"It may be that Britain – and much of Europe – is in a similar moment to that described by Clark just before 1848: on the edge of a new kind of society we don’t yet have the language to describe. It feels frightening because without that language it is impossible to have coherent dreams of the future. To build a better world, you need an idea of what should change and how.
And one of the things preventing that may be our obsession with constantly replaying the past. In the present age, the fog of experience has been thickened by the mass of recorded data that allows the recent past to be endlessly replayed, refusing to fade away. A constant loop of nostalgia – music, images, films and dreams from the past. It is another block to the future. And it is also the way this series is made. My bad."
Adam Curtistalking about his new-ish program Shifty
“You have this constant pantomime of hysteria which screws with your idea of time and yet it’s almost like you’re treading water. Nothing is actually happening. No one actually comes up with anything new. There are now four films being made about The Beatles. Four major movies about The Beatles. That’s like people in the 1960s listening to a musical from the time of Queen Victoria. It’s extraordinary! We’re trapped!”
“Taylor Swift is such a prim 1950s, almost Doris Day figure. That’s not to diss any of what she’s saying but it’s quite held together in time and I don’t think that expresses now.”
“What you’re left with now is this weird psychodrama-scape of everyone knowing that everyone is performing. The real self has completely disappeared deep within your and my minds and you’ll never find it.”
In The Guardian, Simon Priceargues 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!"
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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.
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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.)
" Paula Cole Releases ’90s-Summoning New Single “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.”
The follow-up to the Massachusetts-born singer/songwriter’s American Quilt (2021) is called Lo and the album’s first single will make ’90s music enthusiasts turn their heads. Titled “The Replacements & Dinosaur Jr.” the song chronicles Cole’s introduction to those bands by her late friend and musical mentor Mark Hutchins. Hutchins, who died in 2016, produced all of Cole’s early demos and was the one who introduced the singer to a wide array of alternative bands, like XTC, A Tribe Called Quest and Daniel Lanois. "In a statement about the single Cole wrote: “Mark exploded my mind. I literally heard the Beatles first with Mark. Also The Replacements, Dinosaur Jr., A Tribe Called Quest, The Pixies, and a lot of gorgeous early-90’s alternative music folks might not associate with me. We connected in our love for Peter Gabriel’s music. I was mourning, honoring, celebrating Mark when I wrote this. I wanted to acknowledge him and his lasting influence in my life. Mark should have had an enormous career. I’m so grateful. The song needed to be fun, like he was.”
This inevitably reminded me of The House of Love's "The Beatles and the Stones"
But also - more appositely - of The Replacements's own "Alex Chilton"
That, then, was A/ quite clever and B/ indicative
Indicating the Replacements's perverse drive to fail in the marketplace, just like Paul Westerberg's revered forebear, the ironically-named Big Star.
But Big Star was only ironically named in retrospect - they really wanted to be big and thought they could be. Listening to the Anglophile distillate of Beatles-Stones that is their perfect first album, the fact that they did fail, that radio didn't embrace them - it seems so mystifying, so wrong. The music is full of self-confidence and sense of destiny.
Later on Chilton did - of necessity, through self-destructive impulses - make a right cult of himself.
But he and the rest of Big Star wanted to be big.
Plus he'd already been a pop star, in The Box Tops, with the massive hit "The Letter".
"Alex Chilton" the song is also a significant contribution to the canon of meta-pop - "I'm in love / With that song", it captures that feeling of being ravished through the radio. (Or in this case, it being Big Star, not through the radio). The chorus enacts what it rejoices in - the seizing of the ear, the endlessly renewing miracle of pop. Yet releasing a song titled "Alex Chilton" as a single virtually guarantees it'll never be a hit (except in the hearts of college radio deejays and fanzine editors).
As for The House of Love, doing a song titled "The Beatles and the Stones" and then releasing it as a single, it just seemed like a form of self-humiliation - as if the only way they could ever be mentioned in the same breath as the B and the S was by this ruse of titling a song after them.
