{"id":431251,"date":"2026-01-26T18:41:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T18:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/431251\/"},"modified":"2026-01-26T18:41:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-26T18:41:10","slug":"everyone-who-hated-geeses-snl-performance-needs-to-chill-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/431251\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyone who hated Geese\u2019s SNL performance needs to chill out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ashlee Simpson, Fear, DJ Khaled, Lana Del Rey, and\u2026 Geese?!? Yes, you read that right: social media\u2019s elder-millennial and Gen-X contingent would have you believe that Geese\u2019s SNL appearance on Saturday night is now one of the worst in the show\u2019s 51-year history. In a recent email forwarded to me, music critic Bob Lefsetz wrote that \u201cdespite all the hosannas in the press, the word [about Geese] does not seem to be spreading.\u201d Look, Geese have over 2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, sold out their recent US tour, and got invited to perform on one of the oldest network television shows still going. Maybe it doesn\u2019t matter what the rock rags are saying about these four New Yorkers, but it\u2019s not like Geese is some obscure underground band. They don\u2019t need an SNL cast member stumping for them like John Belushi did for Fear in 1981 (though somebody in the writer\u2019s room is responsible for pitching James Austin Johnson\u2019s Cameron Winter impression<\/a> last month). It\u2019s OK to acknowledge that the hype exists, even if you\u2019re not opening your wallet to it anytime soon. <\/p>\n

But the cranks just don\u2019t dig the kids. SNL subreddits clocked Geese for being a \u201cgod-awful,\u201d \u201castroturfed band\u201d performing songs off Lou Reed and Metallica\u2019s Lulu album. Yikes. One user even claimed that they would \u201cgenuinely rather listen to AI music with royalties that go to diddy\u2019s defense team\u201d than spend even a second with Getting Killed. Double yikes. @rychkid on X wrote, \u201cSo, Geese is about the worst band I\u2019ve ever seen on #SNL, and I\u2019ve been watching since 1977.\u201d If he\u2019s telling the truth (he\u2019s probably not), then that means he tuned in on October 21, 1978 when Frank Zappa hosted the show and got himself banned. Maybe @rychkid was waving his fist in disapproval when Elvis Costello started playing \u201cRadio, Radio,\u201d or started clutching a rosary when Sinead O\u2019Connor ripped up the photo of Pope John Paul II. He must have called in sick when Mk.gee came by the show in 2024. Sure, Fear tore apart the SNL studio when they played, but at least the show was somewhat game to do some weirdo shit back then. One of the coolest moments in the show\u2019s history was when Harry Dean Stanton and the Replacements got drunk before the show went to air and proceeded to get even drunker as the night went on. Every time I imagine a 4-foot-11 Lorne Michaels fuming over that, my cheeks get sore from grinning. <\/p>\n

The funniest part about all of this is that Geese didn\u2019t do anything crazy on SNL. But the discourse around their two songs (\u201cTrinidad\u201d and \u201cAu Pays du Cocaine\u201d) would have you convinced that they held all of Studio 8H at gunpoint and made everyone in the audience watch the ending of Marley & Me, or something. Of course, if you\u2019ve only heard of Geese but have never actually listened to their music, their performance of \u201cAu Pays du Cocaine\u201d may not have been the most convincing introduction. But SNL is infamously a terrible venue for live music. Dijon was able to mostly bypass<\/a> the studio\u2019s awful sound quality late last year, but the only \u201call-time great\u201d musical performance in the 2020s is still Jack White\u2019s last-minute appearance<\/a> during COVID. By the time Geese got around to \u201cTrinidad\u201d as the clock flirted with 1 a.m., they\u2019d found a groove\u2014and by \u201cgroove,\u201d I mean a furious ear-bursting seance of bedeviled rock music. But outlandishness abounds, and the taste of Geese remains an acquired one. <\/p>\n

This Geese hate, well that\u2019s a tale older than Geese and older than the people dismissing them\u2014because every generation is mortified by the musicians that come from the next. It\u2019s the ultimate age-gap disconnection, a humiliation ritual passed down through ancestry like a hereditary condition. Luckily Paste bought into Geese\u2019s stock a long time ago: we named them the Best of What\u2019s Next<\/a> in 2021, wrote a cover story<\/a> on them in 2023, and, just last summer, gave their album Getting Killed a rare perfect score<\/a>. Personally, I think they\u2019re making art that rises up to the cultural moment that people in their twenties are experiencing right now. Will Geese actually save rock and roll? Maybe not yours, but somebody\u2019s. After all, in 20, maybe 30 years, those are the people that will be deciding whether or not Geese are, in fact, one of the all-time great bands. That\u2019s how this shit works, right? The people with boots on the ground get to peel the back off the label. 50 years ago a bunch of writers said that Hendrix was the greatest guitarist of all time and now we\u2019re all like, yeah, Hendrix is the greatest guitarist of all time.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very possible that Geese doesn\u2019t end up being one of the best bands ever. But nobody\u2019s saying that they\u2019re the Beatles, nor should they. They\u2019re just Geese. Love them or hate them, it\u2019s pretty cool that a couple of twenty-somethings got invited to perform on network television and chose to play \u201cTrinidad,\u201d a truly batshit song where Cameron Winter yells \u201cthere\u2019s a bomb in my car\u201d over and over. Remember when Phoebe Bridgers tried smashing her guitar on stage<\/a> during SNL and middle-aged men lost their minds over it? We go through this shit every couple of years: older people (mostly guys, let\u2019s be real here) can\u2019t fathom a younger artist even existing, let alone playing a song on a TV broadcast. Ageism is a terrible, terrible drug of paranoia that\u2019ll have people convinced that Geese makes music in a completely different language. I implore anybody reading this to fix your heart and listen to \u201cCobra.\u201d Art is supposed to pass you by. It\u2019s a good thing to feel out of touch.<\/p>\n

But, then again, SNL is pretty awful programming, so I don\u2019t know what cultural sway it even has in 2026. It\u2019s probably not a lot. The showrunners can\u2019t even be fucked to produce any meaningful criticism of Donald Trump or what\u2019s happening with ICE in this country right now. So maybe Geese playing SNL isn\u2019t that big of a deal, but it\u2019s not like they got caught lip-syncing, smoked a blunt on stage, or ripped the studio apart. All they did was yell \u201cthere\u2019s a bomb in my car\u201d on live television and actually sound halfway decent on one of the worst soundstages in network television. If you don\u2019t like Geese, I implore you to step back and ask yourself, \u201cDo I hate this music because it\u2019s actually bad, or do I hate this music because I\u2019m not a part of its target demographic?\u201d No matter the answer, I think you should chill out. Some folks think cilantro tastes like soap. It\u2019s just rock and roll, man. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ashlee Simpson, Fear, DJ Khaled, Lana Del Rey, and\u2026 Geese?!? Yes, you read that right: social media\u2019s elder-millennial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[236,88],"class_list":["post-431251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=431251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}