YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE THE BAND "GEESE™"
...AND HERE'S WHY!!
“ADS ARE NOT MEANT FOR CONSCIOUS CONSUMPTION. THEY ARE INTENDED AS SUBLIMINAL PILLS FOR THE SUBCONSCIOUS IN ORDER TO EXERCISE A HYPNOTIC SPELL…
FAR MORE THOUGHT AND CARE GO INTO THE COMPOSITION OF ANY PROMINENT AD IN A NEWSPAPER OR MAGAZINE THAN GO INTO THE WRITING OF THEIR FEATURES AND EDITORIALS.”
— MARSHALL MCLUHAN, UNDERSTANDING MEDIA: EXTENSIONS OF MAN (1964)
“MOST PEOPLE SEE A VIDEO OR SOMETHING ABOUT AN ALBUM THAT CAME OUT, AND THAT FIRST COMMENT THEY SEE BECOMES THEIR OPINION, EVEN WHEN THEY HAVEN’T HEARD THE WHOLE ALBUM. IT’S REALLY IMPORTANT FOR US TO MAKE SURE WE’RE AHEAD OF IT AND CONTROLLING THAT NARRATIVE IN THE DIRECTION WE WANT.”
— JESSE COREN, FOUNDER OF CHAOTIC GOOD™
“WE ARE GOVERNED, OUR MINDS ARE MOLDED, OUR TASTES FORMED, OUR IDEAS SUGGESTED, LARGELY BY MEN WE HAVE NEVER HEARD OF.”
— EDWARD BERNAYS, PROPAGANDA (1928)
“I’M GOIN TO THE MOON, I’M GOIN TO THE MOON, I’M GOIN TO THE MOON, I’M GOIN TO THE MOON, MOON MOON MOON, GOIN’, GOIN’ GOIN’, GOIN’ TO THE MOON, I’M GOIN’ TO THE MOON AND YOU’RE BUYING THE TICKET MOTHERFUCKER!!!”
— CAMERON WINTER™, LEAD SINGER OF HOT YOUNG BAND™, GEESE™, FROM A NEW SONG, ONE OF THE WORST SONGS I’VE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE, PERFORMED LIVE IN BERLIN SOMETIME RECENTLY.
OK - THIS IS ANOTHER LONG ONE.
TOO LONG FOR EMAIL…
OPEN IT ON THE SUBSTACK APP OR YOUR BROWSER BEFORE YOU EVEN BEGIN TO READ IT.
Musaceous (adjective): refers to plants belonging to or resembling the Musaceae family, which includes bananas and plantains.
From the perspective of a young music fan in the late 90s and 2000s, it seemed to me that the entirety of the rock and roll counterculture was stuffed into a banana.
If you had any interest in “Alternative Culture™,” it was right there in your face - in the pages of music mags, on the walls of head shops, screenprinted onto the T-shirt that the nose-ringed individual walking past you was wearing under their leather jacket, etc., etc.
By that time, several decades had passed since the 1960s had burned themselves out in that grim final act, their afterimages still circulating widely, permeating the cultural atmosphere like the resinous haze of Nag Champa™ smoke, reconstituted as The Sixties™—a constellation of icons, myths, and marketable signs.
As I’ve written about before, and will continue to write about forever:
“the Sixties™”. Not the 1960s.
“The Sixties™,” which did not begin in 1960.
“The Sixties™,” which did not end in 1970.
“The Sixties™”. Not the 1960s.
“The Sixties™”: that period of political and cultural action that took place sometime between 8:00 PM (EST) on Sunday, February 9, 1964, and 9:00 PM (EDT) on Thursday, August 8, 1974—the evening when the Beatles™ made their American television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show™, and the night that Dick Nixon announced his resignation after the Watergate scandal.
The common cultural narratives about “The Sixties™” that have been drilled into our skulls tell a story of a generation animated by a revolutionary impulse, a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of cultural offerings that propped up a paisley-patterned façade whose surfaces were littered with spray-painted messages about hope, idealism, and unification.
The Sixties™ can be read as an index of mythologies: a laminated catalogue of icons, slogans, martyrs, and spectacles.
When it comes to music, no band from the Sixties™ has been so over-mythologized as the Velvet Underground™. From the moment I first encountered it, that Banana™ consistently told me that, so long as I kept it near me, I could consider myself Cool™.
And so I did.
And so I do.
And so I shall.
