Righteous rantige from two from the Chart Music pod squad. One still with us, the other speaking from the hereafter.
In The Guardian, Simon Price argues that "Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history"
Good point about the reductive idea of working classness wielded by those fans who accuse naysayers of being snobs:
"Oasis have been presented as the true voice of the council estates from the very start of their career. But what of their less stereotypical, but equally working class, 1990s contemporaries? Don’t they count? No band was more aware of class politics than Sheffield’s Pulp, for example, but Pulp were arty and sang about outsiderdom and dressed like Oxfam dandies instead of Arndale Centre townies, so they’re considered somehow less “real” than their Mancunian peers. Meanwhile, the Manic Street Preachers are as working class as they come, but refused to conform to lads-lads-lads cliches, played with androgyny and homoeroticism, and wore their (state) education on their leopard print sleeves."
Sharp too on how the failings of the music might ultimately be decisive, more so than the retrograde attitudes of Noel and especially Liam....
"We’re all familiar with the concept of separating the art from the artist, though everyone’s mileage varies on where to set the line in the sand. But the art needs to at least be good. Oasis, memorably described by the late great Neil Kulkarni as the “English Rock Defence League”, offer nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans. Lyrically, too, they’re dismal... dull platitudes that might as well have been written by AI. But the problem is the music. Oasis don’t do fast songs. Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager. Is there anything more useless than a rock band that doesn’t rock?"
"I guess we'd still be making good albums. And just doing the fuckin' same thing on loop. I hate all these cunts that try to reinvent the wheel, 'oh we need to go jazz fusion', with rap and all that. Fuck off - get Faces down your neck, Pistols - just do that on loop. It's great. Why you want to fucking change it? Bit of fucking lager thrown in, and a couple of spliffs and that, and a couple of cheeky ones and that. Fuckin' great!"
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I have softened slightly towards Oasis, at least compared with back in the day when I wrote real-time diatribes as caustic as Price and Kulkarni.
Liam is an empty-headed arse, but whenever I read an interview with Noel, or see him in a doc (like the Hipgnosis one recently) I can't help warming to him: he's funny, acerbic, sharp within his delimited range.
The thing that gets me about Noel G - about Oasis as a whole - is that they are so uninterested.
Not uninteresting. Uninterested. They appear to have zero interest in anything outside of an extremely circumscribed area. Musically, obviously. But in all ways and all things.
A long time ago, I read a piece where Noel was talking about his favorite book - the book that was always by his bedside. Revolution In the Head: the Ian Macdonald book that goes song by song through the Beatles career, using a variety of prisms layered on top of each other... musicological, key changes and scales and chords; what happened in the studio with the production and engineering and experimenting with technology; lyrical inspirations; individual biographic arcs; internal band politics and emotional conflicts; the nitty gritty of collaboration and who contributed what; social and cultural and political contexts; external artistic influences and inputs. Not every song can support that level of exegesis, there are trifles and throwaways. But the entries on "A Day In the Life" or "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Revolution" or "I Am the Walrus" are probing panoramas, gyrating around the song and its creators from every conceivable angle.
I was quite impressed that Noel loved the book. Ian Macdonald was a serious intellectual, a polymath, and Revolution is a rich, dense read. The opening essay on the 1960s and what they meant is a definitive take.
But then I thought: Noel's reading this book, picking it up again and again, rereading the entries on his favorite songs.... it's like a Bible to him.
Reading it, doesn't he ever feel.... ashamed?
Ashamed of his own incuriosity, compared to his idols. Who, as the book amply demonstrates, checked out and explored and experimented with just about everything that was happening and that was in vogue in the Sixties - musique concrete, Indian classical music, Eastern spirituality, the latest trends in visual art, cinema (I just picked up Revolution In The Head and there's a bit where McCartney has the gall to play his little art movies to Antonioni, in town to film Blow Up!).
Not that I've read every, or even many, interviews with Oasis but I've never seen an indication they are interested in anything at all apart from music - and even then only an extremely narrow furrow of canonical rock-as-it's-supposed-to-be. The loop-the-loop stuff that Liam refers to in the video above.
