The hope and selfishness of Oasis
Maybe the Gallaghers are gonna be the ones that save me
About a year ago, , gifted us with an amazing primer on Oasis. At the time, the idea of an Oasis reunion seemed as far-fetched as a Fugazi reunion, but now—holy shit—the Oasis thing is happening, and I’m honored to share Dentino’s incredible essay this historic event. Please to subscribe to Dentino’s newsletter, Out In Left.
Among the surprises at Liam Gallagher’s recent tour commemorating the 30th anniversary of Definitely, Maybe, Oasis’ debut album, was Liam singing “Half the World Away.” His version is better than big brother Noel’s, an acclaimed 1994 B-side. It doesn’t mean it felt better.
It felt like Liam threw a party to impress someone, only for that person to flake. It felt like someone was missing as much as someone was wrong. Was it Liam, who sold $200 tickets to glorified karaoke? Or Noel, stubborn as ever and spending his time on something called the High Flying Birds? Or me, for spending real American dollars to travel from San Diego to Manchester, England, to participate in this imitation?
At the same time, I felt unburdened singing along to music that had lifted me out of pandemic doldrums. Liam looked unburdened singing songs that, a generation ago, made him famous and that today still resonate. The Bible tries to convey in hundreds of pages what “Live Forever” does in four minutes. If Liam’s audience is any indication, then the demand for Oasis’ anthemic singalongs is at an all-time high. And at long last that demand will be met: Oasis is reuniting. “This is essentially the Eras Tour for us overly football-oriented gadgies, isn’t it?” one tweet read.
I’m wary of thinking too deeply about a band that’s often associated with lad culture and hedonism, but then I’d be subscribing to the worst of contemporary culture. Irony and cynicism and self-referentiality are exhausting and degrading and lazy. (See: the Deadpool franchise.) Oasis isn’t an intellectual band—Liam attributes his musicianship to being beaten with a hammer—but they possess an earnestness and a belief in humanity. They believe things are getting better. How do I know this? Because they have a song called “It’s Getting Better (Man!!)”—one exclamation point for punctuation, the other for the cocaine they were on. It’d be easy to write off their reunion as a cash grab, because it is one, but it’s also an opportunity to inject the culture with a near-extinct feeling: hope.
In August 1996, Oasis played to a quarter million people across two nights in Knebworth, England. Based on ticket demand, they could have played there another two weeks. There was arguably no bigger musical act in the world at the time and certainly none bigger in their native United Kingdom. (Save it, Blur fans.) That popularity was based in large part on 1995’s (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? If you’re not familiar with the iconic album art or with “Wonderwall,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” and “Champagne Supernova,” then you must be a literal Luddite.
In 1997, the band released Be Here Now, an album overshadowed by drug-fueled studio sessions, subsequent touring debacles, and the Gallaghers’ metastasizing blood feud. Any guitar-based outfit would kill to make that album, but next to Definitely, Maybe and Morning Glory it was a jarring comedown, the runt of a superlative litter. Oasis made four more uneven studio albums, and by their dissolution in 2009 the band was little more than tabloid fodder. In three sentences, music critic Steven Hyden offered a comprehensive biography: “The Gallagher brothers were best known for fighting a lot. Their last fight occurred before a festival show in Paris, when Liam threw a plum at Noel and then attempted to take his brother’s head off with a guitar. Noel quit, and Oasis was over.”
What you need to know about Oasis can even be boiled down to a single sentence: An intense argument between Noel and Liam recorded in 1994 charted when it was released as a single in 1995. Everything about this band is ridiculous.
Though I try to give their latter output some grace, Oasis was relevant for six years, from 1994 to 1999. Some might truncate that to just three, including former rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs. “[After Knebworth] I honestly think we should have went, ‘Thank you, every one of youse, for getting us here. We were Oasis, and good night,’ and walked off,” he said in the documentary Oasis: Supersonic. “We should have… disappeared into a puff of smoke.”
In fact, Liam and Noel had been estranged for some 15 years, the same amount of time between Oasis’ first and last albums. In other words, fans had been calling for reconciliation and a reunion almost longer than Oasis had been releasing music. It’s a testament to how affecting their peak was.
