To me, this is just confirmation.
Because I have had this conversation a hundred times. How did this band get so big. Why are they everywhere. Is this real.
And I get it. Why.. Cause I live in both these worlds..
I have been in music. I have toured. I have sat in studios. I have worked in marketing at a high level. I have watched things catch fire organically, and I have watched things get lit on purpose.
Here is the truth nobody wants to admit.
This is not new.
There is this romantic idea that the best bands just happen. That they crawl out of basements untouched by strategy and the world simply discovers them.
That is almost never true.
Take The Velvet Underground. One of the most important bands of all time and one of my favorites. A band that shaped entire genres. That made other musicians believe they could make music too.
Now ask yourself this honestly.
Would we even know who they were without Andy Warhol.
Without the imagery, the positioning, the co sign, the scene building. That’s amazing marketing.
There is a very real version of history where those songs exist and nobody hears them.
Here is where I land as someone who lives in both worlds.
Marketing cannot make a bad band great. But it can make a great band impossible to ignore.
That is the difference.
What Chaotic Good did with Geese is not some dark manipulation of culture. It is just a modern version of what has always existed except now it runs through TikTok instead of magazines, zines, or downtown art scenes.
And yeah it will not work for everyone.
Because you still need the thing underneath.
The reason Geese breaks through is not because of TikTok.
It is because when you get there there is actually something there.
To me they sound like a collision of everything I have ever loved about New York bands. The disorientation and art damage of The Velvet Underground. The jagged precision of Television. The effortless cool and chaos of The Strokes.
They do not behave the way you want them to. They do not sing the way producers spent decades trying to train singers to sing. They are funny in interviews, detached, almost like they do not care if you get it.
And that is exactly why people argue about them.
I have had friends tell me they cannot stand them. A producer friend told me I spent years trying to get people to sing with the band and this guy sounds like he does not even want to.
And I love that.
Because that tension, that friction, is the whole point.
That is what made bands like this matter in the first place.
At shows they will jump from Leonard Cohen to Primal Scream to New Radicals to Justin Bieber.
That is not random.
That is taste.
That is a band that understands the full spectrum of music not just where they are supposed to sit inside of it.
So the question is not did marketing help Geese.
Of course it did.
The real question is did marketing bring you something worth your time.
Because when it does that is when marketing works.
That is when it is not manipulation. That is when it is discovery.
I see the good and the bad of marketing every single day.
I have seen it prop up things that do not deserve it. And I have seen it shine a light on things that absolutely do.
To me Geese and even Cameron Winter’s solo work fall into that second category.
They can back it up.
So market to me all you want.
Just make sure when I get there there is something real waiting.
