**This title is on pre-sale. Ships March 2026

Hardcover with dust jacket
6 in. x 9 in. | 15.24 cm. x 22.86 cm. | 441 pages
Original cover art by Lemi Ghariokwu
By Vivien Goldman

"Essential reading: the making of history as it was happening. Vivien was there."
—JARVIS COCKER, Pulp

Vivien Goldman was the first, most passionate and indubitably the most elegant chronicler of reggae, funk, free jazz and Afrobeat music: a pioneering female writer who shaped the Golden Age of music journalism in her image. Rebel Musix, Scribe on a Vibe collects Goldman's extraordinary output from 1975 onwards and features encounters with an incredible list of musical geniuses—including of course, her good friend Bob Marley. It is both an unrivaled window onto late 20th century counterculture and the indispensable chronicle of a legendary "Punk Professor" who single-handedly changed the course of music writing forever. 

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, Rebel Musix features the writing of one of only a handful of women writing in this Golden Age. She was 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.

No music fan should be without it.