Whether or not you have heard about the band Geese, something about their music and the message they represent needs to be appreciated in a way that people have not yet. Throughout their music, they navigate a relatively consistent theme of back-and-forth shifts between deep pools of authenticity and shallow puddles of simple messing around. Through that seesaw, Geese provides important lessons about how students in Gen Z can achieve something that seems to be fizzling away as profit incentives swallow more of what define pop culture industries: honesty.
Geese, which formed in 2016, has released three studio albums, with Getting Killed coming out most recently. What I find important about their music is how much it is a symptom and representation of how we, as a generation, view sincerity and irony. In other words, they represent a conflicted desire our generation has to be sincere. We want to be able to make serious art, to work toward real changes in the world, or to simply have honest and intimate relationships with people. The thing is, we grew up in a setting where these things have been abstracted. Art is utterly commercialized, big-issue advocacy in the U.S. feels futile to many, and our modern systems of communication continue to degrade our connection with others and ourselves.
Geese has something to say about all of these things because their sound, wildly different across their discography, perfectly encapsulates this impossible balancing act. In the band’s music, there’s an even more acute sense of “this is all about to collapse” than in Heavy Metal. They seem to struggle to stay sincere for too long about anything. This is stated almost explicitly in the last track, “St. Elmo:” “Some stories have a sad end / Some sad stories have no f***ing point… / Make believe I know the answers.”
They have this sort of absurd declaration of incapacity.
Think about culture. Way before anyone from Gen Z was born, media became the dominant form of cultural exchange — especially with movies and TV. It is part of a system that conditions us to act in accordance with a set of social regulations and norms. Our media doesn’t just give us arbitrary productions without any rhyme or reason. Leading industries are able to lead because they predict what productions will make companies the most money and go ahead with the best option. Our cultural spaces are saturated with people who are desperate not to innovate but simply try and show us what we want to see; that way, we have a reason to come back.
Media, as an entity, learned a while ago that the best way to satisfy that formula is to reproduce tried-and-true themes and messages that have already shown to generate huge profits. Generation to generation, media machines have had to pull new material from what’s current, which means every successive generation has a less authentic idea of rebelling presented to them than the one before. In the situation I propose, it’s a recursive process. The relationship between media and consumers is strange. It is more manufactured and inauthentic than its counterpart on the street.
Getting Killed is unhinged. It was tracked in ten days in Kenny Beats’ basement during this year’s Los Angeles wildfires. It’s frenetic and restless and about some sort of lofty spiritual death (“Here I come, here I come / Here I come, here I come / Here I come, here I come / Here I come, here I come …”). Winter wails like a lunatic, Max Bassin floods the backing of almost every track with haptic percussion, and Dominic DiGesu and Emily Green bounce to their bass and guitar riffs like crazed rabbits. Lyrics of songs like “Cobra” and “Half Real” meander like they’re really just saying words, but the internal momentum of the music is so strong that the album never misses a beat. There’s an optimism to be found here: Even without a narrative to follow or a purpose to all the disorder, they carry on. Self-assured, swaggering. They push for something real, authentic, even if it’s only a fragment. I think listening to this effort play out encourages people to follow suit in some way.
If our culture has been abstracted so much and people are feeling fatalistic about the world at large, why aren’t we completely nihilistic as a generation? Well, any broad conjecture on culture is only ever partially true. People can’t ever be grouped under blanket statements. Still, I think the phenomena I’ve talked about have had interesting effects. The clearest effect, I’d say, is our culture of irony. Though not unique to Gen Z, our irony suggests a wider skepticism and cynicism toward everything presented to us. We’ve developed a distrust toward institutions and other people, and we don’t necessarily like that fact. I think young people really do want to be able to express themselves sincerely, in good faith, but we’re inseparable from our humor. Geese’s music encapsulates this exact back and forth. Their music has powerful, genuine undercurrents, but their default is messing around. They could never let go of that whack heart because it’d strip them of their core identity.