In that sense, they are a steep decline even from The Stone Roses, who did have interests in art and politics (and in music beyond the straight-white-line of the Brit canon), who were widely read and liked to argue about serious things.
Oasis are the Beatles - if the Beatles were just about the tunes and nothing else at all.
Except the tunes aren't as good or as differently, variedly good - there's nothing as odd and unsettled as "She Said She Said" .. nothing that approaches the vertical (an Ian McDonald term - Lennon's tunes are horizontal) melodic grace of Paul McCartney.
Oasis are the Beatles - if they were all Ringo, then.
Except none of them are as open-minded as Ringo, who gamely contributed to the most experimental things the Beatles did, and usually rose to the occasion and then some - like the drum track to "Tomorrow Never Knows" or his playing on "Rain", or "Strawberry Fields Forever"... or the steal-your-breath beat on "Come Together"…
And that analogy falls down even further when you realise Oasis have never had a drummer as good as Ringo either. They've never shown any interest in rhythmic invention; the drums are always buried deep in the soundmush, subordinated, menial… seemingly with no function beyond marking time. There are drums on these records only because rock bands have drummers in them.
Oasis are the Beatles if none them were Ringo even.
For all their limitations, they have about four or five great songs that nail one feeling exactly, the invincibility of youth. "Live Forever"...
"Champagne Supernova" is the One for me. I couldn't help falling for that one even as I wrote a disapproving piece on Oasis and Blur for The New York Times, around the time of Morning Glory and The Great Escape).
On some visit to England many years later, when I'd been sent to do a story so I was staying in some fairly central hotel, I was woken by the sound of a drunken bloke hollering the chorus to himself as he staggered along the street below Yes, I thought: it's a song purpose-built for those times you are so so wrecked and you feel like no one else in the entire world is having this much fun. A song for people who say things like "we are such fuckin' legends" .... as they engage in the standard excesses... the stuff that people do each and every weekend... that are being replicated all over the country at that very moment.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Rock counterfactuals:
#1. After "Setting Sun" - freakbeat reinvented for the '90s, the most exciting thing Noel G ever participated in, contributing some decent lyrics too - he decides that Oasis are tame, lame stuff and joins up with the Chemical Brothers permanently and they form a rave'n'roll supergroop, scoring #1 after #1 and changing the whole direction of post-Britpop rock.
(What would the supergroop be called?)
#2. In our reality, luvdup Hacienda-regular Noel is enthused enough to make a few stabs at acid house. But the tracks come to naught and he gives up and goes back to the Rock Trinity of Verities: Tunes, Attitude and Guitars. (While keeping some sort of remnant of the mass uplift and druggy togetherness - Oasis concerts as raves for the technophobic, Knebworth as Tribal Gathering without the diversity, conservative rather than future-facing).
But what if the acieeed attempt went well? If he'd found some suitable accomplices and went down the 808 State path?
( Another counterfactual is the one in which Shane MacGowan, similarly Shoomed-up, manages to persuade the rest of the Pogues to do a 20 minute acid house track called "Get Yourself Connected". In this reality, Shane badgered them to do it - “it sounds great when you’re on E” - but they weren't having it.)
42 comments:
People seething about Oasis is becoming something of genre. "Show me where the Gallagher brothers touched you."
I've always been neutral to mildly positive about Oasis - they were a 7/10 band who occasionally hit 8/10 - but I'm starting to warm to them purely because of the ludicrous rage they inspire. It's probably the most entertaining thing about them.
It's a fact known by absolutely everyone that anyone who avows a dislike of Oasis, or indeed any form of disregard towards Oasis, secretly adores Definitely Maybe, and is just too wussy and invested in their attempt at a discordant opinion to admit the truth.
Don't try to deny it. You know I'm right.
Since the reunion seems right now to only be a series of gigs, I wonder if Oasis are themselves worried that they haven't escaped the curse of Oasis' post-imperial phase, that of producing solidly average work that gets downmarked because everyone remembers the earlier golden stuff, and an attempt at a new album may reveal that tragedy to be true. I hope they have escaped it, but I'm a realist.