But as Liam and Noel careened between solo projects and as the two refused to talk to one another because of… something … the people have been denied one of the best frontmen ever and one of the best songwriters ever and some of the best pop music ever.
In a way, Oasis is an act of service, a vehicle to positively change lives, even their own. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the chorus in “Acquiesce,” one of the band’s best songs and one of the few with both Noel and Liam featured on vocals, is: “Because we need each other / We believe in one another.” They couldn’t express love, except on stage through a third “person,” the audience. Withholding that is selfish. The 1975’s Matt Healy put it less psychoanalytically: “Grow up. Headline Glastonbury.”
Taylor Swift is a solid comparison to Oasis, considering their common ubiquity and divisiveness, but Oasis couldn’t have an Eras Tour. They barely had one era. So how did this band of poor, childish Mancunians make such a cultural impact in such a short time? And how did theirs become the most anticipated (and lucrative) reunion in music?
*Takes a hit of a joint* It’s all about the music, man.
The scaffolding of Oasis—the attitude; the album sales and streaming numbers; the legendary, if inconsistent live act; the tabloid drama—rests on the songs. “Slide Away” is their greatest, and for my money it’s the most underrated love song in pop music, but their most representative is “Live Forever.”
“If the one thing I’m remembered for is ‘Live Forever,’ then that will do me,” Noel Gallagher once told The Sydney Morning Herald. “‘Wonderwall’ is fine, a lovely pop song, but I wrote ‘Live Forever’ when I was 21 and that song, the lyrics to that song, will stand up 500 years from now.”
Maybe I don't really wanna know
How your garden grows
'Cause I just wanna fly
Lately, did you ever feel the pain
In the morning rain
As it soaks you to the bone?
At first glance, the opening verse doesn’t convey much, and that’s a common knock on Oasis. Unlike the character-based storytelling of, say, a Taylor Swift or a Bruce Springsteen, Oasis lyrics can be ambiguous, if not nonsensical. The chorus to “Some Might Say,” the lead single to Morning Glory, is infamous in this regard. In today’s parlance, Noel’s lyrics can be described as vibes. Who knows what they literally mean, but everybody feels what they convey. But that slang cheapens the essence of Oasis, generally, and “Live Forever,” specifically.
Noel’s best songwriting and lyrics contain at once pools of sorrow and waves of joy, to quote the Gallaghers’ idol John Lennon. Being more specific is to put the thumb on that scale, to explicitly make it either a happy song or sad song, but we don’t have a happy life or a sad life. We have a life that includes all the feelings, and there’s no single interpretation of what this life means. “Maybe I don’t really wanna know / How your garden grows / ‘Cause I just want to fly” means exactly what I need it to, every time I listen to the song. Oasis has a universal appeal not because of catchy hooks and choruses, though they have those, or because their songs mean nothing and offend no one. Oasis soaks into the bones because Noel somehow incorporates everything.
Maybe I just wanna fly
Wanna live, I don't wanna die
Maybe I just wanna breathe
Maybe I just don't believe
Maybe you're the same as me
We see things they'll never see
You and I are gonna live forever
“In its original form, ‘Live Forever’ is a fist-pumping song. Me and my best friend are going to take on the world,” Noel Gallagher once said. “No one’s going to get in our way and we are going to live forever.” It’s a strikingly positive analysis, considering Noel’s public persona as a cantankerous asshole, but he is correct. The last two lines of the chorus are some of the most uplifting and sentimental that you’ll find outside of nursery rhymes, but they’re earned.
First, the preceding lines again fill out the emotional spectrum. The narrator may say they’re going to live forever, but they’ve already acknowledged their mortality. Whatever burden they carry suffocates and endangers them, literally or metaphorically, and they yearn for escape. They know they won't and don’t want to live forever, physically. They’re not bored, wealthy Floridians who want to be entombed in cryogenic freezers. They’re complicated, scared, and optimistic people who want to be free with the people they love. Even if they don’t achieve safety, then the idea of them will live forever. They may go out together, and that’s something, maybe even enough.
