THE GEESE BACKLASH IS THE DUMBEST DISCOURSE OF 2026
LET’S TALK ABOUT WHAT YOU MAKE AND THE MARKETING YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND
The internet has already moved on. Some new outrage, some new villain, some new thing to scream about at 11 PM on a Monday. That’s how this works now. A story catches fire, the hot-takes pile up, the discourse eats itself, and by the time the dust settles everyone’s forgotten what they were mad about.
The Geese story wasn’t really about Geese. And the people who wrote about it while it was hot mostly missed what it was actually showing us.
Quick refresher for those who tuned out. Brooklyn rock band Geese released their fourth album Getting Killed in September. New Yorker called it the best record of 2025. SNL debut in January. Coachella last weekend. Meteoric rise, by any honest accounting. Then a WIRED piece revealed that a marketing firm called Chaotic Good Projects had been running TikTok campaigns for the band , networks of accounts seeding performance clips into algorithmic flows, a tactic the firm’s own co-founder calls “trend simulation.” Cue the pitchforks. Psy-op. Industry plant. Fraud.
For what it’s worth, Geese was being covered by Rolling Stone and the New York Times back in 2021, four years before Chaotic Good existed as a company. I first listened to them when a friend sent me 3D Country in 2023. I loved it. Hold onto that thought.
I’ll get some history out of the way quickly, because it matters but it isn’t the point.
Every band you love was marketed. Brian Epstein put The Beatles in matching suits, gave them the mop-tops, engineered three Ed Sullivan appearances instead of one because he understood compound exposure before the word “algorithm” existed. The Washington Post called his U.S. plan “Operation U.S.A.” , a months-long engineered campaign. Motown ran a literal finishing school where Maxine Powell drilled posture and diction into Marvin Gaye and The Supremes. Sub Pop flew a British journalist to Seattle in March 1989 to write about a scene that barely existed yet, months before Nirvana’s Bleach was even released, because Bruce Pavitt understood that British press would create American demand. Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust was a marketing construct announced as such.
The Beatles, incidentally, didn’t start with George Martin, the celebrated producer.
They started with a marketing guy.
I guess John Lennon was an industry plant.
The marketing was always there. You just couldn’t see it. What’s different in 2026 isn’t that marketing exists. It’s that the mechanism is visible. A firm openly says “we run pages and seed clips” and suddenly we treat it like a war crime. It’s shelf placement. Grocery stores have charged cereal brands for eye-level shelves forever. Nobody accused General Mills of running a psy-op on Cheerios.
Fine. That argument has been made, well, by half the music press. Read Consequence or Dazed or the A.V. Club if you want that essay. I want to talk about something nobody is saying.
THE GEESE BACKLASH WAS NEVER ABOUT MARKETING ETHICS.
Here’s what I noticed watching this cycle play out. Chaotic Good’s client list includes Dua Lipa, Justin Bieber, Coldplay, Tame Impala, Sombr, Alex Warren, Wet Leg, Dijon, Mk.gee, Oklou, Laufey. Dua Lipa has a marketing budget the size of a small country’s GDP and nobody is calling her a psy-op. Nobody is writing “Justin Bieber is an industry plant.” The entire weight of this discourse landed on one band. The rock band. The band whose genre contract, supposedly, includes authenticity.
That’s not marketing criticism. That’s genre policing. And underneath the genre policing is something uglier.
I’ve spent almost twenty years running a company in the music industry. I’ve watched this arc play out a hundred times. Somebody builds something real. They figure out how to get people to notice. The moment the noticing becomes visible , a magazine cover, a viral demo, a sponsorship , the community turns and calls them sellouts, plants, inauthentic. It’s lifeboat logic. Everyone’s convinced there’s only so much room, so the second someone climbs in, the others start looking for reasons to throw them back into the icy sea of artistic despair.
But here’s the part I’m only brave enough to say because I’ve lived it:
When you’re furious that another entity is successful, when you’re convinced they cheated, when you can’t stop picking apart how they did it , that fury is almost never about them. It’s about you.
I know this because I’ve felt it. Every successful founder has. You watch someone else’s thing take off and your brain, being a survival machine, immediately generates a story that protects your ego. They had rich parents. They knew someone. They hired an agency. They sold out. They got lucky. Anything, anything at all, that lets you avoid the harder question.
The harder question is: does anyone want what I’m making?
Not “should they want it.” Not “would they want it if they knew about me.” Does anyone actually want it? Have I made something people want to buy? Have I made music people want to listen to? Have I made anything that connects to a real human need or desire, or am I making something for myself and expecting the world to applaud?
Jack White has a line I love. He said, “Every band has a uniform, whether they want to admit it or not.” He was talking about stage clothes, but it’s bigger than that. Every creator has a uniform. Every company has a uniform. Every person putting work into the world is, like it or not, a product. The question isn’t whether you have a uniform. The question is whether you’re honest about the one you’re wearing.
