The world has seemingly caught up to Oasis. Its hard-edged, aspirational songs like “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “Supersonic,” and “Live Forever” resonate once more, though for reasons the band couldn’t have foreseen. Oasis’s return reveals the long-standing paradoxes of the Mancunian act, providing a soundtrack for the unreconciled contradictions of our present moment.
The populist character of Oasis forms a central thesis of Alex Niven’s excellent account of the band, Definitely Maybe (2014), part of Bloomsbury’s album-focused 33 1/3 series. Like other iconic groups, Oasis emerged amid a conjuncture of different, though related, trends that enabled their success. Along with acts like Blur, Elastica, and the Verve, Oasis was integral to the Britpop scene and the Cool Britannia moment of the mid- to late 1990s. More deeply, however, they evinced economic and political trends in Britain that were reshaping the underground musical landscape and its commercialization from the 1980s onward.
As Niven writes, Definitely Maybe is “an album defined by the claustrophobia of the decaying city in which it was imagined.” The city in question is Manchester, where the Gallagher brothers grew up on a council estate and which, along with its outer boroughs, had already produced influential predecessors like Joy Division, the Smiths, and the Fall, among many notable artists. It is also the city at the heart of Friedrich Engels’s 1844 study, The Condition of the Working Class in England. All that is to say that the Gallaghers grew up within two interrelated histories that fundamentally informed their worldview.
Equally significant, they both came of age in the Thatcherite Britain of the 1980s — Noel was born in 1967 and Liam in 1972 — with Noel later recalling his weekly trips with their dad to collect unemployment benefits (dole payments) from the local welfare office. This working-class milieu mimicked those elsewhere in the world, such as the Pacific Northwest, where figures like Kurt Cobain similarly encountered limited opportunities due to the parallel consequences of Reaganism. The coiled energy of bands like Nirvana and Oasis betrayed an emergent class rage that surfaced as an effect of these government’s policies. Yet they also exhibited a tension between despair and aspiration that revealed a resistance to that era’s political conservatism while acceding to its individualist understanding of success.
Niven draws a further comparison between Oasis and the hip-hop of the time. Starting in the late 1980s, rap music took a decisive turn to sampling soul and R&B records from the 1960s and 1970s, as witnessed in groundbreaking LPs by De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and Beastie Boys — a resourceful, bricolage technique that came to dominate the genre. Both Gallagher brothers went through a hip-hop phase (albeit briefly) with Noel, having seen Public Enemy perform in Manchester, calling them inspirational.
Hip-hop was certainly another response to Reaganism. More to the point is the resemblance of artistic method between Oasis and its rap artist peers. Both took a scavenger approach to the past to salvage material that could be reutilized in the present, treating the recordings and musical heritage of those who preceded them as a kind of public commons. The critical accusation that Oasis was derivative of the Rolling Stones, T. Rex, and especially the Beatles has never really hit hard, largely because Oasis, like its hip-hop counterparts, has been transparent about its muses and adoration for them.
Oasis furthermore emulated the local style of its time. In addition to the heavy, high-volume sound of grunge, they retained elements of Britain’s like-minded shoegaze scene that extensively used effects pedals to create immersive soundscapes of saturated reverb. Oasis signed to Creation Records, home to prominent shoegaze outfits like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine as well as important precursors like the Jesus and Mary Chain, who also experimented with distortion. Niven highlights how the same sound engineer, Anjali Dutt, was behind the boards for both Definitely Maybe and My Bloody Valentine’s classic Loveless (1991), widely considered the epitome of its genre.
Nonetheless, Oasis went to surpass these early comparisons. Crafting their own identity, the Gallaghers adopted a transfixing public image in addition to their music, involving loutish behavior, football shirts and bucket hats, and, not least, displays of friction (at times staged) between the coolheaded Noel and hotheaded Liam. This spectacle of unreconstructed masculinity that became known as “laddism” formed part of a broader cultural drift spanning from the delinquents of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) and its film adaptation by Danny Boyle to Martin Amis’s much later novel, Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012).
An ugliness accompanied this cultivated unruliness. In a manner that came across as racist to many, Noel criticized the choice of Jay-Z as a headliner for the Glastonbury Festival in 2008, saying hip-hop had no place at the event. In response, Jay-Z famously trolled Gallagher by covering “Wonderwall” at the start of his set. Mark Fisher would later disparage Oasis and the Britpop scene for promoting an uncomplicated and exclusively white version of Britishness that neglected the innovations of musicians like the trip-hop visionary Tricky, who was recording during the same period.
The music of Oasis would also suffer. Global success led them beyond their Mancunian origins, cutting them off from the wellspring of their best music. “Everything good about Definitely Maybe — its dreams of escape, its sense of solidarity, its rare freedom with borrowed materials – gets its validity from this backdrop,” Niven writes sympathetically. “When this anchoring later disappeared, Oasis would lose their orientation quite spectacularly.”