Myths about the Velvet Underground™ have preceded their work since the moment they (first) ceased to exist as a band. In retrospectives, music magazines, record reviews, and interviews, you almost always hear some variation of the following statement: “The Velvet Underground™ made groundbreaking records that sounded and felt like absolutely nothing that had come before, and no one bought their records at the time.”
In the early eighties, Eno made a remark to an interviewer that went something like:
“I was talking to Lou Reed the other day, and he said that the first Velvet Underground record sold only 30,000 copies in its first five years. Yet, that was an enormously important record for so many people. I think everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band!”
The band has been crowned as the Royalty of the Underground™, often credited with being the first to truly unite the infernal energies of rock and roll with the bleeding-edge concepts leaking out of the margins of the European and American avant-garde.
The labels have told us all of this time and time again in their marketing campaigns, writers have insisted upon these things in their liner notes and reviews of boxed sets and reissues, the media have propped them up as such in retrospectives of the era, and music fans and musicians adamantly defend this position on their behalf.
But few people ever put their hand up and ask: is any of it true?
Scottish writer and film director Grant McPhee has.
He’s been writing a series about The Myth of the Velvet Underground that seeks to answer that exact question, and it is a fascinating investigation into the inner machinations of the Star Maker Machinery™.
Through deep research into the archives of the Music Press™ and the abundance of literature related to the band, McPhee tells it like it really was: The Velvet Underground™ may not have been as big as the Beatles™, but they were by no means an “obscure” band that “made music that had no antecedent.”
They were signed to a major label that consistently released, distributed, and marketed several of their records over the course of half a decade; they were aligned with one of the most famous artists to have ever lived on this planet; and they had an abundance of press dedicated to covering, reviewing, and promoting all of their releases. Though they may have been among the first bands to be recognized as melding various influences from the American and European avant-garde into the structures and aesthetics of rock and roll, they were in no way the first or only band to do so, and their recorded output is very much in line with what acts like the Mothers of Invention™, the Who™, and a myriad of other forward-thinking, art-school-inclined groups on both sides of the Atlantic were doing concurrently.
So what’s with all the noise?
Well, that question is easy to answer: as Grant suggests, this all largely began around the time that Lou Reed™’s solo career took off in the early 1970s, alongside a Velvet Underground™ reissue campaign that sought to position the band as being “too cool for most people to understand.”
And it worked. It still does.
David Lee Roth once said something to the effect of: “The reason more rock critics like Elvis Costello™ than Van Halen™ is that more rock critics look like Elvis Costello™ than they do us.”
I’m not suggesting that music critics and Rock™ fans see themselves in Lou, Mo, Sterling, John, or Doug. I find this quote fascinating because Roth is (perhaps unintentionally) alluding to something much larger: fans and critics are spectators, and as spectators, they rely on musicians, rock stars, and musical iconography to verify their own identities.
So much of what people think, say, and write about the Velvet Underground™ has less to do with the band, their music, and the content of their actual work than it does with what other people think, say, and write about the Velvet Underground™.
There is a reason the “music heads” engage with The Myth of the Velvet Underground™ and participate, generation after generation, in advancing the parade of inherited claims recirculated with every retrospective, reissue campaign, and “best-of” list. To affiliate oneself with the Myth of the Velvet Underground™ is to borrow its accumulated aura; the association functions less as aesthetic commitment than as a shorthand for taste, discernment, and cultural literacy.
What I love most about Grant’s writing and this project in general is the emphasis on how all of this does a supreme disservice to the people who actually contributed to the development of the group’s sound and output over the years—namely Lou Reed, Sterling Morrison, Maureen Tucker, John Cale, Doug Yule, Angus MacLise, Tom Wilson, Val Valentin, and the band’s management, label, and beyond.
The Velvet Underground were, and still are, the greatest rock and roll band to ever exist. That’s not because some prick in a denim jacket at Rolling Stone™ made a living off of signalling that he was tuned into the counterculture, not because of what Brian Eno said, not because of that fucking Banana™.
In his review of the VU’s 1970 masterpiece, Loaded, Lenny Kaye reminded readers of something important:
“Lou Reed has always steadfastly maintained that the Velvet Underground were just another Long Island rock ’n’ roll band.”
EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE
On a related note, do you ever get the sense that many of the so-called “mainstream pop stars” whose images you unwittingly encounter dozens of times a day aren’t actually as “mainstream” or popular as you’re told they are?
Do you give even one eighth of an eighth of an eighth of a fuck about Dua Lipa™, Zara Larsson™, Childish Gambino™, Bebe Rexha™, or Shawn Mendes™? Does your mother? Your little cousin? Your boss? The person delivering your mail? Your barista™? Have you (or anyone close to you) ever actually spent real money on anything these Artists™ are selling? Do you, or anyone around you, follow them with any real interest in what they make or do?