Talking of the Beatles, here's legendary-era-of-blogs ex-blogger Owen Hatherley surprising us with an excellent piece in The New Left Review about the AI-concocted half-lives of the Beatles
"The rise of McCartney’s reputation at the expense of Lennon’s over the last few decades has something to do with the way popular music has become a less crucial part of youth culture. People still listen to music, it still changes and develops, but it is no longer the main vehicle for social comment or subcultural identity, far less important than social media; perhaps on the same level as clothing. Gone is the idea that pop music could ‘say’ something, that it could be a means of commenting on society, or an integral element of an oppositional counter-culture. McCartney’s solo work now seems unexpectedly prescient, anticipating modern listening habits. McCartney, Ram, Band on the Run or McCartney II all deliver the immediate dopamine hit and the restlessness with genre that you can find on Spotify playlists; they are albums already ‘On Shuffle’....
"What has also virtually disappeared from pop music is ‘politics’. The Beatles’ politics were complicated, to be sure. Each of them owed almost everything to the welfare state. Starr’s upbringing was rough, and a spell of childhood illness saw his life saved by the new National Health Service, which sent him to a sanatorium, an unimaginable thing for a working-class child before 1948. McCartney and Harrison grew up in good suburban council houses, and their families – sons and daughters of Irish migrants – were in skilled, stable work during a period of full employment (Lennon’s father, a Liverpool-Irish sailor, was a ne’er do well, but he was raised by his middle-class aunt in a large semi). Lennon and Harrison went to Liverpool College of Art, and McCartney sat in on lectures, later recalling attending a talk on Le Corbusier.....
"The ‘new’ ‘Beatles’ songs have been devoid both of the interesting if generally failed political content of Lennon’s solo work, and the musical invention of McCartney. They are the worst of all worlds, leaden plods saying little more than that Lennon in the late 70s didn’t have much to say anymore. That was likely why he wasn’t saying it publicly, declining to release the songs in his lifetime. Yet, tellingly, ‘Now and Then’ has far outsold an actual new album of actual new songs by the actually living Rolling Stones, who were sixty years ago the Beatles’ nearest competitors.
".... Nostalgia can be spun out of the flimsiest of mid-20th-century golden age cultural phenomena – Cliff Richard, whom Lennon and McCartney loathed, is currently on tour – but, unfortunately, the Beatles really were special. It isn’t all a hoax; there has never been anything quite like the sheer speed and promiscuity and drama of those six years of actual Beatles music. They proved that working-class people from ordinary places could create, in the 2.5 minute slots of the lowest of low art, work that is bottomless in its complexity and richness. There are entire worlds in A Hard Day’s Night, Revolver, Sgt Pepper, Magical Mystery Tour or the White Album, evanescent spaces in which rhythm and blues, Victoriana, cheap chanson, electronic avant-gardism and Indian classical traditions are all mixed up and transfigured in the studio by people who, as the Get Back film revealed, could not even read music. Theirs was a world in which everything was getting better, with new possibilities, new ways of hearing and seeing opening up every minute."
And here's some retrotalk from yours truly - a discussion with Francesco Tenaglia for The Music Folder, a talk-series curated by Archivio Storico Ricordi, which investigates the intersection of music, memory, and arts. This was done a little while ago, so the focus initially is on the recently-shown Get Back 8-hour Beatles documentary series and the uncannily persistent dominance and prominence of the Fab Four in our culture (chiming with Luke Turner's swipe at Maccagemony in the previous post). Then the retrotalk moves onto curatorial and annotative culture, obituary and elegy writing, the deejay as archivist, completism and collectoritis, my work as a teacher.... You can find the audio of our discussion here and a marginally tidied-up transcription here.
Well I suppose I am, aren't I? And in that capacity I chatted with Ann-Kathrin Mittelstrass of German Public Radio for a program about retro trends of the present, the Nostalgie-Epidemie, etc, including the Beatles Get Back mega-doc (which I loved-loved and meant to write about here but then the moment passed).
