Psy-opportunity Knocks

The man who delivered copies of my last book to my house a couple of years ago looked at my name on the delivery note and informed me that the singer from The Doors had been a CIA plant. He also told me Paul McCartney was dead and The Beatles were part of a similar British government plot. “What was the posh, privately educated Brian Epstein doing working with them otherwise?” the man asked me. He told me about some websites I should look at. I nodded, not really listening, just pretending to listen, as he shared some other pop star conspiracy theories. I can’t remember who or what – Cliff Richard was a Mossad agent, Steps were Russian. I wonder what the delivery driver would have thought of the band Geese. They’ve been called psy ops recently. Maybe not government plants, but industry ones. The gist of what happened – or the geest of it – is the band’s management (the CIA presumably), or their record company (Putin), used artificial marketing means to make the band’s crossover to the mainstream happen slightly ahead of their time slot.

If this is going to be the norm from now on, it’s going to ruin things for us smug early adopters. And let’s face it, I was a Geese fan before anyone else. I liked playing Cameron Winter’s solo stuff to people and feeling superior because they didn’t like his weird old voice like I did, or his bizarre lyrics that sounded made up on the spot. I thought I’d get at least a couple more albums worth of that smugness before the rest of the world joined in. I guess geese (this isn’t deliberate) will skip straight ahead to mass popularity now. They’re already playing ironic Justin Bieber covers and going out with other famous pop stars on Instagram.

I wonder how my former favourite band (because I can’t like them now that everybody else does) will handle their premature bigtime. Will their next album be full of arena ready singalongs? Will they ‘bring out’ Dave Grohl and Sabrina Carpenter at the Grammys? Or perhaps they’ll shun the shit out of their popularity by filling their songs with ever more daft time signatures and unconventional tunings, like that band with the polka dots costumes and the unfinished Devo songs, who I hate to break it to you, will fairly soon remove their masks and reveal themselves to be Ant and Dec. Show business is stupid.

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