The online media ecosystem, with its obsession with forward-facing metrics, virality, and endless circulation, would have you believe these people are more famous, more influential, more omnipresent than anyone who has ever lived. And in a sense, maybe they are—you’ve probably seen their faces dozens of times this week.
But if you start asking around, you’ll notice something: for most people, beyond surface-level recognition, a few hooks, a vague awareness of the Brand™, there is no depth. No real attachment. No real demand. No one seems to actually care.
These vaporous entities are little more than wide, gleaming surfaces for brands and consumers to reflect themselves off. They are only as useful, valuable, and popular as they appear through metrics and visibility.
It’s strange.
Suspicious.
But it’s also the truth.
We’ve crossed a new threshold where an entire layer of the music industry now exists to simulate the conditions under which virality appears to occur naturally.
On the other side of the glass, over there, down through the wires, across the data centres holding the water-cooled servers, routers, and firewalls, there is now an entire industry, openly discussed in trade publications and marketing circles, built around manufacturing the appearance of popularity. Digital marketing firms coordinate hundreds of “fan accounts,” seed trends, game platforms, and engineer virality from the ground up.
Artists and songs do not just “take off.” They are pushed, placed, circulated, and repeated until they feel unavoidable.
The goal is the systematic shaping of perceived reality across multiple layers.
Some of the tactics openly described by these firms and observable across platforms include::
BURNER “FAN” ECOSYSTEMS: where hundreds of “fan” pages are created in parallel, a mix of meme pages, niche genre accounts, and aesthetic lifestyle accounts that repeatedly post clips of the same song with fake discovery language (“how is no one talking about this?!”) and “underrated artist” narratives, so as to make it feel as though a song or artist is emerging organically from the culture, rather than being planted or pushed.
COORDINATED CONTENT BLASTS: where multiple accounts post the same track within a tight window of time, with slightly different captions, edits, and contexts, with the intention of creating the illusion of simultaneity and coincidence as a means of tricking algorithms into thinking that “something is brewing.”
COMMENT SECTION ENGINEERING: where fake or semi-controlled accounts blitz posts with comments that build social proof inside the post, not just around it, creating the illusion of human interaction in the hope that new viewers will interpret the comments as the trustworthy responses of real people.
MICRO-INFLUENCER SEEDING: the use of hundreds of smaller influencer accounts casually posting a song as if they had organically discovered it, avoiding the obviousness of large-scale promotion.
TREND BAITING: attaching a song to an existing popular meme format, dance, or repeatable caption structure that people are already engaging with.
These techniques work in concert with more traditional forms of marketing and advertising. In the case of a hot “indie” artist who wants to appear both credible and buzzy, you might see a media blitz in the form of press write-ups, playlist placements, and “rising artist” features after several rounds of what is called “trend simulation” have already injected their music into the content circulatory system. This benefits both the artist, who is seeking institutional validation, and the publications, which are trying to present themselves as relevant, important, and on the pulse in the face of extinction.
One example of a company providing these services is the digital marketing firm Chaotic Good Projects™.
In a recent interview for Billboard™’s On The Record podcast, the founders of the company, music managers Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman, discussed this new frontier of music promotion, the manufacturing of virality, and the ways in which discourse around artists, brands, and products can be actively shaped:
“Instead of asking artists to post more self-promotional content, Chaotic Good builds a network of TikTok pages of all kinds, from fan pages, meme pages, sports clips, and more, and plugs the artist’s song in the background to create a groundswell of support for the track.”
Since its founding, Chaotic Good has become a go-to for labels and artists looking for this newer form of digital marketing - “trend simulation.” The company has run campaigns for clients such as Zara Larsson™, Coldplay™, Tame Impala™, Mitski™, Travis Scott™, Childish Gambino™, and more.
One example of how these firms employ tactics like “trend simulation” as an extension of traditional marketing and PR is the practice of sending hundreds of accounts to immediately comment on an artist’s Tiny Desk™ or SNL performance moments after it is posted, creating the illusion of instant movement, buzz, and heat.
Under this logic, promotional appearances are no longer treated as secondary exposures, but as primary events in themselves. A Tiny Desk™ or late-night performance is no longer simply a platform for the music. It is packaged, announced, and circulated as if it were a release. The promotion begins not with the performance itself, but with the announcement of the performance, generating anticipation and signaling importance before anything has even occurred.
