Forget Bad Bunny’s halftime show and the Drake lawsuit: if social media is any indication, this year’s biggest music controversy concerns Brooklyn rock band Geese.
Geese blew up last year, with their latest album Getting Killed earning rave reviews from Paste and Consequence of Sound before topping year-end best album lists by Stereogum and the New York Times. The furor recalled the days when bands getting a coveted 9.0 rating on Pitchfork felt like a musical event.
Even so, enthusiasm has been tempered by an intense backlash, with online commentators now dismissing Geese as industry plants, retreads, and hacks. The frenzy became so elevated that popular music YouTuber Anthony Fantano issued a call for the haters to chill out.
Most recently, a Wired article with the clickbait title “The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop” pointed to the band’s use of a media strategy firm to build online hype, feeding into the view that the entire phenomenon was fake.
Unlike the old days, when dissing bands was just a way of standing out from the musical in-crowd, contemporary discourse ups the ante. Rather than just say they don’t vibe with the group, many people have tried to suggest there’s something nefarious about a quartet of privileged rich kids who flirt with reactionary rock masculinity and run schemes to rise to the top.
Of course, it’s perfectly okay to dislike Geese, and it’s great to be critical of the music industry’s worst practices. But the episode reflects the flawed nature of contemporary cultural discourse — particularly the tendency to dress up vibes-based personal judgments as high-stakes political litmus tests.
Given how much the conversation seems to be about pouring cold water on a rock band managing to get people excited about music’s future once again, the lesson is simple: sometimes it’s okay to just like or dislike music.
Geese formed in 2016 while its members were still teenagers. While they had planned to…
Auteur: Jarek Paul Ervin
