Besides, practically everyone with internet access has weighed in on this already; the best thing written about it is probably the blog post that started the whole conversation at the end of last month, by the singer/songwriter Eliza McLamb, who was really writing about the attention economy and the struggle to game that economy enough to ensure your survival while still remaining present in your life and your art, the daily effort of engaging with what is real while still making the cobras dance.

The subsequent Geese-psyop story became a discourse grenade because unlike McLamb’s post it uses the sexy/scary word “psyop” and also because we’re in a global and culturewide crisis of meaning, in which manufactured realities exert pressure on the real world and we’re being manipulated more constantly and efficiently by social media than ever before while also being more conscious than we’ve ever been of that manipulation as it’s taking place. Our ability to perceive any event accurately is under attack, and this is reshaping all our lives so profoundly and so quickly that the comparatively simple idea of Geese being an industry plant is on some level psychically soothing, because the idea that rock-band popularity can be sockpuppetted is a ponderably-sized symptom of an imponderably large problem, something we can get our hands around as we attempt to process what’s really an existential earthquake and then go back to work.

For what it’s worth, the question of how (and sometimes whether or not) to function and persevere in a world where the real seems to have been terminally compromised by the fake is one that’s addressed repeatedly on a 2025 album called Getting Killed by the New York City rock band Geese, on which Cameron Winter’s narrators can’t stop hurling themselves against the bars of exactly the cage we’re talking about. There are also at least a few lines seemingly concerned with the fate of the artist in the attention economy: “I can’t even hear myself talk/I’m trying to talk over everybody in the world.”

Geese did not mention this week’s news cycle from the stage at Coachella because can you imagine how dorky that would have been? Nobody paid $3,000 bucks to hear Cameron Winter have a conversation with the Internet. Instead, as the word GEESE flashed big and bold behind them—more insidious subliminal marketing—they came out and dropped the hammer on “2122,” complete with ack-ack-gun wah-wah pedaling by guitarist Emily Green and a fishtailing spin through the Stooges’ “TV Eye” in the middle in place of last week’s viral cover of Bieber’s “Baby.”

The rest of the set—eight more songs, peaking when the sun came level with the stage and Cameron muttered “Oh, shit, it is bright in the Gobi Tent” before going into “Pays Du Cocaine,” culminating in a sped-up kick-out-the-jams “Husbands” outro aimed directly at a pit that had spontaneously opened as if on cue—was a reminder that a) Geese are a fantastic live band, even if we live in a world where that’s no longer enough on its own, and that b) Getting Killed lifted them further than 2023’s 3D Country because it’s a more dynamic record on which an expert mix by a hip-hop producer ensured that the peak moments of each song landed hard, like an EDM drop. The Coachella crowd went off like the Sports Bar Goes Wild meme for the “You’re gonna have to nail me down” part of “Taxes,” and from what I could see through my YouTube window they all looked like real people to me. And Cameron Winter’s hair looked really good in the sunset glow of the desert of the real.

Geese Coachella Weekend 2 set list: “2122”—>”TV Eye”—>”2122″; “100 Horses”; “Cobra”; “Cowboy Nudes”; “Crusades”; “Bow Down”; “Au Pays Du Cocaine”; “Taxes”; “Trinidad”