Profs and Pints Online presents: “Lessons from Bob Marley,” an insider’s perspective on a musical revolutionary and healer, with Vivien Goldman, a New York University adjunct professor who teaches a course on Bob Marley and is the author of two books on him.

Since the start of the pandemic, the music of Bob Marley and the Wailers has been downloaded 27 times more than usual, according to Billboard. What was it about this legendary musician that makes us turn to him in trying times?

Come gain a rich new understanding of Marley from Vivian Goldman, an award-winning writer and musician whose most recent book on Marley is The Book of ‘Exodus’: The Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Album of the Century.  As an adjunct professor at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, she teaches courses on Bob Marley, Reggae and Island Records.  She also knows this subject personally: After spending seven months as Marley’s Island Records publicist, Goldman went on to cover him closely as a journalist until his death in 1981 at the age of 36, traveling with him and staying at his Kingston home.

In her interactive, online talk, Goldman will discuss some of the key aspects of Marley’s life and creativity that have enabled him to remain so relevant long after his passing. She’ll discuss how he came to be the defining voice of what was then called the Third World, and how his destiny took him much further than the role society had intended for him.

Marley’s was a path full of challenges. As the son of a brief cross-class and race marriage, the light-skinned youth was often rejected by both races. The music industry ripped him off throughout his early career. Politically-motivated gunmen, whom he had personally tried to help, tried to kill him in his own Kingston home in 1976.

Yet across a spectacular musical canon, Marley refused to become bitter. He never lost his commitment to keeping hope at the heart of his anti-establishment, worldly-wise, spiritual Rasta rebel music. Come learn about his sources of strength, his beliefs, and the impact he continues to have on music and society today.

Profs & Pints Online: Lessons from Bob Marley