One other thing that's strange about the Oasis "discourse" is this idea that they have been uniquely, perniciously, influential. However, if you listen to the formulaic, autotuned pap that fills the current year charts (or what passes for the charts) it is clear that Oasis have precisely 0% influence on contemporary popular music.
Popular music nowadays is highly diverse, forward looking, technologically sophisticated, ruthlessly quotidian, and contemptuous of all tradition. And it's still shit.
It's hardly a new genre is it? People were saying these things in the '90s, they were just drowned out by the mass sycophancy.
If anything, these anti-Oasis voices are having their own kind of reunion, an anti-Britpop revival.
Yes, you can't see any trace of Oasis in current pop music. It's a quarter century on since their dominance faded. People are really talking about the effect on the '90s and to an extent the overspill with things like "landfill indie".
What a silly argument - people love Oasis but out of perversity, pretend not to?
I couldn't even tell you what the tracks are on Definitely Maybe.
I believe the ideal phrase at this juncture is "chinny reckon".
You find it ridiculous that, in the realm of music fandom, people might be disingenuous regarding their tastes? As if they're falsely claiming to love or despise a particular band for reasons of fashion? Next thing you know, people will start claiming that they preferred certain bands before they got big.
Less facetiously, it strikes me that the anti-Oasis arguments are almost uniformly intellectualised ones: their lyrics are nonsense, their music isn't varied, they're liked by drunks in pubs, etc. The pro-Oasis arguments seem to me based firmly on Oasis' emotional appeal: strong melodies and slogans which, when they work, inspire a taking-on-the-world sense of bliss, confidence and belonging. To dismiss these as cheap sentiments is, again, an intellectualised dismissal (Recall Sontag's Against Interpretation).
Perhaps a more trustworthy argument an individual can make against Oasis would be to say that Oasis doesn't spark much emotion in them. But I don't hear many people making such an argument, and instead just decrying Noel and Liam as oiks.
(By the by, the current analyses focusing on the Gallaghers' working-class appeal are pursuits down a blind alley. Oasis' appeal at their peak transcended class, and their indie contemporaries sang about the class system far more. Indeed, at the time they were seen as exemplars of 90s Britain as a classless society. That critics in 2024 are invoking Oasis' working-class origins is a symptom of the recent reassertion of class in 21st century Britain.)
All of this is so spot on, thanks for sharing. FWIW, though I think their music is so dull it usually doesn't warrant the column inches, their best songs are wonderful
(typo) *Their best songs are Wonderwall
one problem with your comment styloo mate is the creeping conformism, another is its browbeating tone. if anyone says they don’t like Oasis they must be hiding, because there’s just one true way, saying Oasis is great. in the face of indubitable truth any contrary claim can only be made perversely. and you *know* because you live in truth, so you can ferret out all these “wussy”, and fake, divergents. yes, only a moral failing (cowardice) would explain not living in self-evident truth. also an inquisitional logic: denial is an avowal of guilt, denying you like them is admitting you like them, (‘admit it, you know I’m right’). attitude and bullying tactic of self-convinced boors the world over.
Good thing we weren't talking about the Happy Mondays.
Ooh I dunno, I think people are pretty emotional about their Oasis antipathies - look at Neil Kulkarni, you couldn't find a more passion-driven writer on the music press, and he got pretty hot under the collar in that clip from Chart Show podcast even a couple of decades after the fact. Just because someone's articulate and can reason out their arguments doesn't mean it's not rooted in visceral reactions.
And wot you on about, Oasis-discourse has been structured in class terms from the start. What was the whole Blur versus Oasis thing about? Or the Yob Rock versus Romo thing I reposted a few days ago? 1996, and you have the anti-lad brigade saying this is a reductive idea of working classness (they could point to Bryan + Brian of Roxy Music, son of a coal miner and a postman respectively, or Japan, working class boys from South London, sons of rat catcher and butchers). And then you have the pro-ladrock contingent saying this is real voice of the streets and you are just a bunch of poncy snobs.
