It’s final exams week at Union College in Schenectady, and the social sciences building is as quiet as, well, a social sciences building during final exams. In ground-floor classrooms, students in T-shirts and shorts, with ponytails and bed-head, sit curled over test sheets. At the slightest sound from the hallway, pencils pause and heads snap up.
Elsewhere in the halls of academia — in seminar room 105, to be precise — scholarship does not occur in silence.
Here, the punk rocker discusses anarchy.
Noah Eber-Schmid has left his studded, patched jacket at home in favor of a black oxford and jeans. His longish hair is combed back, a few degrees shy of unruly. But you can tell — from the black-rimmed glasses, the pale skin, scruffy fringe of beard and the inky, sort-of-combed hair (better than the mohawk, but not as flattering as blond, says Noah’s mom) — that there’s likely a different sartorial story here, as well. But on this day, Noah doesn’t want anything to distract from the defense of his 123-page thesis on contemporary anarchism, which he spent his senior year working on — inspired, in part, by a long fascination with punk rock music.
The questions begin, and for 40 minutes Noah talks about the culture of radicalism, Marxism, postmodernism and things so intellectual that the thoughts of nonphilosophy majors, should they happen to eavesdrop on this meeting, might start to wander, self-defensively, toward more pedestrian territory, like the Easter bunny and flossing.
Noah’s real audience — four professors, who will assess him a grade — totally get it. He talks for a while about the May 1968 uprising in France. Ultimately, Felmon Davis, associate professor of philosophy, rests his hand on his chin in an uber-professorial way and nods.
“In my opinion, it’s not so much about overthinking, but the divorcing of theory from actual action,” Noah says evenly, in answer to a final question about the role of philosophy in anarchist theory: Did overthinking ruin modern anarchism?
“I don’t think you can overthink something,” he says. “Theory has to be directly grounded in action.”
In a little more than two months, Noah, who graduates today, will ground theory with action in his own life exploring the punk culture in Europe on a prestigious Watson Fellowship.
The 21-year-old, who has earned a double major in political science and philosophy, will test his theory that ethics, identity and belief bind punks in Europe in a community that transcends music by hanging out with punks in Central and Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. He also will investigate the punks’ vibrant, scrappy attitude and “do-it-yourself” culture (make your own music, sell it cheap, don’t get rich).
The yearlong project — or at least $25,000 of it — will be paid for by a grant from the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship Program, which was created in 1968 by the family of the founder of IBM. Fellowships are awarded annually to college seniors from 50 private, liberal arts colleges and universities, and are meant to give graduates of “unusual promise” the freedom for in-depth, hands-on exploration of a topic of their choosing.
A Watson project “has to be a deep held, longstanding passion,” says Davide Cervone, chair of the Watson Committee at Union. “What they’re after is a person who is going to be changed in a fundamental way, and who will bring that back to what they do.”
Past Watson Fellows from Union have studied Renaissance churches and Beaux-Arts train stations in Italy, the development of the long-necked lute in Central Asia, and the German literary critic Walter Benjamin.
Noah’s project on punk music — chosen from among four finalists at the school — might seem nontraditional, but only on the surface, said Charles Batson, associate professor of French, who worked with Noah during the academic year to hone his proposal before its review by the national Watson committee.
“As (a Watson Fellowship saying goes), what they’re ultimately looking for is not a project that’s going to lead to the smallpox vaccine, but they are looking for the Jonas Salk,” Batson said. “What’s great about Noah is his interest in philosophical questions. He is continually seeking answers.”
For Noah, as for many fans, punk rock involves a tangle of contradictory elements.
It is both personal and public. It is introspective and in-your-face rebellious, peace-loving and ear-rending, intimate and global. It is innocent and malicious, insightful and ridiculous.
A little like middle school, which is when Noah discovered his real fascination for the autonomy-loving, aesthetically edgy type of rock that emerged in the mid-’70s in the U.K. and America, in bands like The Sex Pistols and The Ramones. Noah grew up in hip and diverse Greenwich Village, the only son of highly educated, staunchly liberal parents. But when he was in sixth grade, his family relocated to Livingston, N.J., and Noah found himself dumped in “the banal and conforming environment of suburban New Jersey.” The nights were so hushed he had trouble falling asleep.
The way he saw it, he wasn’t quite rich, poor or competitive enough to fit into the established cliques at school. A diagnosis of dyslexia, when he was 5, meant that while he excelled in English, math was always a struggle. Punk, though, was a catch-all group that seemed to transcend and overlap the easy categories.
Noah had entered his teen years with a collection of pop-punk albums, like Green Day and early Blink 182, but learned, in high school, that he had much more to learn.
A more seasoned punk — one of just three at the school — took Noah under his wing, sharing some of the more mainstream punk bands he’d outgrown, helping Noah develop a taste for bands like The Misfits, then A Global Threat.
But it was more than just the music that Noah liked. The lyrics — about alienation, fighting for the right of expression and resisting forced conformity — seemed to describe his own life. Sure, he had liberal parents he got along with, but, like most high school kids, he also had struggles that seemed bent on crushing his spirit. For instance, though he could easily handle the material, teachers interpreted his dyslexia as a failure in mechanical reading skills. He had to fight to earn a spot in AP English.
“A lot of the statements and the feelings that I found in the first punk songs I listened to were the things I was already feeling,” he says. “In a sense, I feel alienated by a lot of things in society and images and thoughts. I may not have had it thrown in my face at home, but I still get it in everyday life. I think everyone does.”
Though she respects her son’s choices, Noah’s mom, Barbara Eber-Schmid, says her husband laughingly blames her for their only child’s extreme leanings.
“When I was pregnant, we had a big Halloween parade in the Village, and that year I dressed up as a punk,” says Barbara, who splits her time between Livingston and Manhattan, where she and her husband run an Internet company. She admits a more concrete contribution came when Noah was in 10th grade, and returned from a punk concert inspired to dye his dark brown hair. Barbara volunteered, as a damage control tactic. Whatever Noah had initially envisioned — rebellious, outlandish — he got hair that was closer to “beach bum blond.”
“The problem was I did too good a job. It looked … nice,” Barbara says. “I think I approved of it too much.”
By that point, Noah had learned to play drums and helped form the first of what would be, by the end of his college career, four on-again, off-again punk bands. The most recent group, White Punks on Hope, named after a song by the punk band Crass, reinterpreted classic hardcore songs as acoustic folk — a format, Noah figures, might be more appealing to wide audiences, who can appreciate the tunes and lyrics once slowed down.
“There are punk songs about going out and getting drunk, and there are punk songs about the Darfur conflict,” Noah says. When it comes to community and political message music, “today’s punks are more like hippies than I think the punks would like to admit,” Noah says.
Ultimately, Noah hopes his “a meditation on the meaning and promise of punk” will lead to a better understanding of himself, and give him the tools to explain punk to the world at large — and one person in particular.
His mother, who, as Noah wrote in his proposal, “has never truly understood what punk is.”
Barbara argues, however, that her son has already succeeded in getting his point across.
“While punk has the image of being sort of dirty and unsavory, I guess it isn’t. I started off thinking it was a horrible thing, that no child of mine would do a thing like that,” she said. “Since he developed an interest in punk, I’ve developed an interest in it.”
In fact, these days in the silent suburbs, she’s taken to cranking The Ramones while she’s on the treadmill.
It’s a start.
Stephanie Earls can be reached at 454-5761 or by e-mail at searls@timesunion.com.
On the Web:
* Hear the tunes of Eber-Schmid’s band, White Punks On Hope, at www.purevolume.com/whitepunksonhope