Punk Professor Vivien Goldman: 'I Still Believe In Culture As A Force Of Social Change'

Vivien Goldman – legendary British punk journalist, musician, academic and "cultural worker" – is puzzled how, for millennials, Kanye West epitomises punk's rebellion. "Just 'cause he dyes his hair?," she quips. 

Well, he is a maverick, albeit a polarising one, "I suppose, in that sense, they're correct because he's punky," Goldman posits.

This year Goldman published the book Revenge Of The She-Punks: A Feminist Music History From Poly Styrene To Pussy Riot, which was ultimately less about "revenge" than narrative redress. She discovered that Chinese punk-rocker Gia Wang was anti-abortion. "That was very unusual," Goldman laughs, still astonished. "We had quite an exchange!"

The non-conformist Londoner was writing about music in the '70s, eventually becoming an editor at the paper Sounds. Chronicling the punk and reggae countercultures, and their convergence, Goldman witnessed "a huge seismic cultural shift”. Along the way, she deviated into publicity, repping Bob Marley at Island Records. Goldman began creating music herself with the experimental collective The Flying Lizards. Solo, she cut dub-punk with John Lydon producing, her cult track Private Armies decrying street violence.

Today Goldman, based in the US, is "the Punk Professor" at New York University's Clive Davis Institute Of Recorded Music (she mentions preparing a Fela Kuti course). But she's travelling to Australia to guest at BIGSOUND, the Melbourne Writers Festival, and FOJAM (Festival Of Jewish Arts And Music). Convivial, scintillating and digressive, Goldman is "on a bit of a buzz”, having spent the day in a studio reading her 2006 tome, The Book Of Exodus: The Making And Meaning Of Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Album Of The Century. "Just amazingly, just right now, somebody wanted me to do an audiobook of it."

Goldman is relishing renewed interest in her output. Three years ago, the European indie Staubgold anthologised Goldman's "long-forgotten music" with Resolutionary (Songs 1979 – 1982), attracting Pitchfork coverage. The University Of Texas Press then fielded Goldman to write a book about women, punk and protest. She decided on a "thematic" approach for Revenge Of The She-Punks, while including playlists. Yet the book is "personal", Goldman stresses. 

"Punk was my cultural formation – and how lucky I was to coincide with it… There was more space for women, although it was still a struggle. It was just a different kind of noise or different kind of feel. It was much more open and much less rigid than the incredibly patriarchal, rockist, laddish rock industry... So that's why I relate to punk. It was so important to me – it liberated me so much."

However, over time, punk's original female artists were marginalised, "There is this process of subtle, or not so subtle, systematic erasure of women's work."

Goldman feared the same would befall punk's subsequent waves of women, "I saw the resonance it had and how that resonance was in danger of being ignored yet again. I was like, 'Uh-uh!' [The book] was a personal quest – and to get something noted. I just didn't wanna be shoved into oblivion."

Goldman was conscious of acknowledging punk's globalism, looking beyond Western optics and profiling diverse figures. Indeed, for her, punk isn't about any single period or place, or territorialism. Above all, Goldman fosters cross-exchange.

"I worry sometimes about an identity industry blocking communication, because people get into their little tower of their construct of an identity. But, at the same time, I realise people sometimes think you're lost without this sense of an identity. But punk was really meant to free us up from having to think about where we were born, or what face we were born into genetically... That's what we all liked about it: it was meant to be a bit of a rebirth. That's why a lot of people took other names and so on – you know, their punk names." 

Goldman's own expression of punk emanates from her Jewish heritage: "My engagement is via the trauma of the Holocaust and the Second World War." 

Goldman's parents had fled Nazi Germany, "And I was raised with people who have numbers on their arms." 

It mattered to her that British punk was intertwined with anti-fascism and the Rock Against Racism movement. And that, Goldman says, makes punk relevant in a troubled 2019: "I still believe in culture as a force of social change."

Lately, Goldman has been booked for live gigs, necessitating she expand her repertoire. She's readying her debut album with Killing Joke's Martin "Youth" Glover, describing it as "jolly nice". "I never used to perform when I was doing music, but I started getting asked to perform, because it's a very different landscape now. I was pretty pleased to shake it up a little bit, instead of always just sitting on your own writing to go out, be with people, lift up my voice. It had that different sort of engagement, so that was great."