Soundtrack for a Coup d'Etat (2024)
The Cradle Will Rock (1999)
Tom O'Neil, CHAOS: Charles Manson, the CIA and the Secret History of the 60s (2019)
Grant McPhee, https://thevelvetundergroundmyth.com
Geese, Getting Killed (2025)
"The Fanfare Around the Band Geese Actually Was a Psyop" (WIRED, April 14, 2026)
Negativland, True/False (2019)
I.
In the 1999 movie The Cradle Will Rock, based on the historical events regarding the staging of the musical The Cradle Will Rock not the 1937 musical itself, John Cusack plays Nelson Rockefeller who commissions Diego Rivera (played by Ruben Blades) to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center. The mural, "Man at the Crossroads," would eventually be destroyed due to the fact that Rivera decided to depict Lenin in the mural, as a counterbalance to Abraham Lincoln. Once this was discovered the New York World Telegram published an article labeling the mural as anti-capitalist propaganda. Rockefeller eventually had the mural destroyed and replaced by another mural American Progress, which remains on the west wall of Rockefeller Center's lobby. As Phillip E. Wegner writes in his essay, "The Ends of Culture or Late Modernism Redux" regarding the depiction of Rivera's mural's destruction at the end of the film:
"The destruction of Rivera’s mural literally erases the artist’s attempted ‘appropriation’ of this space, reasserting the private nature of this apparently public domain. Even more provocatively, the film shows the destruction of the mural transforming it into something else altogether…. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the whole appears to have been transformed into something not unlike Jackson Pollock’s postwar abstract expressionist paintings. In the film, abstract expressionism quite literally comes to occupy the place held by Rivera’s ‘representational’ work'.” (251-252)
In another scene, Rockefeller, speaking with Mussolini's envoy played by Susan Sarandon, can be seen hanging a painting above his mantle, which appears to be far more abstract than the mural Rivera has been painting in the lobby of Rockefeller Center (I haven't been able to identify the painting but, given the fact that Mussolini's envoy has been gifting various artworks to the wealthy industrialists she's been in contact with while in the U.S., it appears to be an example of Italian futurism). This only underscores the point that Wegner makes above: the powerful, moneyed interests will no longer allow representative art to be hung in public spaces for fear that such realistic messages might penetrate the consciousness of the public and lead, as the great Philip Baker Hall fears throughout the film, real revolution.
This suggestion, which is hinted at strongly though never explicitly mentioned in the film, was new to me when I first saw the film in 1999. Soon, however, it became an almost shibboleth within the academic world I found myself in to take as fact that post-war American painting, and to a greater extent post-war American culture, was supported and disseminated through the power and largess of the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as wealthy men like Rockefeller: https://www.artforum.com/features/abstract-expressionism-weapon-of-the-cold-war-214234/
This story is well documented and, as I stated above, is accepted as canonical history within academia: abstract expressionism is a weapon the CIA used to silence impulses of political artists who would use realism to depict the United States as it actually is. In other words, you could happily hang a Rothko in a corporate office without anyone being unnerved by what it was depicting. It would be easy enough to shame the average viewer into thinking they "didn't get it" and thus educating them into an eventual appreciation, than dealing with the message socialist art would clearly communicate to the masses.
The film Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat tells a contemporaneous story regarding how the "jazz ambassadors," most famously represented by Louis Armstrong, were used by the CIA to provide cover for the United States' coup of the first democratically elected leader of the former Belgian Congo. The jazz ambassadors, featuring musicians such as Dizzy Gillespie, Nina Simone and Dave Brubeck was a program the state department had set up in the early 1950s to promote American culture to a wider audience while simultaneously demonstrating that racism, while a real phenomenon in the U.S., took a back seat to the larger, celebratory, cultural impact black artists had made and continued to make.