What a company like Chaotic Good Projects™ specializes in is expanding the surface area an artist occupies within the digital media ecosystem. By coordinating networks of accounts, seeding content across platforms, and strategically triggering algorithmic amplification, the firm is able to inflate visibility and simulate momentum, producing a spectacle of cultural capital that can then be exchanged for brand deals, placements, and partnerships.
Remember: platforms reward perceived momentum, not actual demand.
If you can manufacture the appearance of momentum, you can trigger platform recommendation systems and attract the attention of real users.
Reality is no longer measured. It is staged and then fed back into perception loops until it feels real.
In the Billboard™ interview above, the founders of the company are asked:
“What would you say to someone who’s freaked out by these ideas that we are talking about, who feels like they’re being manipulated by artists and marketers online?”
Their responses:
Coren: “Unfortunately, a lot of the internet is manipulation. Andrew would always say everything on the internet is fake. All opinions are formed in the TikTok comments, which is a reminder to us of what we can help with. I don’t know if this will make anyone feel better, but a lot of what we do on the narrative side is controlling the discourse. Most people see a video or something about an album that came out, and that first comment they see becomes their opinion, even when they haven’t heard the whole album. It’s really important for us to make sure we’re ahead of it and controlling that narrative in the direction we want.”
Spelman: “In the past, a label and management team would do a great job getting their artist on SNL™ or Tiny Desk™ or Triple J™, post it, and then kind of wait, and the comments would come in: terrible cover choice, voice sounds terrible, all that. What we do at Chaotic Good with our management clients is this: the second the SNL™ performance drops at midnight, you should post 100 times saying that was the best performance of the year. The question is how you do that at scale. It takes a lot of work and infrastructure, but controlling the narrative is really, really important.”
What’s being sold here is no longer just the music, but the feeling that something is happening, and the quiet pressure to be part of it.
This is not just a new frontier in music advertising. It goes beyond the paid, explicit promotion of a product or service.
It is not just a new frontier in marketing either, beyond branding, positioning, and repetition as tools to shape perception and build hype.
And it is not payola. This is more diffuse, more ambient, more pervasive, less about paying for exposure than about engineering the conditions under which exposure feels inevitable.
What’s being shaped is not the audience directly, but the atmosphere in which the audience encounters something, the environment that determines whether it appears meaningful, relevant, or real.
It is the manipulation of context: the engineering of consent through the shaping of perception itself.
In this sense, it begins to resemble propaganda, not in political content, but in its structural form, what Edward Bernays defined 98 years ago as:
“Effort directed systematically toward the gaining of public support for an opinion or a course of action.”
“WATCH GEESE DEBUT EXTREMELY SICK NEW SONG ‘APOLLO’ IN BERLIN”
— STEREOGUM™
There are several interconnected reasons why certain classic or beloved perfume formulations get discontinued or fundamentally altered. Regulatory restrictions based on safety and allergenicity research have limited or banned materials like oakmoss, nitromusks, Peru balsam, and costus root. Certain animal-derived secretions like civet and castoreum, which contain compounds related to pheromone-adjacent molecules, have become prohibitively expensive, scarce, or outlawed due to ethical concerns surrounding their production and extraction. Natural materials like Mysore sandalwood, real Bulgarian rose, aged iris butter, and ambergris have become so expensive as to be economically unviable, resulting in the use of cheaper synthetic recreations or reduced concentrations in their place.
Similarly, Rock and Roll™, as a cultural formulation or energy source, has not simply “declined in quality”, but undergone a process of reformulation, stripped of its volatile compounds and reissued in a safer, more stable, and institutionally legible form.
Rock and Roll™, in its original state, was distilled from unstable and often destructive materials: poverty, addiction, criminality, sexual urgency, and the brute force of industrial modernity. It emerged from specific postwar conditions that can no longer be replicated, the collision between black musical traditions and a newly weaponized form of white teenage alienation, amplified by a surge of consumer electronics that turned guitars into artillery, alongside mass media, and a culture not yet fully managed or surveilled. What resulted from these conditions was a volatile reaction, a kind of chemical event.
With those conditions gone, we are left with synthetic recreations, reduced concentrations. We are left with acts like Geese™, which we are collectively coerced into treating as something they are not, and could never actually be.
Well…what the fuck is “Geese™”?
In the off chance that you haven’t yet been forced to develop an opinion on this phenomenon, Geese™ are a relatively new band fronted by a Young Genius™ called Cameron Winter™. They have been called “America’s most thrilling young rock band” and “Gen Z’s first great American band.” They’ve been credited with “tackling the anxieties of a new generation with a new kind of rock,” and, in an article published by The Atlantic titled “Finally, a New Idea in Rock and Roll,” described as “pushing the genre in new and electrifying directions.”
