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Bagpuss |
It's easy to forget now, but there was a time when Oasis seemed like the most exciting and vital band to have emerged in the UK in years. Their debut album and first couple of singles dazzled with their energy and sheer atypicality, but after that point many felt that they lost some of their sheen while their popularity simultaneously skyrocketed. Were these feelings accurate and did they really lose their initial lustre, or was this just another example of people turning against something when it gets 'big'?
Although Oasis have continued to grow in stature with each successive release, there is a widespread belief that their early works were characterised by a sense of excitement that seemed to erode from their work in direct proportion to their sharp rise in popularity. Many listeners who enjoyed the early singles and "Definitely Maybe" have been disappointed by what has come since then. When I first heard 'Cigarettes and Alcohol', I thought that Liam Gallagher was putting that voice on for a joke. I'd never heard anyone sing so badly on record before but his obvious confidence in an appalling singing voice made their early singles exciting. Their music and interview personas seemed like self-conscious repudiations of everything other people might consider cool or dangerous. They were rude and graceless but not spiteful or angry enough to be offensive, they dressed in anoraks and Marks and Spencer jumpers and sang about inviting ladies over for lasagne. The fact that they took cocaine, fought all the time and filled songs with bombastic rock 'n' roll cliches just seemed comically incongruous. Their music was less obviously derivative in the early stages as well, energetic and aggressive but politically disinterested and far removed from punk's philosophy. It drew on the Beatles' imagery but without the archness or intelligence that informed so many of their records. They seemed to be still experimenitng at this stage since no niche market had been created for them. It was when they responded to the media's attempts to try to categorise them that things began to fall apart. The lyrics became less kitchen sink and played up their anthemic, bombastic side which had been kept neatly in check on "Definitely Maybe". Heavy-handed Beatles-esque touches (the piano intro to 'Don't Look Back In Anger' pilfered from 'Imagine') were added. The whole thing reached its nadir in the media-contrived 'Battle of the Bands' with Blur in which both groups inevitably had to simplify what characterised the band. Oasis just became boring and mean-spirited in their comments, branding themselves 'working class heroes', seemingly using comparisons with the Beatles as a defence of their music. Since then, an inability to escape from such comparisons has blighted their music, limiting the scope of their song-writing and finally killing off the truly disparate and experimental nature of their earlier work. - Edward Meehan When they first appeared, it was genuinely exciting to have a band like that around, and I freely admit to having liked the first couple of singles a lot (and indeed, thinking that the musical 'theft' on 'Shakermaker' was amusing rather than pathetic), but the lustre wore off pretty quickly for me simply because I didn't like enough of their material. I still think "Definitely Maybe" sounds fantastic for the most part (particularly 'Up In The Sky', 'Columbia' and 'Married With Children'), but there were a couple of tracks I didn't think were up to much, especially 'Slide Away' which I found to be both dreary and overlong. I also thought 'Whatever' was fantastic, regardless of 'derivation' from Neil Innes (I wasn't that bothered, because due to contractual bastardness he never got any of the recouped money anyway), but from that point on it just seemed to go downhill for me. But people do like to forget how important they were when they first appeared, and that's something that needs redressing as often as possible. - TJ Worthington I remember getting a promo copy of 'Whatever' the same week that I actually went and bought The Stone Roses "Love Spreads", and to be frank it really seemed as if the old guard were dead and we had some new heroes. I played 'Whatever' twenty times on the day I got it, I think, and thought it was a stupendous single. There are very few releases that have got me that excited since. For all my sins, I even liked 'Don't Look Back in Anger' and 'Some Might Say', but it was definitely around the point of "(What's The Story) Morning Glory" that the rot set in. More to the point, I can easily see the limitations of the Strokes and The White Stripes giving us a repeat of the same phenomenon (though neither of those bands have had the same effect on me personally, frankly). A lot of full on trad rock bands over the past decade have managed to get themselves lost with their limited format very quickly and gone on to produce disappointing follow up work. If Oasis had split immediately after "Morning Glory", I think most people would view them very differently indeed. - Dave Bryant I was non-commital about Oasis until every song of theirs had to be a bloated epic, then they just pissed me off. The appeal seemed to hinge on the Liam's singing voice and Noel's guitar playing - both of them pedestrian, crashing bores. - Andy Durrant
However, there are those who argue that Oasis' later work has been every bit as vital as their earliest offerings... There are plenty of reasons for disliking 'Wonderwall' in terms of what it's come to stand for; in 1994 Oasis were as punk as anyone since Nirvana, and ended up falling into the trap of knocking out one commercial-rock single and two ballad singles per LP. If you only know of Oasis through singles and tabloids then they must be pretty despicable, to know 'Shakermaker' and 'D'You Know What I Mean?' without knowing 'D'Yer Wanna Be A Spaceman?' or 'Going Nowhere'. And I could list the twenty or thirty bands that got a deal purely because they sound/look/hyperbolise like Oasis, but this isn't technically their fault. Well, Travis are. It's not earth-shattering to say that Noelly G is a piss-poor lyricist, and all that "roads are winding", "lights are blinding" is less than inspired. But what really pissed me off was the number of also-ran Britpop merchants who queued up to slag Oasis off for NME column inches - for Louise Wener to slag off Noel as a lyricist, and Justine Elastica to say his songs are emotionally dishonest, are pretty ironic when you consider their own careers. Having said that, I actually like the line "backbeat, the word is on the street", or, at least, the way the bassline kicks in on the word "backbeat" - I think someone called this "a clever attempt to express the redemptive power of the Beatles" or pop music in general. Starts with whiney acoustic sorrow, becomes "shut up @#%$ moaning and get on with it", which in these days of rich white Californian kids espousing "ironic" homophobia and droning about how their dad won't let them borrow their Beamer is starting to sound a pretty radical worldview. - Dave Rolinson
paintbox(a)bluejam20.freeserve.co.uk.
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