview with the Punk Professor

Wednesday, October 3, 2007 

Vivien Goldman recalls with a laugh the day in 1984 when she saw her death, but the laugh fades as she becomes lost in the memory. She was in Nigeria staying in Fela Kuti’s home; she had just arrived hours before and found people sleeping everywhere like house cats when Muhammadu Buhari’s army showed up to haul everyone to jail. Kuti was an opponent of the government who was in jail, and they came to arrest his coterie of supporters. They grabbed Goldman and were about to throw her in a truck until Pascal Imbert, Kuti’s manager, yelled out, “Leave her alone. She just arrived from Paris! She’s my wife! She knows nothing! “

Goldman stops for a moment and then smiles plainly. “They thought I was just some stupid woman…. That time sexism worked in my favor.”

Vivien Goldman has become a living, teaching testimony of the golden era of punk and reggae. She is an adjunct professor at New York University who has taught courses on the music scene she was thrust in the middle of as a young public relations representative for Island Records. She writes a column for the BBC called “Ask the Punk Professor” where she extols the wisdom she gained as a confidant of Bob Marley; as the person who first put Flava Flav in video; as Chrissie Hynde’s former roommate; as the woman who worked with the The Clash, Sex Pistols, The Slits and The Raincoats.

As Wikinews reporter David Shankbone found out, Goldman is one of those individuals that when you sit in her presence you realize she simply can not tell you everything she knows or has seen, either to protect the living or to respect the dead.

DS: The first biography of Bob Marley, Soul Rebel, Natural Mystic, was written by you based upon your personal experiences with him, and you have recently written a book about Marley called The Book of Exodus. How difficult is it to continue to mine his life? Is it difficult to come up with new angles?

DS: You were there with Marley through that time when he really caught on; was it obvious to you then that there was something amazing and unique happening?

DS: Warhol’s Factory photographer, Billy Name, once told me he knew that what was going on was amazing, but he never thought Warhol would become the entire fabric of the art world as he is now.

DS: But Marley has become a fabric of sorts…

DS: How do you define punk?

DS: What is the commodified version of punk selling?

DS: That aesthetic is everywhere, as though if one spikes his hair he is punk.

DS: Your philosophy is that punk is not just musical, but also an aesthetic. That it can imbibe anything; that it stands for change and for changing a system. Let me give you a few names, and you to tell me how you think they are or are not punk. Britney Spears.

DS: Dick Cheney.

DS: Kanye West.

DS: Osama bin Laden.

DS: Is the definition of punk relative, then? He’s a Madrasah punk but not a Manhattan punk?

DS: Pete Doherty.

DS: If punk is about change, then why the maudlin sentimentality over the closing of CBGB’s, which at times turned into demonizing a homeless shelter?

DS: I felt it was what it was at a certain moment, but it wasn’t that anymore. They were charging eight dollars for a beer. That’s not very punk, and that wasn’t attracting the punk crowds. It was like people who move to the Bowery because they think it’s so edgy but it’s really a boulevard of glittering condos.

DS: Where do you think New York’s culture is going? There are so few places on Earth with such a large concentration of creatives who meet and influence each other, but the city is becoming less affordable and cleansed of any grit. Is there a place for punk in the Manhattan of the future?

DS: You’re friends with Flava Flav, right?

DS: At the time he wasn’t known?

DS: Do you think apathy is a problem today?

DS: What about G. G. Allin? He used to defecate on the stage to make a point.

DS: Well, he’s dead. Do you think people are afraid to speak out today?

DS: Is violence for the cause of social change punk?

DS: Sandra Bernhard once did an homage to what she called the Big-Tittied Bitches of Rock n’ Roll: Heart, Joan Jett, Stevie Nicks. She mourned that there were no big-tittied bitches left. Who are the big-tittied bitches of Rock n’ Roll today?

DS: Do you have moments of extreme self-doubt where you wonder if anything you do matters to anyone?

DS: You have worked for two corporations that are seen by many as the least punk in their respective communities, the BBC and NYU. How does one remain punk in such environments?

DS: Have you ever been in a situation where you feared for your life, where you thought, this may be the way I go?

DS: What happened to him in the secret jail?

DS: In Jamaica there was so much violence during the civil war.