About a decade ago or so, it was made effectively illegal to be a white guy with a guitar and a feeling, to smoke American Spirits and explain “Astral Weeks” to a woman who didn’t ask. Which, fair enough: Van Morrison isn’t that good, and mansplaining is, of course, bad. But a revolution always devours its children. We killed the last man who still said “authenticity” and “real instruments” unironically, found muttering outside Pitchfork’s headquarters, clutching a bootleg of “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” like a religious relic. He promised these songs would last forever and then they didn’t. We had to kill him. But his corpse kept talking. Yes, about “Astral Weeks.” It all feels so ghostly now.
In 2004, New York Times music critic Kelefa Sanneh coined “poptimism” and called out “rockists” for “obsessing over old-fashioned stand alone geniuses.” At heart, this was a prophylactic against humiliation. Attempting to make peace with the suspicion that nothing we could make would bear the weight of the greats, he urged us to “stop pretending serious rock songs will last forever, as if anything could.” First we embraced smallness: “lo-fi,” “whisper pop,” “bare,” “bedroom,” “Billie Eilish.” Then, unavoidably, came the exhibionist despair of the confessional economy: easter eggs, pseudo-emotional events, “sincerity.”
Like every creed, the poptimist posture eventually collapsed into its own tired formula. By the 2020s, the chic minimalism of lowered expectations left criticism starved for grandeur. We’re perpetually hunting for the next saint to anoint, but when yet another candidate is devoured by the hype cycle, we act surprised. This time, it’s Geese. Late last year, frontman Cameron Winter released his solo debut “Heavy Metal,” instantly becoming a minor cult favorite. As of publishing, “Getting Killed,” the band’s latest album, has been out for barely a month — just long enough to attract every imaginable label in the ouroboros of music journalism: genre-defying, America’s most thrilling young rock band, industry plants, overrated, “why can’t they write a fucking melody?” (Fair.)
The skepticism is familiar and the marketing preordained, but any verdict about Geese, flattering or dismissive, misses the point. The old binaries of good/bad and authentic/fake don’t make for good criticism. The debate over whether Geese is Great in the old, capitalized sense is both irrelevant and inherited from the mess of poptimist music criticism and the reaction to it. “Getting Killed” isn’t committed to any aesthetic stance as much as to the performance of conviction itself. That’s what sets them apart: the will to make something great with full awareness of the futility of trying. Winter, meanwhile, seems convinced that you just need to keep shouting.
The vocal performance of “Getting Killed” is sustained through sheer insistence. Getting Killed opens with “Trinidad,” beginning with hysteria. For nearly a minute, Winter screams that “THERE’S A BOMB IN (HIS) CAR.” The repetition isn’t cathartic. There’s compulsiveness in a gesture that tests whether a belief can survive its own parody. The lyrics spiral into apocalyptic fragments — “my son is in bed, my daughters are dead” — yet the violence feels internal, civic, modern. “Trinidad” wants an integrity it knows it cannot have, so the track stages it as spectacle. This, perhaps, is Winter’s wager: what matters is not being sincere but the relentless insistence of it.
“Cobra” and “100 Horses” translate that restlessness into grotesque devotion. “Baby, let me wash your feet forever,” Winter pleads, before conceding, “we have danced for far too long / and now I must change completely.” The attempt to catch revelation in real time rather than polish it later feels, in “Getting Killed,” like an autopsy. That same impulse turns bodily and the song offers itself up. It bleeds and scrubs itself clean. Winter has to write faster than he can doubt himself. He already knows it’s cliché.
Springsteen canonized escape-by-motion (“Born to Run”) and Dylan’s “arrival as a site of becoming” is standard lore. The album’s closing track “Long Island City (Here I come)” doesn’t quite sound like either. “Long Island City” isn’t arrival. If desiring greatness is to court ridicule, to mark oneself as naïve, masculine, obsolete — then desiring greatness is Winter’s operating principle. If they are watching, let them. He says, “A masterpiece belongs to the dead / There are microphones under your bed / And there’s footage that will prove us both wrong.” And then: “Oh Charles, tell me about the end / You were there the day music died / And I’ll be there the day it dies again.” Several deaths are one: the end of the ‘50s, the expiration of rock’s cultural centrality. He volunteers for the reenactment. “Getting Killed” is that reenactment: God forgets his own friends, Charlemagne is stuck on a midnight bus, Joshua’s trumpet becomes a street taunt. Winter’s saints ride the M train. Invoke the sacred, accept it won’t save you, keep it coming anyway.
Wanting something is to want it past the point of satisfaction. To want it knowing you’ll never get enough or getting it at all and wanting it anyway. Criticism following the rise of “poptimism” spent the past two decades indoctrinating us to distrust that impulse. The virtue of restraint made everything minimal: the songs, the ambitions, the expectations. Desire, in that sense, is the last honest way of knowing anything. Desire is stupid, embarrassing, insatiable, and therefore incorruptible. Desire keeps rotting in the open air, insisting that there must be more. Everything ends in exhaustion but this. This is why Geese succeed: they refuse the ascetic bargain. They want too much. They make a mess of it.
The streaming era promises insufficiency. At the end of the day, every album is data and so on and so forth. And maybe it’s true that a masterpiece belongs to the dead. Maybe we’ll never be great again. Maybe we’ll collapse in the attempt. But there is nothing righteous in learning to love art that insists it’s enough. “Getting Killed” might not be the greatest, and Geese might not be the next whatever, but they are ravenous.