Have you already been told that?
Have you seen the clips?
It’s all a bit much, izzinit?
It’s very suspicious.
When their frontman Cameron Winter performed at Carnegie Hall last December, the set was filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson and Benny Safdie.
Have you already been told that?
Have you seen the clips?
It’s all a bit much, izzinit?
It’s very suspicious.
Look, Geese™ might be a “good band.” I’ve heard they are kind, sweet people with a real and intense love for music. It’s probably great that a young band is succeeding to this degree under current conditions. Cameron Winter™ might be a talented lyricist. Maybe he is the “Leonard Cohen” of our time. Maybe Geese™ are filling a void for a new generation. Maybe Geese™ are dexterous musicians. Maybe Geese™ are too American for me to understand. Maybe Geese™ are for twenty-somethings who came of age during the “Plandemic™,” and I, as a pretentious Millennial™, just don’t get Geese™.
Have you already been told all of this?
Have you seen the clips?
It’s all a bit much, izzinit?
It’s very suspicious.
You know what?
FUCK OFF.
Fuck Geese™. Fuck kind, sweet people with a real, intense love for music. Fuck young bands, and fuck succeeding. Fuck Cameron Winter™. Fuck his lyrics. Fuck Leonard Cohen. Fuck our times. Fuck the void. Fuck the new generation. Fuck dexterous musicians. Fuck Americans. Fuck everyone outside of America who can’t understand. Fuck twenty-somethings. Fuck the Plandemic™. Fuck pretentious Millennials™ who “just don’t get Geese™.” Fuck those of you who have the audacity to tell a pretentious Millennial™ that “they don’t get Geese™.”
Fuck you and fuck me.
I’ve lost control of my mind. They’ve broken in and set up shop. They’ve run all the wires, set up the screens, calibrated the projectors, and dialled everything in. I can’t get them to leave.
No, not Geese™. The managers of the Reality Studio.
I really need to meditate and apply a Korean Snail Mucin Power Sheet Mask™.
Maybe I should go back to Othership™ and let it all out in a Male Scream Session™.
Geese™ is not a rock and roll band.
They don’t sound like Television. They don’t sound like Funkadelic. They don’t sound like the Rolling Stones. They don’t sound like the Velvet Underground. They don’t sound like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. They don’t sound like Deerhunter. They don’t sound like Led Zeppelin. They don’t sound like the Beatles. They don’t sound like the Strokes. They definitely don’t sound like the Fall (lol…please…fuck…off) or any of the other artists listed as comparisons on their Wikipedia page. If anything, they sound like every single one of these bands discographies being streamed in HD at the same time through AirPods™. And that, my friend, sounds like a FUCKING RACKET.**
(**I really am sick of editing this piece, so I’m not going to put trademark logos on these band’s names. I’ll trust that you know which ones deserve it.)
Picture the following: you are standing in the hallway of an American college dormitory. Out of the first room to your left, you can hear a guy in a tank top crying over the first song on Kid A while he chats with Claude™ about his Mental Health™. To your right, you hear the sound of another young man weeping over a dreadful Neutral Milk Hotel song leaking out of a door left ajar while his therapist asks him through a Zoom™ window if he’s Okay™. Directly ahead of you, slightly to the left, there is another door that’s wide open. Out of that open door you can hear another student that is bawling hoarsely over the worst David Byrne tune ever recorded while he does an online therapy session. You walk forward down the hall. Someone wearing a zip-up hoodie over a polo shirt over a T-shirt walks out of a room where they are playing “Going to a Town” by Rufus Wainwright at deafening volume. They are on their phone with their therapist and they are crying. As you continue down the hall, you notice that every other dorm room is loudly playing “The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth” by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah in sync while its occupants cry and prepare for Zoom™ call therapy sessions.
That is what Geese™ sounds like.
That is what Geese™ feels like.
That is what Geese™ looks like.
Geese™ are going to hate themselves and their music in 10 years. As they should. Well at least I’d like to hope so. That is how you are supposed to feel about yourself.
Geese™ is not even an assemblage of very kind, sweet people with a truly intense love for music, a young band succeeding to such an unheard-of degree in the current state of affairs.
Geese™ is a flag in a bio line.
Geese™ is content.
Geese™ is a moment.
Geese™ is Psychotherapy™.
Geese™ is kinda like Wellness™.