Geese has a uniform. Cameron Winter has a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits mystery-in-plain-sight thing going on. The band reeks of Brooklyn. They have taste and a vibe. They’re the kind of band people can’t stop arguing about , their look, their sound, their lyrics, their guitar playing, their musicality. They feel like Dylan in 1965 and that feeling is the product. It’s contagious. This is the thing almost nobody wants to say out loud: the most famous musicians and artists of all time, without exception, had a uniform and a vibe and a cultivated aesthetic. Jagger. Bono. Cobain. Prince. Dylan. Every one of them was a character, carefully constructed, performed with commitment. Authenticity in music is almost always a specific kind of performance of authenticity. The artists who pretend otherwise are the ones doing the best marketing of all.
So when I see someone furious that Geese hired a marketing firm, what I actually see is someone who hasn’t reckoned with their own uniform. Someone who’s convinced themselves that their obscurity is integrity. Someone who wants millions of listeners but is making work for fifty. Someone using the vocabulary of ethics to avoid a conversation about craft.
I’m not saying every critic of Geese is a failed artist. I’m saying that when you feel the flinch , that hot little jolt of they cheated, that’s not fair, I could do that if I had their budget , it’s worth asking where the flinch is coming from. Because it’s almost always coming from a drawer you haven’t opened.
Here’s the part I’ve had to sit with myself, after two decades of JHS: you don’t have to sell your soul to be successful, but you do have to make something people want. Those aren’t the same thing, and the distinction matters. Go make your avant-garde record. Go build your niche brand. Go write the weird book nobody asked for. The world needs those things and some of them will find their audience eventually. But don’t get mad at Geese when they show up on SNL. The SNL slot is not proof that the system is rigged. It’s proof that they connected to an emotion that the world was feeling, and then someone helped the world find them.
If your work isn’t finding an audience, the uncomfortable truth is that one of two things is happening. Either you haven’t made something people want yet, or you’ve made something people want and you haven’t figured out how to get it in front of them. Both of those are your problems. Neither of them is Geese’s problem. Neither of them is Chaotic Good’s problem. Neither of them is the algorithm’s problem.
WHAT ACTUALLY MATTERS?
As much as the above is true, I believe that a deeper problem is being ignored here. I think we’ve collapsed two different words into one. Success and fame are not the same thing. We’ve forgotten that.
The internet has made fame so visible, so constant, so seemingly accessible that we’ve started treating it as the only legitimate version of having made it. Everything else feels like settling. But fame is a strange life. Most people who have it will tell you it’s lonelier and weirder than it looks. The crowd you imagine when you picture being famous isn’t actually there. What’s there is exhaustion, and strangers with opinions, and the slow erosion of a private self.
Wendell Berry has been writing for sixty years about a different idea. That a good life is local. That the work that matters most happens at the scale of a neighborhood, a congregation, a kitchen table. That the question isn’t how many people know your name but whether the people who do are better off because you exist. There’s a version of musical success almost nobody on the internet talks about anymore, and it’s the most common one in human history. You make music with your friends. You record your songs. You play the local bar on Friday and the church on Sunday and the festival in the park in July. You teach a kid down the street how to hold a guitar. You write something that gets sung at a wedding. You die having made beauty for the people who shared your life. That is success. That has always been success. Most musicians who have ever lived have lived exactly that life, and most of them were not unhappy about it.
If you have a normal job and you get to make music, you are doing the thing humans have been doing forever. You are not failing at being Geese. You are succeeding at being a human who makes music. Those are different goals, and the second one is older, and probably truer, and almost certainly happier.
So here’s where I land, now that the dust has settled.
The Geese backlash was a tell. It told us who in the current culture doesn’t understand how music has always worked. It told us who uses the vocabulary of ethics to avoid the conversation about craft. It told us that “authenticity” is a brand we reserve for the artists we personally discovered, and “industry plant” is what we call the ones we didn’t. It told us that genre policing and gatekeeping are still alive and well, and that the rock canon is the last place where we demand artists pretend they aren’t selling anything.
And it told us something about ourselves. When you feel the rage at someone else’s success, pause before you post. Ask whether you’re mad at them or mad at the gap between where they are and where you are. Ask whether you’ve made something people want yet. Ask whether you’re hiding behind the word authenticity because it’s easier than the word resonance. Ask whether you actually want what Geese has. You probably don’t.
When it comes to marketing, the machinery has always been there. The cereal was always paying for the shelf space. The only thing that’s changed is you can see the receipt. Read it. Put it down. Go make the thing that your making. No excuses.
Thanks Nick for the conversations that helped me land my thoughts on this moment. You have lived the concept of making things better than anyone I know. It’s an honor working with you.
If you enjoyed this, consider grabbing a copy of my new book Made On Earth For Rising Stars: The Story Of Electro-Harmonix. Every pre-sale matters. Pre-order at ehxbook.com. Also, my content here is always free, but if you subscribe with any payment, 100% goes to my local non-profit art center where we teach kids music and art for free. www.arthousegrandview.com
Josh, I expect many who read your excellent piece will focus on the recent kerfuffle involving Geese, choosing which team they are on as an identity marker: Pro Geese or Anti Geese. It seems to me this article is about something deeper—how we have come to view everything in these binary terms, passing judgment on things on the internet as if those things matter more than how we are living out our lives in the communities where we truly live. Thank you for sharing these important insights.
“That the question isn’t how many people know your name but whether the people who do are better off because you exist.”
Words to live by