Though the film shows that Gillespie and Armstrong vehemently opposed what the CIA and the state department were doing in the Congo once they found out, it tells a similar story to The Cradle Will Rock insofar as it depicts how involved the U.S. government was in the production and dissemination of post-war American culture. Moreover, no matter much the artists in question might have distanced themselves from the aims of the state department in featuring their art, there is a residual taint to these art forms having been so entwined with the Cold War ideology and its real life political violence. Most of the musicians involved in the ambassador program, unless they forcefully broke from that particular ideology like Nina Simone (who was openly calling for violent revolution by the end of the following decade), were left behind as jazz moved into the 1960s (Armstrong and Gillespie especially).
You could make the argument that the state department, Central Intelligence Agency and the United States imperialist ideology decided to be less overt in the following decades. Museum boards and cultural ambassadors were too forward facing to be effective covert weapons in shaping the hearts and minds of both United States citizens as well as those around the world who appreciated American culture. Thus, when "uncovering" the covert influence of the government upon cultural products, writers and cultural critics have had to rely on speculation and conspiracy to find connections between governmental control and mass culture. Additionally, as the culture became the counter-culture, one which was often in direct opposition to the explicit aims of the United States' government (most explicitly exhibited in the opposition to the Vietnam War, but also evident in the civil rights and, especially, post-civil rights discussion of racism), it becomes far more difficult to ascertain what is potentially directed from above and what genuinely grows out of unrest from below.
Nothing makes this more manifest than the obsession surrounding Charles Manson and the Sharon Tate murder. Tom O'Neil's book traces Manson's connections to the music industry in the late 1960s (specifically his relationship to Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, producer Terry Melcher and promoter Gregg Jakobson), Manson and his followers' frequent visits to the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical clinic, which was overseen by CIA informant Louis Jollyjon "Jolly" West, as well as the suggestion that Manson, who was often treated with leniency by authorities after being arrested many times, was a CIA informant himself. Or, as my friend Josh said after reading the book, "Manson was a psyop that went right, or a psyop that went wrong."
However, the lack of concrete connections that might flesh out Manson's story, illuminates further odd aspects of the west coast counter culture that only adds to the conspiracy: the following passages posted by Jared Smith from his blog the Wax Museum in 2025 sums up many of the connections
"Some researchers push the theory even further, suggesting the rock stars themselves may have been willing — or unwitting — participants in a larger PSYOP. The military and intelligence connections are almost endless.
The 'spontaneous' Laurel Canyon scene took root in 1965, the same year the Gulf of Tonkin incident — based on dubious intelligence — escalated the Vietnam War. Commanding U.S. Naval forces that fateful night was Admiral George Stephen Morrison, father of The Doors’ Jim Morrison. While one Morrison ignited a war, the other scored its soundtrack.
Frank Zappa’s story is just as curious. His father, Francis Zappa, was a top chemical weapons specialist at the Army’s Edgewood Arsenal, a facility tied to both chemical warfare research and MKULTRA mind control experiments.
Zappa’s manager, Herb Cohen, a former Marine, was among the first to arrive in Laurel Canyon. In 1961, Cohen was in the Congo at the exact time Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba was tortured and killed in a CIA-backed coup — a moment when the agency was sending jazz musicians overseas as cultural cover.
Stephen Stills, one of the Canyon’s earliest stars, grew up in El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Panama while his father worked on covert U.S. operations. These countries, perhaps not coincidentally, were all sites of American-backed coups during that era. John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas had his own proximity to power, attending the Naval Academy before winding up in Havana at the height of the Cuban Revolution. Jackson Browne entered the world on a U.S. military base in postwar Germany while his father worked for the OSS, the forerunner to the CIA.
The deeper you dig, the more the lines blur between the counterculture’s leading voices and the very power structures they appeared to oppose."
All of this begs the question to what end was the government involving itself in the counterculture of the 1960s. The answer echoes the argument The Cradle Will Rock and Artforum make with regard to the art world during the Cold War:
"The early anti-war movement was disciplined and deeply political. But when psychedelics flooded the streets, protests turned into festivals and organizing was replaced by flower power and personal liberation. The CIA later admitted to helping spread LSD through various channels. Rock stars became the new spiritual leaders, and the revolution lost focus."