Okay, permit me nuance. Oasis has always struck their fans in the gut and not the cerebral cortex. As such, no supporter has ever felt the need to delineate why they like Oasis, and that's why Oasis fell from their peak: not because the anti-Oasis brigade persuaded them via sophistry, but because the songs lost the magic.
And I take your point somewhat about the class aspects during Oasis' pomp. But firstly, it is telling that Oasis didn't write songs about class, unlike Blur and Pulp (mind, Oasis didn't care about lyrical semantics). And Yob Rock vs. Romo? That would hold more significance if Orlando managed to get beyond no. 86 in the charts. In any case, there was the 90s claim that the success of Noel and Liam, along with others (e.g., David Beckham), demonstrated that Britain was moving beyond class structures: Cool Britannia. So I'd say I have some justification in saying the current narrative emphasising Oasis' working class credentials is partially the hindsight of 2024 and the damned resurgence of the class system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQEagpAROho Reminded of this, Matt Lucas and David Walliams parodying Blur. Dated a little, but the end of the song still makes me chuckle.
At the risk of blundering uninvited into someone else's argument, I have to recommend Carl Wilson's fantastic book about taste in music: how and why we like what we like, how far we can trust our own responses, how social context shapes our opinions, and so on.
The original version was a 33 1/3 book: 'Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste'
https://a.co/d/hSdYeCB
That's the version I read, which is brilliant. There was also a later expanded version, titled 'Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste'.
https://a.co/d/9zDJx75
I am not sure how much extra you get from the additional material, but I think any readers of this blog would enjoy it in either version.
You can read a sample here: https://read.amazon.com/kp/embed?asin=B00IOO8Z8I&preview=newtab&linkCode=kpe&ref_=kip_embed_taf_preview_PG7NH85EAP108BY7D5EZ
To an extent I defend Oasis for the same reason I would defend Benny Hill or the Carry On films - I can see the limitations of the thing being denigrated, but I find the denigrators themselves even more offensive.
The impulse isn't so much anti-working class snobbery, but a kind of revulsion towards anything that has a sentimental mass appeal. It's the impulse that John Carey famously delineated in "The Intellectuals and The Masses." There's a definite envy running through the hatred of Oasis - how a pair of people so resolutely ordinary, so apparently verbally inarticulate, can hold the masses in sway. Just think what you could do if you had their magical social power.....
I think that's true, but I'm not against criticism of Oasis for either real or perceived staidness, but rather the kind of weird libidinal energy that so often accompanies it. It's obvious that Oasis or whoever the target is are really just stand-ins for the real object of animus, which is the broad mass of the public.
I like that Carey book - it's bracing to have such a forceful argument to the contrary of a lot of where your sympathies generally lie.
He has a point about the snobbery of artistic and literary elites. But his counter proposal is a bit philistine - that literature should be about ordinary life and ordinary people, written in language that an ordinary person could understand. So he praises Arnold Bennett for his realism, sniffs at Joyce and DH Lawrence and Woolf.
To put that in Beatles terms, Carey's argument would allow for "Penny Lane" but not "Strawberry Fields Forever", its flipside.
One of the great things about pop music is that things that are avant and weird actually get to be not just tolerated but enjoyed by people who normally avoid that kind of thing - or perhaps simply not come into contact with that kind of thing.
A Beatles example would be "I Am the Walrus". Which Oasis covered. They love it, because it's the Beatles. But they would never do anything equivalent themselves, anything that mad or that (for its time) lyrically abrasive and grotesque and confrontational. And whatever the equivalent of "Walrus" might have been in the '90s, they'd reflexively have scoffed at, said it was arty wank.
"Classlessness" was a central myth / dream of the 1960s, based on a bunch of simultaneous things: the way that the Beatles won respect and affection from all kind of people who would normally sniff at pop; working class figures becoming Zeitgeisty stars and public figures - David Bailey, Twiggy, Terence Stamp etc; conversely upper class people getting involved in pop culture, Marianne Faithfull, people like Blackill the managers of Pink Floyd etc.
