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.

"IT WAS FORTY YEARS AGO TODAY": DUST THEM ALL OFF

“I wish I was a punk rocker with flowers in my hair; ’77 and ’69, revolution was in the air”, or so sang erstwhile MySpace ‘phenomenon’ and purveyor of the insipid Sandi Thom. The rest of this forgettable track aside, these lyrics (and Thom can claim none of the creative spark for this sentiment) provide an interesting insight into the prescriptive nature of music history. There seems to be a general consensus, usually by those with a vested interest (Stuart Maconie et al I’m looking at you) that there are certain dates that are intrinsically ‘magical’ when it comes to music production, and thus are etched into our collective musical minds as significant. 1969 is one of these sacrosanct years. Even the most cursory of glances at the music press at the moment will yield myriad articles singing the praises of this year. Yet all will focus on one band, one album and one conclusion: the Beatles, ‘Abbey Road’ and that 1969 was a full stop at the end of a creative surge in popular music.

Ok, let’s get the necessaries out of the way. Yes, the Beatles were (and still are) unparalleled. They are among the most significant products this country has ever produced, and I don’t just mean musically, I mean they’re up there with the Magna Carta and the NHS! Yes, ‘Abbey Road’ is an amazing album and it did serve as the perfect end to the Beatles’ career[1]. But the way 1969 has passed into musical history, you’d be forgiven (well, not by me) for thinking that the whole of the music industry shut down, entering a dark-age of self-indulgent stadium rock until punk came along and breathed, or rather spat, vitality back into British music.

The points I’d like to try and get across in this article are firstly, that 1969 doesn’t simply represent the ‘end of an era’ and that a lot of exciting musical ventures took root in that year. Secondly, I want to try and dispel somewhat this prescriptive vision of ‘great years’ or even ‘great period’ of music in history. The sanctifying of an imagined past (almost always viewed in comparison to an un-favoured present and negatively projected future) is an overly simplistic and detrimental way of viewing music.