How a Punk Rock Cassette Saved My GPA
For those interested in the psychology of creativity or trying to ramp up their grades.
In case you missed some of my other creativity articles…
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Fall semester, freshman year at Binghamton University. I was throwing the shotput on the track team (origin story here), taking a full course load, and enrolled in a creative writing class that I apparently let slip through my fat, creatine-laced fingers.
The way I forgot about my 3-credit class was not unlike the way you ignore watering a plant until it is brown and crispy and beyond saving (far from poetic). I showed up to class. I sat in my seat. I still had a high level of social performance anxiety, so I kept very still and looked down often (which many people who only met the adult version of me cannot imagine).
In late November, the professor reminded everyone that portfolios were due in two weeks. Thirty pages of original work. Stories, poems, articles —whatever we had been producing all semester.
I turned to the person next to me. “What portfolio?” She looked at me like I had asked what year it was. (NOTE: This would have been a great essay for why I went to medical school to treat people with early-onset dementia.)
Turns out, we were supposed to be writing five pages of original writing per week. Every week. For the entire semester. I had produced exactly zero pages. Not a single sentence. I had been showing up to a class whose entire point was output, and I had been listening in awe of the wonderful writers my age while producing nothing.
Two weeks. Thirty pages. No extensions or excuses.
That night I tried to generate solutions during a workout and then it hit me. I jogged back to my dorm and grabbed a cassette from my collection. Ludichrist. Immaculate Deception. If you have never heard of them, imagine thrash metal and hardcore punk having a weird, irreverent baby in 1986. The album cover features a Jesus figure wielding a cross like a weapon while cherubs fly around with drums and chains. It is not subtle.
You might be surprised to know that they are rarely mentioned in the same sentence with Aerosmith and Aretha Franklin, with their 1,559 monthly listeners on Spotify.
I went to the computer lab. This was before laser printers; we had dot matrix machines that screamed like fax machines having a nervous breakdown. The lab at 2am was mostly empty except for a few engineering students who looked like they had not slept in days.
I put on my headphones, pressed play, and made myself a rule: every song becomes a story.
“Fire at the Firehouse” became a story about a firefighter who sets blazes because he is experiencing malaise and this allows him to be a hero with excited crowds rooting for him (I assume the writer and director of this movie copied my idea - link). “God Is Everywhere” became something darker, about a woman who cannot escape her own guilt for being a shitty mother, no matter where she runs. Track after track, I translated the energy, the imagery, the mood into prose. I was not thinking about craft. I was quickly converting one medium into another as fast as my fingers could move.
The dot matrix printer whined and stuttered. Pages came out in that perforated continuous-feed paper that you had to tear apart. By 6am I had a stack of stories that smelled and felt like hot ink.
I handed in the portfolio. I got an A-minus. While I don’t remember the exact feedback, it said something to the effect that I have a wacky mind and some people will appreciate it, some won’t, don’t let the critics win.
What I never told my professor: I did not plan this. I did not discover a method. I panicked, grabbed the nearest source of personally meaningful material, and strip-mined it for inspiration.
Years later, I found myself teaching a class on the psychology of creativity. And I promised myself to constantly check in with students on what’s working and whether they are keeping up.
And I found some science to back date a justification for what I did in the early 1990s:
In 2017, cognitive psychologist Catrinel Haught-Tromp at Rider University ran an experiment. She asked people to write two-line rhyming messages for greeting cards; the kind you write for birthdays, thank-yous, get-well-soons. A task every child has experienced with the dominant emotion of excruciating annoyance.
She split her participants into two groups. One group wrote their rhymes with no restrictions. The other group had a single, arbitrary constraint: they had to include a random noun in their rhyme. Not a relevant noun. A weird one. Words like “sheep” or “pajamas” or “sprinkler”.
Now, if you believe that creativity requires freedom, and most people do, you would expect the constrained group to struggle. They have an extra obstacle. An irrelevant word jammed into their task. That should make things harder.
The opposite happened. The constrained group produced significantly more creative rhymes. And not by a small margin, the effect size was big. Independent judges, blind to which condition produced which rhyme, consistently rated the constrained messages as more original and more resonant.
But here is the part that distinguishes this study from the others on the creativity-freedom question: Haught-Tromp also tested what happened when you removed the constraint after people had practiced with it.
Those participants kept being more creative. Even without the arbitrary noun, they outperformed people who had never been constrained in the first place. The constraint trained their brains to explore differently. They learned to avoid the clichéd, high-frequency associations that System 1 throws at you first. They went deeper into the forest of possibilities instead of settling for the first clearing.
The study was named after its inspiration: the Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis. Dr. Seuss wrote that book on a bet. His publisher challenged him to write a children’s story using only 50 words. The constraint led to one of the best-selling children’s books in history.
And to bring it full circle, guess what is the most famous song produced by Ludichrist? A rap version of the same children’s book. Do know there is a 92.1% probability you will despise this song. But give it a shot because the 12-year-old version of me adored this:
The problem is not that you lack ideas. The problem is that you are standing in front of infinite possibilities, which feels the same as standing in front of nothing at all.
A blank page is terrifying because it could be anything. Your brain, faced with unlimited options, starts generating reasons why each option is wrong. Too obvious. Too weird. Too ambitious. Too simple. You have not started yet, and you are already editing.
Constraints kill the editor. When I sat down with Ludichrist, I did not have to decide what to write about. I did not have to figure out tone or mood. The musicians handed it to me. My only job was to receive and convert.
This is why writing prompts exist. This is why artists give themselves arbitrary rules. This is why some of the most creative work in history came from people operating under brutal limitations. Constraints create conditions where creativity is easier.
But most prompts are garbage. “Write about a time you felt grateful.” “Describe your dream vacation.” These are invitations to produce therapy-journal drivel. They constrain the topic without providing energy, structure, or surprise.
Music is different. A three-minute punk song contains pacing, emotional arc, imagery, and attitude. It is a compressed narrative already.
🔒 For the Curious
You’ve made it this far, which means you probably value creativity. Then you are going to love what lives below: The actual method, broken down into steps you can use tonight, plus multiple variations that work just as well. Plus! The great creativity book that will hit bookshelves later this year.
