ESSAY – THE LEGACY OF POSTMODERN POP Pt 2: OASIS AND WHAT’S THE STORY MORNING GLORY? (1995)

First came Definitely Maybe of course, which is a great album, so good I don’t feel capable of writing about it just yet. But as everyone knows, it’s something of an anomaly in the Oasis canon. The artistic standards are consistently high, the lyrics are pretty good on the whole (sometimes exceptional) and, crucially, for all the rock classicism, it mostly sounds like it was released in 1994, which is the year it was actually released in. Contrastingly, all of Oasis’ subsequent records sound like archeological fragments from bygone epochs. It isn’t quite as if you could say that Heathen Chemistry (in actual fact released in 2002) sounds like an album made in 1969, more as though the record has emerged from some bizarre Terry Gilliam-like alternative universe in which history has collapsed, and a sinister dystopian government is trying to confuse the populace with a horrible machine that sounds like 1980 one minute, 1965 the next, then 1976, then 1989, and so on and so forth. Put another way, Heathen Chemistry is, in common with all the other post-Definitely Maybe offerings, a quintessential postmodern record. Oasis were the band the postmodern age deserved, right enough.

The incredibly culturally damaging/boring process was initiated in earnest with their 1995 long-player What’s the Story Morning Glory? a work for which the epithet ‘zeitgeist-defining’ hardly seems adequate. From the Austin Powers-esque, pseudo-retro-nonsense of the title downwards, this is an album which establishes new standards of anti-meaning. Gary Glitter somehow manages to turn up on opening track ‘Hello’, which sets the tone for the rest of the record, an hour-or-so in which childish inanity is driven to such a peak of intensity that paedophilic is perhaps the only word.

OASIS: AN OBITUARY

Well, it’s finally over… apparently. The pantomime dames that are Noel and Liam Gallagher have finally drawn the curtain on the self-appointed ‘biggest-band-in-Britain’ once and for all (although whether Noel can be tempted back once more into the breech is a moot point). Now seems as good a time as any to assess the legacy the band will leave behind, and, at this juncture, it doesn’t look too rosy.

When Oasis first arrived on the main stage of popular culture, I was just about the dead centre of their (supposed) demographic. 11 years old, white, male, northern – perfect. I was also struggling to carve out an identity in a Britain that, at the time, didn’t seem to have too much to offer. So, along came Oasis with Union Jack guitars and songs that were fairly easy to imitate and, like so many, I bought it hook, line and sinker. I’m not ashamed to say that I loved Oasis. I was an Oasis fan. I loved the bravado, the ‘us against the world’ rhetoric. I loved the volatility, the bickering and when Liam stuck his forks up at a camera. But, in the words of Saint Paul; “when I was a child, I spoke as a child”. That’s the problem, the brothers Gallagher have singularly failed to put aside childish things for over 15 years – and they weren’t exactly children to begin with! I mean, I have a younger brother and we used to argue and fight and say we couldn’t stand to be around each other – when we were children. To see two brothers in their forties still doing it is just embarrassing. Their resolute inability to change even slightly has meant they have faded, ungracefully, into ever increasing irrelevance and it is sad in every sense of the word.