Aida doubts reality: Are Geese only so successful because bots on the Internet convinced us of it? And have we collectively forgotten what Michael Jackson did again?
I still can’t get over the biggest music debate of the last two weeks – we have to talk about it again: Is the hype about Geese a PsyOp, i.e. a “psychological operation”, as the US magazine “Wired” wrote in an investigation? inspired by an essay by the musician Eliza McLamb? Do we only think the band is good because an agency called “Chaotic Good Projects” unleashed thousands of bots and fake fans on the Internet, populating the comment sections of videos and creating content themselves in which they celebrated the band? Are we really that easy to influence – and can virality really be that easily created artificially? Were the doubts about Geese and frontman Cameron Winter, the people who could never really understand the hype (I’m one of them, as you know), justified – and was the band nothing more than a bunch of Nepo babies and so-called “industry plants”, i.e. a hype artificially built up by the music industry?
Equal opportunities? Ha-Ha.
Of course, as always, it’s not that easy. Just because Chaotic Good Projects confidently claimed to have found the key to going viral in a podcast with Billboard journalist Kristin Robinson doesn’t mean it’s true. After all, the most important task of a marketing agency is to first and foremost sell itself. And we all tend to forget that “Getting Killed,” Geese’s dominating album from last year, was their fourth. Big indie labels had already courted her a few years ago; Partisan, also home to Idles and PJ Harvey, prevailed. However, the debate cannot simply be brushed aside, as some commentators do, because marketing campaigns have always existed and agencies are doing what they have always done – namely claiming without evidence that they can do everything. Because: The rumor is still circulating that the Internet gives all musicians the same opportunities to become superstars supposedly overnight. This narrative is less true today than ever before – and it almost doesn’t matter whether Chaotic Good Projects’ claims are true or not.
Of course, it has never been enough to simply be a musician. Anyone who starts today must also become a content creator, director and marketing specialist at the same time. Maybe then you have a chance – but probably not. Because while you can try to post perhaps a dozen videos and clips a day and respond to a hundred comments, an agency whose employees do this job full-time and partially automate such tasks with AI can have a much greater impact. But you have to be able to afford such an agency first. Who has access to such agencies and thus to these influence technologies is also a question of financial resources.
The same strategies as Trump and the Manosphere?
Are Geese and Cameron Winter, oklou, Mk.gee, Wet Leg and Dijon automatically bad musicians whose success is undeserved? Of course not. Almost all of these records were among my favorites last year – and after I attended Geese’s show in Berlin, they almost convinced me, despite my initial incomprehension. However, I am critical if such practices are now also becoming established in the indie sector. After all, this area often boasts of fairer treatment and better values - sometimes even with an explicitly political stance (Partisan also manages the musical legacy of musical legend and political activist Fela Kuti). Should we then really just accept that big indies finance and carry out such influence campaigns as you might expect from majors and their industry plants, as we know from the political campaigns of Trump, the Brexit supporters or the AfD and as Manosphere podcasters have perfected with their fans?
The meteoric rise of Manosphere loser Andrew Tate, for example, was based on the fact that he encouraged his fans and especially the paying participants in his scam online courses to distribute clips of his videos en masse via TikTok and Instagram – and thus artificially create virality. He achieved what Chaotic Good Projects only claims and distorted reality so much that he could claim great relevance as a niche online scammer.
Was that something?
With a small number of die-hard fans, you can also try not only to influence the discourse, but to completely turn it around – as we are currently seeing in the debate about the new Michael Jackson biopic and, above all, its conspicuous blank spaces. Colleagues who have published reviews of the film report insults and attacks. The frequent reports of sexual abuse? Whatever, it’s all fake. As if the documentary series “Leaving Neverland” never existed, as if the many victims who continue to appear today were all unbelievable, as if there were no doubts and no discourse.
Editorial recommendations
What is reality? Of course always a construction. But we are currently hurling ourselves into a world in which one can no longer be sure what is real and what is not, what is credible and what is not (and I haven’t even started on the fever dream we are currently witnessing with the debate about the whale in the Baltic Sea). “Everything is fake on the internet,” one can of course reply cynically. But do we have to accept it? Do we want a world in which we can no longer believe each other? At least not me. And I find Geese to be authentically lame.
