Does Anyone Like Music?
What happens when marketing is revealed to be marketing, plus gamelan-led dub techno, and more.
My college had this windowless room with a gamelan in it and nothing else. Once, my sophomore year, in an ethnomusicology class, we got to go in there and play it, which required a level of inter-class coordination and collaboration that we basically could not manage. That was not my first introduction to the gamelan, but every time I hear it, which is a lot, I think about how hard it was for me to wrap my head around the concept of the instrument. That does not seem to be a problem for the Russian producer Hoavi, who on Architectonics, his new album for the great Peak Oil, which uses gamelan and a near-obsessive commitment to percussion via contact mics to create a gorgeously organic dub techno album. When it comes to dub techno, it’s easy to assume that you’re going to hear something overtly synthetic—in fact, it’s often the point, but Architectonics is so overwhelmingly organic that it sounds completely unlike anything else out right now.
Speaking of gamelan! When I DJed at the Getty last week, multiple people came up to me to ask what I was playing at one specific point, and what I was playing was a track from Daniel Schmidt’s In My Arms, Many Flowers, a gorgeous American gamelan record made by a dude who was big in the Bay Area minimalism scene in the ’70s. The record, which pulls together some of Schmidt’s personal tape recordings from the era, was released ten years ago by Recital Program. In my weird little corner of music it was seismic—opening up new strains of inquiry and thought about what Western takes on Eastern instruments could sound like. When I first heard it, it connected so many dots, and began sounding not just like a fun record made by an academic music dude with a big beard, but source material for the ensuing decades of experimental-leaning music. But you don’t need to know any of that to appreciate this record. You don’t even need to know what a gamelan is!
Quick question: do you like the band Geese? Second question: did you know that part of the reason you saw so much Geese on your timeline, on TikTok, out in the world, was because a company called Chaotic Good Projects made sure you would see a lot of them, flooding the zone with interviews, clips, and people hyping them up? Third question: How does this make you feel about Geese? Do you still like them? Do you care at all? Are you mad? Ambivalent? Betrayed?
If this were a therapy session (maybe this can be a therapy session?), I’d tell you that your feelings—whatever they may be—are valid. It does not feel good to learn that something you thought you liked for pure reasons was actually manipulated in such a way to make you like it. But hold on a second…is that actually what happened, or is this just a situation where regular old sort of gross marketing blew past the defenses of a particular demographic group that often prides themselves on not being susceptible to marketing?
The latest discourse around Geese is not actually about Geese, and it’s not even about the tactics that Chaotic Good employed to keep Geese in the conversation. It’s actually about insecurity. Personal taste is not a stand-in for personality, but it is an essential part of building a personality—your favorite things start to feel like yours, even when you have no ownership over them at all.
Take the em dash, which is basically the Geese of punctuation: it’s a little confusing, unwieldy, there’s no real purpose for it. You could live without it, but when you start using it, it becomes part of your life. When LLM’s took it from us, we bristled because the em dash was IYKYK shorthand—a way for readers to understand that you were on a writing tear. That your words just floated, liquid, and so there was no time to end a sentence to begin a new one. The em dash can carry you over to the next thought without losing momentum.
I still love the em dash, I’ve used it five times in this newsletter already, and I’ll probably use it a bunch more before I’m done. Chat GPT can’t take the em dash from me, just like liking Geese didn’t take your authenticity from you. They just used tried and true marketing techniques in a slightly more modern way and were able to get enough ears and eyes on them to ascend from indie rock semi-popularity to, at least briefly, cultural ubiquity.
This should not change how you feel about Geese. It should not make you like them any more or less than you already do. If you aren’t part of the music industry, you don’t have to pretend you are (some of you are probably numbers people who “like” “math”, a position I admire but have no understanding of. If this is you, please ignore). Streaming numbers aren’t your problem, neither are sales. All you have to worry about is the music itself. If you feel “tricked” into liking Geese, then that says more about you than it says about Geese.
WIRED published an article that tracks this whole kerfuffle. They published it with the headline: THE FANFARE AROUND THE BAND GEESE ACTUALLY WAS A PSYOP
This is a misleading headline. It wasn’t a psyop at all, it was just regular music marketing, which has always been a little bit gross.
The piece, written by John Semley, features quotes from both Chaotic Good and the musician Eliza McLamb, who is the one who drew attention to the Geese and Chaotic Good arrangement in the first place. The WIRED headline makes it seem like an expose, but at the end there’s a quote from McLamb that pretty well outlines how to feel about it all:
For her part, McLamb says that these sorts of new, extremely online marketing campaigns are “no more or less nefarious than anything else that's been going on in the music business since the dawn of time.” Asked if she would ever consent to these sorts of trend-simulating marketing tactics promoting her own music, McLamb is unequivocal: “I would absolutely take part in a narrative or UGC campaign.”
So yeah. It’s no more or less nefarious than anything else in the music business, and she’d also take part in a similar thing. I get it. The music industry is a mess. There’s far too many artists competing for far too little attention. Wouldn’t you want to be heard too?
"That was not my first introduction to the gamelan, but every time I hear it, which is a lot..." lol
The em dash is going with me to the grave!