The explicit political motivation of the anti-war/anti-imperialist movement that could be found in, say, the folk music revival of the early 1960s gave way to the more abstract, psychedelic movement of the late 1960s. Devoid of any concrete political aims, and supplied with all the psychedelics the hippies would need, the "peace and love" generation would generally avoid being a real political threat to the hegemonic order, until it was eventually brought to a cataclysmic end by Manson and the family.
II.
Regardless of how rooted in reality these narratives are, there's an undeniable similarity to these stories: an artistic movement with political leanings (painting, jazz, rock music) is co-opted by the government (state department, CIA, etc) for its own nefarious ends, selling that artistic movement back to its unsuspecting fans as a weaponized extension of hegemonic power. The difference in each of these examples is that whereas both painting and jazz have concrete examples of how these art forms were manipulated by actual government and government adjacent organizations, the story of 1960s rock being a psychological operation is filled with hazy conjecture and tenuous connections. The larger narrative which encompasses the counter-culture and music of the late 1960s lays out the ways in which artistic expressions of "freedom" adhere to an already established narrative in the West that artistic freedom is only something that can be achieved under a free, democratic capitalist society. Abstract expressionism is only something that can become a significant art movement if the government abstains from dictating which artistic movements are acceptable and which aren't. Jazz is an art form from a minority community that can only be allowed to flourish in a free society that recognizes the significance of that art form as such, Jim Crow laws notwithstanding. As the Prague Spring in 1968 demonstrated to the world, the counterculture of youth can only be safely practiced in a free democratic society, again, Kent State aside.
Yet, with the last example, we see a shift in how the psychological operation is defined: no one would argue that abstract art or jazz was invented by the CIA or the state department, yet, in the narrative stipulated by the Wax Museum blog post and repeated elsewhere, would any of the shifts found in music and culture in the late 60s have taken place without the participation of the military or the CIA? You could argue that psychedelic music pre-dates the Doors, Haight Ashbury, Laurel Canyon and Frank Zappa, but the Brits have their own version of this conspiracy, the Tavistock Institute. This institute, founded in 1947 and tasked with the study of group psychology, has been accused of "inventing" the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd as examples of a larger conspiracy which by "'means of rock music and drugs" encourages society "to rebel against the status quo, thus undermining and eventually destroying the family unit'. In the 1940s and 50s the groups attempting to hijack extant cultural forms can be named. By the 1960s these forces shaping culture hide in the shadows, manipulating the culture and counterculture by secret organizations overseen by nameless people who can only be discovered going down rabbit holes.
I think the end game of this type of thinking is evidenced by the "controversy" surrounding the band Geese. I will say upfront that I like the band Geese, that I enjoy their most recent record Getting Killed, that I find opening your record with a song in which the lead singer keeps shouting "there's a bomb in my car!" is funny and entertaining (while also being provocative and annoying at the same time), that the second song on the album, "Cobra," demonstrates that they can write decent songs and that their live show, as evidenced by the very good Coachella set I watched with my daughter this past weekend, is solid. Has all of this been determined by a start up company named Chaotic Good, which, in multiple interviews, explained the methods by which they have pushed Geese songs onto social media platforms? Maybe. I'm both old and jaded enough to know that we are shaped by things far beyond our acknowledgment (I am not a subject outside of ideology), while also realizing that if everything is simply PR than the ability of PR to actually do what people pay PR to do is as effective as ultimately doing nothing. Also, I've listened to enough music to develop individual taste so that there have been countless "good" bands shoved down my throat for which I have zero interest.
It's the final point that those who view all of what gets "passed off" as culture as a long-running "psy op" would take issue with: to what extent is your taste your own? How much of your taste has been shaped by forces beyond your control? You can always fall back on the argument that you know what you like, but, in the last sixty plus years your "taste" has been heavily inundated with propaganda whipped up by men in lab coats who work for the CIA, state department, McKinsey, big capital, multi-national corporations and now, in the age of Artificial Intelligence, machines. What I'm fascinated by is how this discourse moved from "this band is an industry plant," a term that suggests, not without a long history of such things, that a band has connections to money and or someone within the recording industry, to "this band is a psychological operation" suggesting something much more sinister with the goal of mind control and manipulation.