Second, Liam is committed to two bits: publicly needling his older brother, and taking Oasis songs at face value. His vocal on “Live Forever” is sincere without being saccharine, and his is a melody that “could wake the Pharaohs,” as the BBC’s Dominic King put it. The performance couldn’t fit the lyric better. When Liam screams “we’re gonna live forever” during the outro it’s not clear if he is rallying the troops or deluding himself. Probably both, maybe neither. A moody guitar solo follows, the musical equivalent of a question mark. It’s a song that only brothers—that only those brothers—could make, but it’s a song that anyone can relate to, one way or another.
Oasis made dozens of songs like this, and the Gallaghers weren’t precious about them. Some of their best work was released as B-sides, leaving at least one classic album on the table, but that is what made Oasis a rocketship, one that burned up upon reentry. They held nothing back. Classic, enduring songs fell out of their parka pockets, and those songs weren’t self-conscious and they weren’t ironic. The Gallaghers remind us that life is best lived and felt, not thought about.
By the second or third wave of Covid I was depressed and riddled with anxiety. I love Phoebe Bridgers, who had released Punisher around that time, but her music didn’t help. One moment you’re listening to downbeat, intensely personal indie rock. The next, you’re telling your Apple TV remote to search for “songs that make you cry” while high on edible and eating Flamin’ Hot Cheetos with chopsticks.
The algo served up an acoustic rendition of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” that Noel had performed with Oasis in Argentina. The crowd was mad for it, as they say, and I had a hard time believing that it was the same band that Kerry McCoy, guitarist for black metal band Deafheaven, cited as an influence. I was familiar with Oasis’ greatest hits by osmosis, but my YouTube wormhole prompted me to listen to Definitely, Maybe in full for the first time. It’s not an exaggeration to say it changed my life.
That’s not to say Oasis cured me. I’m not a child. But the band did help untangle the wires in my brain, allowing positivity to flow again. It’s not accurate to say I feel happy when I listen to Oasis, because that’s not a full enough emotion to describe it. Instead, I feel fulfilled, maybe, and dare I say hopeful.
“Sometimes because we have so much information from all around the world, on our televisions, on our computers, on our phones, it seems as if the world is falling apart,” Barack Obama said in 2016. “But if you said ‘when in human history would be the best time to be born?’ The time would be now.” After a Trump presidency—and facing the specter of another—and amid worsening climate change, human suffering, and economic inequality, the sentiment from Mr. Hope and Change seems alien, even sadistic.
If the post-Obama era could be represented by an image, then it’s the “This is Fine” meme. If it could be reduced to a band t-shirt, then it’s the one I have of Phoebe Bridgers’. The front reads “I feel nothing” and on the back is a car on fire. Deadpool can’t just nab the bad guys. He needs to wink at the camera while doing it. Caring and being earnest are almost bigger crimes than those he’s prosecuting.
I get that this is a protective mechanism. People can’t criticize me if I criticize myself first. I can’t be hurt if I dissociate. It’s an understandable reaction considering the state of the world, but it’s also selfish and not unlike the Gallaghers when they refused to reconcile.
Hope is risky. It requires vulnerability and a belief that that faith will be rewarded. It’s in that interplay where human connection exists. It’s emotionally fulfilling to feel joy with and because of other people. That’s only possible when we open ourselves to the possibility of pain. Moderating those emotions, protecting against them, flattens life. It’s safer in that defensive crouch, but when we deny someone love, or the possibility of it, we deny it for ourselves. I believe people are craving this sort of confident sincerity. I am. Liam’s swagger, stance, and style is the embodiment of it. An Oasis reunion tour is a nostalgic retreat like how any reunion tour is, but waving away the underpinnings of their universality and popularity is cynical.
Of course, there is sincere content and artists across media, but Oasis existed on a cultural level unto themselves. They weren’t in the mainstream. They were the mainstream. I struggle to identify anything as big as they were and that inhabits a similar emotional space. The Office, maybe? But 90,000 people aren’t packing Wembley to watch reruns on Peacock. Pop music is unique in its ability to bring people together and affect those people with concision.
Liam and Noel have this formula down pat, and they know what they create together is singular. They know it now, which is why they’re getting back together, and they knew it then. Definitely, Maybe is “twelve songs that… are about being alive and having a good time. About being happy. About enjoying yourself,” Noel said in a 1994 interview, then his little brother finished the sentiment.
“And then about being sad. But knowing that it can get better.” Oasis is “about everything. Just life.”
 | A guest post by
|