The Soundtrack of a Generation: The Oasis reunion tour was a series of football stadium nostalgia-fests, with the fans the unmistakable stars of the show.

We didn’t know Labour was over. We just kept hearing that everybody was gonna get loaded and have a good time. There was even a magazine called Loaded, and it spoke the way Oasis spoke, talking hilarious shit in a laddish haze, while working-class people lost their unions, their livelihoods, and their sense of community.

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Though few of the many other books about Oasis are better than his, they all share the same gleeful repartee, in which Oasis is lovable and tuneful and ballsy and hilarious, which is all true. The fact that it is as toxic as glue sniffing doesn’t really matter when the feeling is so good.

That deep nihilism of the 90s even in the feel-good Oasis

You could feel the volcanic rage and the Pandora’s box of emotions in their huge sound. While they never really talked about it or wallowed in it, they internalised their angst and anger, and they couldn’t help it infusing their music with a dramatic energy that even coloured their good-time songs….

Fuck everything!

Full quote

In 1956, when Jimmy Porter made a melody of mouthing off in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, he was still attached to a notion of the state, a set of institutions that buggered up your life but nonetheless defined you. The Gallaghers’ parents married into that ethos, but by the time the boys were strutting their stuff, singing “Don’t Look Back in Anger” to a generation of young people alienated by Mrs. Thatcher, the idea of personal hedonism seemed a better response to the pressures of a society she claimed did not exist. For working-class kids, it was suddenly not about a life spent in a factory but about a great night spent on the pills, and Oasis called time on our parents’ conformity. “Oasis were an emotional flame thrower,” Robb writes.

You could feel the volcanic rage and the Pandora’s box of emotions in their huge sound. While they never really talked about it or wallowed in it, they internalised their angst and anger, and they couldn’t help it infusing their music with a dramatic energy that even coloured their good-time songs….

Fuck everything!

Oasis are not a great rock band, they are a great karaoke band

💐 Brilliant

With great bands, hearing and understanding are one, and no amount of explanation will ever capture what they are. That’s true of the Sex Pistols. It’s true of Sly and the Family Stone. But it’s never been true of Oasis, because the music was never really an amplification of the boys’ reality, merely a clichéd replacement. They didn’t “mean it, maaaan,” as Johnny Rotten sang, they didn’t mean anything, and the nonsense words they sang were always placeholders for the cheapest sentiment. Oasis was a stadium rock band all along, in ways the Pistols could never have been, so it was easy for them to become a band pounding out anthems for men in merch. Who are we, in our bucket hats, but a weary tribe of property owners trying to establish ourselves as a generation, delighted to spunk some cash on the effort? All together now! Let’s get down with our “council-estate glam” and regret the failures of idealism along with Peter Mandelson.

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… Their biographers love to describe them as the last of the great rock and roll bands, but actually they were the first of the great karaoke bands