You have the adoption of that odd classless droning accent that e.g. Mick Jagger had. Whereas before that people in showbiz and entertainment all spoke with a kind of well-spoken, faux-posh voice.
(One of the Beatles's innovations was that they didn't nice up their voices, they spoke in their own accents, in this informal, drawling, sarcastic tone)
So the "classlessness" of Cool Britannia is part of its knowing replay of the 1960s - England swings again. Everyone likes the same music. Barriers collapse.
Even more than classlessness, an even bigger myth of the Nineties was that of multiculturalism. I was surprised to find out that during the Nineties, the ethnic minority population of the UK only amounted to about 5 to 7% of the population of a whole. When you consider that that small proportion could be divided into four or five major groups, then the size of any one ethnic minority group was tiny. And even *that* relied on classifying a group such as "Muslims" as a single minority, which they very obviously aren't,
So in reality Britain was a largely monoethnic country that had basically memed itself into believing that it was a multicultural one. This is why race politics in Britain have always been so mental, as there has always been a generalised belief that it is more diverse than in actuality. If at the time you mistakenly believed that Britain was a genuinely diverse multicultural society (which even I did at the time) then it becomes easier to see Oasis as a sort of reactionary outlier. a hankering for when Britain was still largely white. But in reality, it really was still largely white. And indeed it still is now.
It's a really interesting book - especially the stuff about Celine Dion's background, Quebec culture etc.
The core ideas come from Bourdieu's work on taste and class - how aesthetic distinctions are indexed to class definition, which is always against another class.
But he's writing about high culture versus popular culture, bourgeois fans of classical music versus fans of variete and pop slop. Once you move within the domain of pop culture and popular music itself, things get really complicated, really quickly. By 1967 you already have the recreation of the high / low split within pop / rock, with Dylan-Beatles-etc as the new internal-to-rock high and bubblegum / dancable R&B / soppy ballads as the low.
By this point the whole field of popular culture is so finely, complexly differentiated, it's hard to transpose the high / low schema onto it in any clearcut way. Say you were drawn to the 'snob', elitist positioning of self - you have about 19 different ways you could to do that. Extreme metal, drill, weirdo internet hyperpop shit, folkie indie.... What conditions the path that any given hipster or would-be outsider / noncomformists go? You'd have to accept that there are other reasons why people get into a particular form of obscurity or underground-ness.... positive attractions and affinities, rather than merely negative, "I'm not like everybody else" reasons. At which point the whole the edifice of Bourdieu gets quite shaky. Because it's clearly not the case that the sole reason, the supposed real underlying reason, behind taste is simply dis-identification with the mass or or identification with it.
Today, the whole field of taste and popular / semi-popular / unpopular music is a chaos - what's highbrow to some is middlebrow to others... for every lowbrow sound there's someone slumming or adopting the contrarian view that it's actually better / more advanced than the purportedly arty or experimental thing over there. The movement of cultural capital is as quicksilver and provisional as the world of finance capital.
Yes I was researching something a while back and I was surprised by how relatively small a proportion of the population was of Caribbean descent. From the music I was obsessively into I'd come away with the idea that it was bigger - because it was so culturally prominent for me but also just generally in music.
And most of that is concentrated in London and a few other cities.
(Nowadays I think people of Jamaican etc descent are significantly outnumbered by African descent people - and the whole class vector there is quite different, as can be see by the composition of the upper echelons of the Conservative Party).
And yes when you go out to non-metropolitan England, like say to a wedding in Herefordshire, it is surprisingly how white the population is.
Responding to the Bourdieu comment (the replies seem to sort themselves randomly when I press publish) and the hyper-differentiation of popular taste, I think (off the top of my head) there are probably three main criteria for liking (or "liking") any particular artist. The first is because you actively enjoy listening to them, the second is because they help you define yourself, and the third is that they garner social approval. These can all overlap in various ways, of course.
If you are working within the media, or moving within a competitive peer group generally, the third criterion becomes more important. If, say, you are in adolescence and still trying to define yourself, then the second becomes more important, relatively.