The endgame of this argument is well represented by two blogs, one of which I discovered after the Geese article in WIRED broke and the other I have known about for a little while. Tony Price, presciently, published a blog post on April 5th (nine days before the WIRED story was published) loudly stating "YOU DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE THE BAND 'GEESE'(TM)." The piece doesn't actually begin with a discussion of the band Geese but of "the Sixties" in general and the band the Velvet Underground in particular. Much like the history mapped out in the first part of this essay, Price is sure that "'the Sixties(TM)'" [sic]:
"The common cultural narratives about 'the Sixties (TM)' that have been drilled into our skulls tells a story of a generation animated by a revolutionary impulse, a kaleidoscopic cornucopia of cultural offerings that propped up a paisley-patterned facade whose surfaces were littered with spray painted messages about hope, idealism and unification.
The Sixties (TM) can be read as an index of mythologies: a laminated catalogue of icons, slogans, martyrs and spectacles."
Interestingly, Price echoes the message of fellow sixties "psy op" Frank Zappa's famous LP We're Only In It for the Money which, as I've been hearing since the re-discovery of that record since the late 1980s, parodied the Beatles' Sgt. Peppers and "skewered" the peace and love bullshit from the Height-Ashbury crowd. As the Library of Congress, an institution which bestowed We're Only in It for the Money the honor of being added to the "National Registry" of recorded music in 2005 (during George W. Bush's presidency) explains: in the original liner notes to the album Frank Zappa encouraged everyone to read Franz Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony" while listening to the record. You see, we, the people indulging in the spectacle of the 1960s are "in the penal colony"--one assumes the same "penal colony" constructed by his dad and manager as part of their grand "psy op."
Price in his blog post relates all of this to Zappa's great enemies, no not the hippies, but those other anti-hippy noiseniks "'the Velvet Underground (TM)'"[sic]:
"When it comes to music, no band from the Sixties (TM) has been so over-mythologized as the Velvet Underground (TM). From the moment I first encountered it, that Banana (TM) [a reference to the famous "banana cover" created by Andy Warhol, who would greatly appreciate Price's continued use of the trade mark symbol] consistently told me that, so long as I kept it near me, I could consider myself Cool (TM)."
It is here that Price refers to Grant McPhee's 23 (!!!) part series on "The Velvet Underground Myth 1963-December 1967." I'll let Grant describe his important work:
"Around four years ago I woke early with nagging thought that seemed to come from nowhere. Surely the Velvet Underground were far more popular in their own time than we've been led to believe? A quick bit of research confirmed it: they were far more popular than the myth suggests."
You can read the twenty three part investigation for yourself to determine if, in McPhee's words, "this is huge." The basic conclusion is that the myth of the Velvet Underground started around the same time that Lou Reed's solo career was taking off and MGM reissued the first three VU albums as well as issued the Live 1969 album. There's probably a grain of truth to all of it, but it seems truly bizarre to me that a) you'd wake up one morning with the "nagging feeling" that the VU was more popular than you'd been led to believe and b) spend this much time trying to prove that although the Velvet Underground weren't that popular they weren't as unpopular as people think they were at the time. And that all of this is based around an offhand quote that Brian Eno gave sometime in the early 1980s. It's nice to have no other pressing issues in your life.