Geese™ is an undergraduate diploma.
Geese™ is a $12.99 iced matcha latte made with the alternative milk of your choice.
Geese™ is a weekend at the cottage with pops, a case of sour apple IPA, and a playlist consisting of discographies by the National, the Hold Steady, and Darkness on the Edge of Town by Springsteen.
Geese™ makes Bill Haley and Pat Boone look like Charlie Manson.
Geese™ is the sound of being aroused by The New Yorker™ while you cry and think about how you’re going to tell your therapist that you found yourself aroused and crying while reading The New Yorker™.
Geese™ is not called “America’s Most Thrilling Young Rock Band” and “Gen Z’s first great American Band” because anyone actually believes those statements, but because the publications and writers making those claims need to justify their existence, and the people who read them need signage and allegiances to corners of culture in order to maintain their Identity Brands™.
Geese™ is the middle of the 2020s™.
STFU about Geese™.
~~~~ If it isn’t obvious, I’m fucking jacked on freddo espresso right now. It cost me $8.99 at a new cafe on the corner of my street. They have a laptop that plays a 30 second loop of “bluesy saxophone” that was clearly generated by AI on repeat. It drove me nuts for the first 8 minutes but then it clicked and I realised that everything in my life is an actually thirty second computer-generated loop. I went home and immediately threw out my pristine mono copies of Kind Of Blue, Ascension, Blue Train, and Fire Music. Junk. ~~~~
Geese™ are not good, compelling, attractive, groundbreaking, controversial, or special enough to justify any of this nonsense.
I don’t think as many people actually like Geese™ as I’m made to believe.
I don’t think as many people actually listen to Geese™ as I’m made to believe.
I don’t even know if Geese™ actually exist.
Have you already been told all of this?
Have you seen the clips?
It’s all a bit much, izzinit?
It’s very suspicious.
Watching the Geese™ spectacle is amazing.
Look at how the American Millennial™ media class are trying to stay relevant with the kids while propping up a band that literally sounds like the condensed amalgamation of every heinous Best New Music™ album they were swindled into pretending they loved in the 00s. “This is the best new band of a generation, and they just so happen to sound like the music that I also cried to in my dorm room.”
Look at how the New Yorker™-tote-bag-over-the-shoulder-at-the-local-pop-up-organic-food-market white people praise the “intellectual prowess of Cameron Winter’s lyricism” as an aberration, or an elevation over what is expected in these supposedly profoundly illiterate times. “Did you know that his mother wrote a book about being in an open marriage? I read about it in The New Yorker™. I believe that growing up with such open-minded parents must have provided him with unique insight into the modern condition.”
Meanwhile, there are millions of under-heralded musicians and record labels currently producing and releasing incredible music without any outlet or conduit through which to share, express, or advertise it. It sometimes feels like no one is even writing about music anymore.
They actually, literally aren’t.
What about places like Stereogum™?
Well, Geese™ recently debuted a new song in Berlin, and Stereogum™ found the event worthy enough of its own headline, article, and social media blitz across the platform-verse.
This was the song:
Fuck off.
And for the love of God, Cameron Winter™, a fucking baseball cap and wifebeater? Fuck off.
Is this irony?
What kind of a band name is “Geese™,” anyway?
Fuck off.
Have you already been told all of this?
Have you seen the clips?
It’s all a bit much, izzinit?
It’s very suspicious.
WHAT THE FUCK IS A “NARRATIVE CAMPAIGN?”
Now, considering all that I’ve just told you about Geese™ and Cameron Winter™, it might come as little surprise to learn who worked the “user-generated content” and “narrative campaigns” for both Geese™’s Getting Killed LP and Cameron Winter™’s solo album:
Chaotic Good Projects™.
In a great piece on this very topic, musician Eliza McLamb explains how she first came across Cameron Winter™’s unfathomably annoying, blindingly white hit, “Love Takes Miles”:
“The first time I heard Cameron Winter’s ‘Love Takes Miles,’ I probably heard it one hundred times in a row. I had found it a week after its release and became immediately convinced that I was one of the few people in the world who knew about this perfect, beautiful little secret. At the time, the song had just under a million streams, and I was obsessed with showing it to everyone. Everyone soon caught on. The next year, it was the summer of ‘Love Takes Miles.’ I played it in rental cars in Los Angeles and off my phone speakers in the most remote parts of Chimney Rock, North Carolina. The rest of that record was a similar revelation for me. I had discovered some kind of magic.
