From Rock to Religion: TF Was Punk Rocker Back in the Day

Dressed in a brown suit jacket, teaching fellow and Government graduate student Samuel W. Goldman doesn’t look much like a punk rocker. His curriculum vitae, which includes publications in the Weekly Standard and Wall Street Journal and a thesis-in-progress advised by Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, is not a product of counterculture.

Looks can be deceiving.

“When I was in high school, I was, not to say a leader,” Goldman says, “but maybe a fixture in the New York area punk scene.”

His first foray into the genre was with a band called the Hysterics.

“We were New York’s leading kiddy-punk band of the 1990s,” Goldman says. A drummer, Goldman met the singer and guitarist of the Hysterics at East Village punk hangout St. Mark’s Place. The band opened at clubs for well-known local bands, says Goldman, and even released two records.

Goldman brushes the Hysterics’ songs off as “pretty terrible,” and they broke up “partly because of the inevitable artistic differences, but mostly because we didn’t like each other very much.”

In his senior year of high school, Goldman co-founded Yakub, named for the evil scientist who in Nation of Islam mythology engineered the white race. With Goldman singing and doing most of the songwriting, Yakub was more political than the Hysterics. Their first song, the Goldman-written “Republic of Virtue,” was a “complaint about...the mediocrity and parochial character of the punk scene,” Goldman says, laughing at himself. “Since I felt that I was very clever, it was all expressed in the idiom of the French Revolution”.

Yakub broke up after an eighteen-month stint when band members wanted to pursue other interests—in Goldman’s case, political theory.

“I have long since moved on,” Goldman says. “I have the ordinary concerns of graduate students.”

Goldman says that punk rock “became dull” to him, but there is common ground between punk and his dissertation, “Political Nihilism.”

“There’s a common dissatisfaction with the usual standard of life,” Goldman says.