I agree with your three factors, but might put a different emphasis on their salience at different phases of life. When you are an adolescent, you often want to like the same music as other people, to fit in with a peer group and to help you communicate with friends and romantic partners. Then as an adult, particularly if you are trying to make a name for yourself as a professional or amateur critic, you want more individual taste to help you differentiate yourself from the herd.
“It's obvious that Oasis or whoever the target is are really just stand-ins for the real object of animus, which is the broad mass of the public.” I think that’s right, but I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think it’s perfectly fine to have an animus against the broad mass of the public. Particularly if - for reasons of race, sexuality, gender presentation, culture, values or whatever - the broad mass of the public has an animus against you.
To put it another way, two impulses are absolutely fundamental to human nature: the urge to assert one’s individuality, and the urge to belong to a group. Different people feel those impulses to different degrees in different contexts. I find it hard to accept claims that any particular balance of those urges is superior to any other.
Great analogy. As Karl and Friedrich put it: “All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
"I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think it’s perfectly fine to have an animus against the broad mass of the public. Particularly if - for reasons of race, sexuality, gender presentation, culture, values or whatever - the broad mass of the public has an animus against you."
Yes, point taken.
Did anyone here get to read Barbara Ellen's Observer piece from yesterday? Interested to hear your views on it. Some impressively put points and I guess it kinda put Pricey back in his box a bit!?
https://www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/aug/31/oasis-britpop-band-reunion
Have never got round to reading the Carl Wilson book but will make a point of it now. Good points as well above on the mix freely 'classlessness' in the sixties culture. Funny how this doesn't really get pointed out much in a lot of the music writing about that decade. Majority of listeners and viewers probably tend never to really pause much to consider that Terrence / Ray Davis / Marianne ... all might have had completely different background, in terms of class upbringings. Didn't Mick deliberately try to sound more working class whereas Keith strived to be posher?
The recent interview Noel G gave to John Robb in the record shop is quite entertaining to be fair and he has a point about the complete unlikelihood in 1993 of that group of individuals becoming as huge as they did. And that's where even the most passionate detractors have to really grant some sort of credit. An Inspiral Carpets roadie who was already into his late 20s, and all that. For the good or the bad it took balls really (and a little talent) to achieve that mega hugeness.
Plodding is one of the popular words for the Nowaysisers -- I saw them just the once, in the Astoria a few weeks before the first album came out and they were plodding but I did feel the excitement of the momentum in those initial weeks at least. Despite all the amazing jungle / electronica / avant rock coming out in 94 it was still a thrill to hear 'Columbia', 'Live Forever, 'Slide Away' played loud in my dank Cricklewood bedsit. Of course it quickly turned to dust and the grey dull sonic plod took over.
Also, are people forgetting that they existed as working touring band from 1998 to 2009 without producing one memorable track? Four forgettable albums of dullard dadrock, but barely a mention of them anywhere the last week. It's the age of FOMO that's causing all these mad Ticketmaster feeding frenzies since the early 2010s. All about getting to 'the Event' nowadays and to hell with the actual content of what's on the stage. Lash out 200 quid on a concert you won't really end up enjoying that much but you have to be able to say you went and post all the pics to prove. At least old Liam is right about that in the clip above.
Re. the aspiration for classlessness in 90s Britain, there is a central figure in that mission, glossed over if you only look at the sixties' revival in the nineties: Thatcher. If the classlessness of the sixties stemmed from, for example, increased educational opportunities, then the classlessness of the eighties stemmed (obviously) from increased moneymaking opportunities. (it's worth noting that Creation Records began because Alan McGee signed up to the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, which led McGee to later bewail that Creation was a Thatcherite creation). This drive for entrepreneurship, though much has justifiably been made of ambitious working class types raking it in, there was also a major element of the upper classes losing all (hypocritical) notions of entering business as gauche and vulgar. The 90s notion of classlessness sought to fuse these conceptions of classlessness, and arguably created a new form of the class system: new-found transparency in education enabled the wealthy to purchase the best education for their offspring, ensuring that wealth stayed within the paws of the wealthy. Social mobility died, and now an Oasis ticket goes for thousands.