Though, I can’t remember exactly how I discovered it. I didn’t hear about the song from a friend or a music blog, and can’t recall a particular memory, only that of seeing the title somewhere on my phone and searching it up on Spotify. How I came to know the song is almost irrelevant information at this point, eclipsed completely by the experience of loving the song on my own terms, creating my own memories with it. The song just came to me, from somewhere, populating seamlessly in a stream of consciousness. A stream of consciousness, otherwise known as an algorithm.”
This is precisely how contemporary digital music marketing operates, less as targeted exposure or coercion, and more as the quiet reconstruction of the conditions under which discovery appears to occur. Not by introducing music to listeners, but by staging the conditions in which it feels as though it arrived on its own.
Eliza goes on to describe the shock and confusion she felt upon learning that, alongside Winter™ and Geese™, other Indie darlings like Dijon™, Mk.Gee™, and Jane Remover™ had employed the same agency’s “narrative campaign” and “user-generated content” services. These were tactics she knew were used by the Star Maker Machinery™ behind the mainstream music world, but had assumed that “mass-market, commercial pop was the only kind of music that such marketing would work for.”
Cameron Winter™ has been positioned in the media as music for “the discerning indie head,” the latest in a dying lineage of true singer-songwriters. It has become quite clear that the PR strategy behind his rise was to make this very specific type of music fan feel as though they were among the chosen few to discover a latent superstar before the masses, the Sheeple™, who rely on being led by the culture industries, caught on.
In the case of a more “mainstream pop artist” like Dua Lipa™, the goal may be slightly different: to make people feel as though they are discovering something that is already popular, convincing them that they are not being left behind by emerging trends.
“Effort directed systematically toward the gaining of public support for an opinion or a course of action.”
The day after Eliza posted this piece, Chaotic Good made major changes to their website, scrubbing the names of many of their clients.
If there’s one thing I hate more than “You Get What You Give” by New Radicals, it’s the sound of Geese™ covering it.
Actually I hate “Closing Time” by Semisonic more than both of those things.
OF COURSE WE END UP HERE…
By the late 1960s, two parallel developments were underway that would come to shape the contours of perceived reality: the refinement of psychological operations (PSYOPS) as a doctrine of influence, and the emergence of networked communication systems such as ARPANET, the precursor to the public internet. Both arose from postwar military research environments, where information was no longer treated as neutral or passive, but as something that could be organized, transmitted, and, crucially, weaponized in the service of shaping perception at scale.
In the last six years, the term PSYOP has drifted from the margins of military literature and the Paranoid Underground™ to become a popular and widely used term in mainstream discourse, and for obvious reasons. Simply defined, psychological operations are methods of influence that operate not by coercion, but by shaping perception: controlling the signals, narratives, and environments through which people come to understand reality.
In 1980, an obscure internal U.S. Army concept paper titled “From PSYOP to MindWar” was circulated. The central idea of the paper was simple: future conflict would be decided less by physical force and more by the ability to shape perception and belief. For a public still reeling from the revelations of MKULTRA just a few years prior, the suggestion that the American military was actively exploring the invasion of the mind through such methods set off alarms among those Noided™ and Nervous™ enough to take notice.
An excerpt:
“Within the U.S. military, PSYOP has habitually been relegated to a back seat as a ‘force multiplier.’ The principal strategic decisions are made in consideration of traditional political and military interests and goals. Only then is PSYOP invited to the table to help achieve already agreed-upon missions more efficiently.
“MindWar reverses this sequence. Psychological means for achieving victory, essentially through convincing the enemy that he really wants to bring his national policies into harmony with ours, are fashioned in support of basic political goals. The use of ‘ordinary’ military force (bombs, bullets, etc.) is regarded as a last resort in circumstances wherein MindWar by itself fails.
“The advantage of MindWar is that it conducts wars in nonlethal, noninjurious, and nondestructive ways. Essentially, you overwhelm your enemy with argument. You seize control of all of the means by which his government and populace process information to make up their minds, and you adjust it so that those minds are made up as you desire. Everyone is happy, no one gets hurt or killed, and nothing is destroyed.”
These ideas anticipate a model in which influence operates through environments rather than messages.
One of the authors of this paper was a prominent psychological warfare specialist within the American military intelligence apparatus, an infamous individual named Michael Aquino. Aquino was deployed during the Vietnam War before serving with the Green Berets and acting as a NATO liaison in the 1970s and early 1980s, during which time he also taught at Golden Gate University.
