hyperstOasis

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?"

Liam, seven years ago, on what they'd be doing if they'd never split up.

"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.)