But this is where Price's current discussion of Geese comes in: if the Velvet Underground, the ultimate example of a "cool band," is the product of some marketing executive in 1974, then how can we trust that any band that anyone says is cool IS actually cool and not made to seem cool to you or I, the humble, average, music listener? And while we can discern the greatness of the Velvet Underground from just listening to their records versus, say, the records Geese has put out over the course of their short career, what happens when 'the system" becomes so all encompassing that they are telling you that Geese are the new Velvet Underground because of how cool they are. Which leads Price to the conclusion that "EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE" and, therefore, every band you've discovered on the internet is fake too. Of course, this has shifted from a conversation about music and the quality of music to a conversation about the internet, who controls the internet, who controls the conduits by which music is streamed on the internet, etc. All very good and important conversations to have but discussions that have nothing to do with the music itself. Or so those who are in control would like me to believe. See where we end up? As the source of music becomes more opaque and, potentially, less human, the conspiracy that you like what you like because of things shaped beyond your acknowledgment becomes darker and all encompassing while simultaneously becoming more legible through the technology we encounter every day of our lives. In this process a bunch of "nepo babies" become the immaterial conduit by which psychological operations bombard us in every micro transaction we partake in throughout our days. Geese aren't merely attractive white people with industry connections who release music, they are the machine by which we are controlled day in and day out.
III.
The most important LP released in the last ten years is Negativland's True/False from 2019. Many think pieces have been written regarding the paucity of "protest music" in Trump's America, suggesting that as politics went from bad to worse, as they did at the end of the 1960s and 1970s respectively, music, setting itself up as something oppositional to those politics, would get better. Yet, popular music in the last ten years hasn't exactly been oppositional neither in message nor in sound. There are exceptions, of course, but many of those have come from older artists who are more established, often already committed to being oppositional figures within the culture (Neil Young, A Tribe Called Quest, Bruce Springsteen). Younger musicians have tended to remain mostly apolitical, with little interest in making music that sounds in opposition to dominant music within their particular genre. The one glaring exception to this rule is, unfortunately, Ye [Kanye] West who has made music and fashion in opposition to the mainstream of popular culture by adopting the aesthetics and symbology of National Socialism. I suspect that the arguments made by Price and others above are precisely why music has neither been overtly political nor oppositional the last decade: it's not that the musicians pushed by the internet are psy opps or industry plants, it's that, with dwindling resources available in the creation or art and music, a band can't afford to be labeled as political or oppositional. As we have experienced over and over again, it would be a relief to believe that artists are plants for brands to sell their goods online, we could suss out the authentic from the inauthentic, rather artists themselves have realized that certain things in opposition to dominant culture hinder the slight possibility a band or musician might become more successful.
The entire ecosystem by which we consume media, whether it is real or unreal, true or false, is the main concern of Negativland's True/False. It's also been the main concern of the collective known as Negativland for almost fifty years. Back in the 1980s, Negativland participated in the earliest forms of hacking and jamming mainstream audio and video culture. They understood how to manipulate the media in an analogue age: on their 1987 album Escape From Noise they recorded a song called "Christianity is Stupid," created a fake press release stating that the song inspired the mass murderer David Bron to kill his entire family, and then subsequently recorded an album, Helter Stupid, which parodied the various news outlets that ran the press release unverified. A few years after that the band released an EP entitled U2, which sampled the band U2 as well as Cassey Kassem. They were sued by Island records and eventually in turn sued by their own label SST and the EP was withdrawn. They then spent several years documenting the ordeal as a way to discuss the insanity of copyright law, arguing for reforms in the U.S. Copyright Act. Negativland has always been a band that uses samples, radio transmission, press releases and other methods to parody and call out the media. In that sense, True/False isn't that different from their other releases. However, the context has changed.
In one sense, True/False is very much in conversation with the idea that the culture you consume is created and disseminated by forces controlled by capital and power. A voice (most of the "lyrics" are samples from all over the place) on the third track says "We'll manufacture, uh, a whole smorgasbord, of these events for the same purpose, so that our, are linking us up on the same, inner dynamics, yearnings, and needs on a deep psychological level." This certainly sounds like the manufactured monoculture railed against in Price's piece. But, as evidenced from the title of the album, the bigger question that Negativland are tackling has to do with the framework through that which we discern as "true" and "false" on an epistemological level, not uncovering that which is true and false. On the first track of the album, appropriately titled "Either/Or" a voice says: "And already you are separated into two camps. And you are on the point of fighting over absolutely non-existent differences." The engine which manufactures and names these differences is social media and the internet more broadly: this reaches an apex with "Fourth of July," a piece of music about the digital warriors fighting an imaginary civil war online. A completely deranged individual spends most of the track complaining about how people ineffectively post online, describing her own commitment to fighting the cultural as well as not yet real wars by posting all day long. Eventually, towards the end of the piece, she exasperatedly shouts: "You either believe in what you're posting or you don't!"