Aquino’s obsession with psychological manipulation had strong parallels with his extracurricular interests in the occult. You see, Michael was a Satanist. He joined the Church of Satan™ in 1969 and, within two years, had risen through the ranks to become Magister Templi of the IV° (whatever the fuck that means), became the editor of their publication The Cloven Hoof, and sat on the group’s governing council. Aquino also had what he described as an “academic interest” in Nazism. During one of his tours of Europe, he visited Wewelsburg Castle, infamously used by the SS under Heinrich Himmler for ceremonial and ideological purposes, and performed a ritual of his own in which he claimed to receive a revelatory text. The outcome quickly became clear: adopt the name “Set,” produce a religious text through what he described as automatic writing, and establish a new religious organization. And so he did. The Temple of Set was born.
The overlap between the occult and the concept of a PSYOP is less mystical than structural, as both domains are primarily concerned with how internal reality is constructed, and how symbols, narratives, and sensory inputs shape belief, identity, and ultimately behavior.
To influence perception is to influence reality.
Oh yea, I guess now is the moment to reveal that in the late 1980’s Michael Acquino was identified by a victim as the culprit behind allegations of widespread sexual abuse at the Army’s Child Development Centre at the presidio of San Francisco that resulted in a lawsuit from parents amounting to $60 million dollars worth of damages.
Make of all of this what you will. I’m not really sure why I thought about this fucking ghoul after ripping into Geese™ for an hour. I don’t know how we even got here.
Oh wait, yes I do.
It’s because all of this has reminded me of a basic fact of modern life:
The techniques used to shape mass perception in high-stakes contexts like genocide, politics, and state messaging now also quietly structure low-stakes experiences like discovering a mediocre indie rock band from Brooklyn™ or your new favourite brand of oat milk.
Or maybe I’m bringing your attention to this for one simple reason: in the hope that every time you think about the band Geese™, you also think about satanic, pedophilic Nazi war criminals.
Lol…hehe……
The mechanisms that determine what feels real, important, or culturally “happening” have converged across these domains, military, commercial, and cultural, and now operate through the same underlying logic of Perception Management™.
Perception Management™ is another concept originating from the U.S. military, a term that often operates as a euphemism for a dimension of information warfare. It is defined by the Department of Defense as:
“Actions to influence emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, as well as the intelligence systems and leaders at all levels, to influence official estimates, ultimately resulting in foreign behaviours and official actions favourable to the originator’s objectives. In various ways, perception management combines truth projection, operations security, cover and deception, and psychological operations.
‘Perception’ is defined as the process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret the input from their senses to give meaning and order to the world around them.”
It needs to be stated again that concepts like PSYOP and Perception Management are no longer tactics confined to military or political contexts. They have become a baseline condition of digital culture, where signals of importance, relevance, and consensus are continuously constructed, circulated, and recognised as real.
The techniques, tactics, and strategies employed by the Masters of War to justify a genocide or create context for an illegal invasion are the same as those used to persuade and convince you that you’re one of the first people to stumble upon Your Generation’s Bob Dylan™ on TikTok™.
Ultimately, what this points to is the plasticity of our desires, how easily they can be shaped, steered, and exploited. If this is how an abhorrent indie rock band from New York™ is being delivered to us, what else is being quietly arranged, surfaced, and made to feel inevitable?
In the 1920s, Edward Bernays described a world in which unseen actors shaped the environment of thought. Today, that environment is structured less by identifiable individuals than by algorithmic systems, which continuously sort and circulate signals of attention, defining, in practice, the limits of what can be perceived, recognized, and believed to matter.
But these systems are not neutral. They are fed, nudged, and exploited by those who understand their logic, PR firms, marketers, and coordinated networks that seed and amplify the very signals algorithms are designed to detect.
If Bernays’ “men we’ve never heard of” once shaped opinion from behind the scenes, they now route the signals that determine what is seen.
The question, then, is not whether influence exists, but how deeply it structures the reality we take for granted. If something as trivial as discovering a band unfolds within a managed field of perception, what else does?
The internet is, always has been, and always will be a weapon.
Now you should go listen to Bo Diddley’s Beach Party and drink some water. Four litres.
See, I did the opposite. Avoided Geese out of principle. The hype had that faint smell of pre-packaged importance, like someone had already decided I was meant to care.
Then I listened and realised I do actually like them, which is deeply annoying and has probably set my vinyl collection back emotionally.
Feels like that’s the messier truth. The machinery is real, no question. But it’s not total. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be standing here, a grown man, voluntarily buying a record I was primed to distrust.
Very embarrassing.
Trying to figure out which comment i should use as the basis for my opinion only this article