Getting away from the social comment... Simon Price's line about "Is there anything more useless than a rock band that doesn’t rock?" hits the mark.
Joe Carducci's line about British bass players and drummers being de-skilled by Punk is garbage. Even into the 21st century you get the Arctic Monkeys with a great rhythm section, and the Libertines with a pretty good one. But Oasis are certainly Exhibit A in the case for the prosecution.
Well Exhibit B is The Velvet Underground.
There are actually loads of highly regarded rock bands that didn't rock, especially those that were influenced by Exhibit B.
Another oddity is the band that are generally considered to be the ultimate rock band - AC/DC - are famous for having a pedestrian rhythm section.
That is an aspersion I have never ever heard made against AC/DC, Just to check out I played I first 10 seconds of "Problem Child" and it's a hot rhythm section. It swings.
The thing about Oasis is, not so much that the rhythm section is pedestrian, it's that is almost inaudible on the records. The guitars and THAT HUGE VOICE take up all almost the sound spectrum. The drums and the bass are buried. I can't remember ever consciously registering what the bass in Oasis songs is doing - probably that kind of root-note bolstering the guitar thing.
Yes but Velvet Underground have a lot of other things going on to make up for the stiff rhythm. Oasis are playing Faces / Slade . non-experimental-Beatles type music, which normally have something going on a rhythmic level. So it's a deficiency - with nothing added to compensate or take it elsewhere. It's the voice that pulls the whole thing along, which is why the 'electric busking' idea fits.
"Pedestrian" is a bit unkind. "Unflashy" or "disciplined" would be more generous ways to put it.
Also, it doesn't matter so much with AC/DC, because the whole band is the rhythm section. Even the vocalist and the lead guitar.
The lack of interest in the bass and drums is more noticeable with Oasis because the guitars are layers of warm blankets: they don't kick or swing at all.
Compare Oasis to MBV, Ride or even (the) Verve: the guitars are similarly wild and woolly, often even more so, but there is usually something cool going on with the bass and drums, too.
Cliff Williams has always been pretty candid about how simple and unadorned his bass lines are, and his wikipedia article quotes him as stating that:
"It's not the [bass] line that counts. It is the feel. My favorite AC/DC tune to play is 'Down Payment Blues', because it's so simple. I play four notes throughout the song, but I get off on the whole thing—not me noodlin' away."[14] He also said that he plays "the same thing in every song, for the most part [...] in AC/DC's music, the song is more important than any individual's bit in it".[38] He added that "complex [bass] lines wouldn't add anything to a guitar-oriented band like [AC/DC], so [he tries] to create a bottom layer that drives what [AC/DC's] guys are doing on top"
I suppose "pedestrian" may not be the right word, probably "basic" is more apposite, but the idea that you need a particularly sophisticated rhythm section to "rock" is somewhat overstated I think. I suppose the extreme example of this is "Take Me To The Other Side" by Spacemen 3. The rhythm section sound like they are locked in a wardrobe in the room downstairs, but it's still a very exciting piece of music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WN44uPFNarU
I don't think Oasis are a particularly good or bad example of an ability to rock, they're pretty much in the middle where, let's face it, most bands are.
I'm not sure about Ed's suggestion that Oasis's songs don't kick or swing. Listening to something like "Slide Away" there are definitely dynamics going on there:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA2_Tjla_60
To my ears the guitars do seem to be moving in and out of time with the drums, sometimes surging ahead, sometimes lagging behind, which does give it an elemental feeling. It's not just a flat progression from A to Z.
As a connoisseur of dynamics (I am a fan of Foghat, Bad Company and Humble Pie) I think Oasis do just fine in that regard.
For the record though, Foghat, Bad Company and Humble Pie are all much better than Oasis.
Alex Niven, author of that Definitely Maybe 331/3 book, had a response to the Oasis reunion in The Guardian.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/30/oasis-culture-working-class-britain
The Gressionist Manifesto by Noel himself: “Progression is going forwards. Going backwards is regression. Going sideways is just gression.”
Luv are Nole.
Simple as.
I hate Oasis and I fucking hate that album. I prove you wrong.
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