"Fourth of July" eerily predicts what political discourse and, more broadly, life felt like during COVID and lockdown: incapable of leaving our homes for a period of time, everything related to our social lives took place almost exclusively online: shopping, learning, political engagement as well as conspiracy theorizing was mediated entirely by our relationship to the internet. Of course, the track "Fourth of July" already anticipates the bigger problem with living through this mediation: the suspicion that everything you are experiencing through social media posts, YouTube clips, video podcasts, etc is potentially a lie or is potentially the truth and that which is outside of that domain is a lie. To paraphrase Arti Aster's great Eddington (a movie very much in conversation with this whole piece): "Your being, manipulated."
The whole album concludes with the title track, a type of manifesto for the whole project. After a fanfare of horns, a woman's voice softly intones the words "true or false" before being replaced by another, less human voice repeating the same phrases over and over again:
"If I say to you this statement is false, let's just think about this statement for a minute, if this statement is true, then, this statement is true. And, if I say this statement is false, then, this statement is false. Let's just think about this statement for a minute: if this statement true, then, this statement is false. And, if this statement is false, then, this statement is true. And we get into a loop which goes on forever."
The statement itself, the content of what we might be able to discern as either true or false is never given, we are simply told over and over again that a statement is true when it is false and, conversely, a statement is false when it is true, eventually the voice concluding that there are statements which can neither be proved or disproved. The loop the voice keeps mentioning is eventually made manifest in the music with a catchy little rhythmic loop that turns into one of the more dance-like things the band has done. Eventually another voice emerges from the music loop and repeated "true/false" voice:
"Conclusions? Whatever people want is true even if it isn't. How can you make a statement saying something is true even if it isn't? Who can say it isn't? Who can say what is? Feelings are facts. So who is to say what's a fact? There is no reality. There is no absolute. There's no objectivity. There's no right and wrong. There's no basis to criticize anybody. There's only people's arbitrary desires."
Negativland's point on this track is not to argue that something you believed to be true (you like the band Geese, the Velvet Underground were an underground band) is actually false (you don't actually like the band Geese, the Velvet Underground was more popular than you think) but that the very framework of uncovering the truth is part of a larger, cyclical process by which you cannot determine which of those statements are true or false. In the examples offered at the beginning of this essay (the jazz ambassadors, the state department's involvement in the elevation of abstract expressionism) the act of uncovering complicates our understanding of jazz and post-war art respectively, but it doesn't invalidate the idea that jazz and post-war art would exist independent of government involvement and manipulation. Price in his blog post explicitly states that "EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE" thus understanding that the medium by which such things may be uncovered has manipulated your being to the extent that anything you may encounter on it could be both true and false at the same time. And we get into a loop, etc.
This is how Geese go from being industry plants, nepo babies, friends with other famous people, music critic darlings, etc basically all of the criticisms I've heard about (especially indie) bands my whole life to Geese is a psychological operation. Your enjoyment of the band Geese is part of psychological manipulation at the hands of those in power to get you to listen to them and agree to their genius. Asking to what end does this psychological operation known as project Geese exist is asking the wrong question (takes long drag of a cigarette), the praise of the band Geese is the end itself. We can make you think anything we'd like you to think by hyping it on the internet, through its multifaceted tendrils reaching out across social media. However, through the lens of true/false and True False, who's to say to what extent the truth uncovered by the great Geese PSYOP isn't the PSYOP itself: the continued erosion of belief and trust in one's own senses to enjoy music, literature, movies, art, theater all of the creative acts that make life worth living. Isn't it much more fun to scroll through articles telling you that it's all fake than to engage with the art you would be engaging in were it not already assumed to be fake?
