#Using a Keep Reading bc the article is indeed longer. I lost my mind I went mad and wrote and wrote and wrote

[soundslivemagazine]

In Defence Of Oasis

Exploring the hype behind one of Britain’s most loved and raucous rock n roll bands.

Unless you’ve been living under the most soundproof of rocks this week, you will have heard the news. After a decade and a half of the alluring ‘will-they-won’t-they’ drama, the Gallagher brothers Noel and Liam have rekindled just as suddenly as they’d ended it all backstage at a gig in Paris in 2009.

The rumours abound on social media suddenly began to feel a lot less like fantasies when Oasis, Noel and Liam’s accounts all teased an announcement last Saturday. Oasis had made announcements since their split, usually about anniversaries, merchandise and documentaries, this wasn’t out of the ordinary. In fact, the band would soon be marking 30 years since their era-defining debut album Definitely Maybe came out in August 1994. Singer Liam Gallagher had also threatened to reunite the band on plenty of occasions in the ensuing decade, but never made good on his word. Why should this time have felt different?

In theory, it shouldn’t have. The village eventually loses interest in the boy crying wolf. And yet, when Liam Gallagher stepped onto the Main Stage at Reading festival to perform a headlining set on Sunday and opened with nostalgic on-screen visuals of Oasis, any doubt left in fans’ minds quickly evaporated.

The following Tuesday, the band confirmed what we already knew: Oasis, the biggest Britpop band of the 1990s, were back in action.

The avalanche of articles followed like they hadn’t in over 20 years: Oasis had undoubtedly reignited the fantasies of music magazines and publications that were otherwise scaling down in the face of rising operational costs. We’ve now seen over 20 NME articles, news on the BBC website, a revived radio documentary on BBC 6 Music, countless Rolling Stone thinkpieces, news in SPIN Magazine, the Manchester Evening News, gossip in the rags of the Sun, Mail, Metro. The mural in Manchester. The millions of people that tried to get tickets for the reunion dates that sold out in hours. It’s easy to be sick of it all, to think there wasn’t a band more overrated, overhyped or beloved than Oasis.

But let’s forget the hymns for a moment. Let us re-examine the appeal of the band before the myth: five boys from Manchester who believed in nothing more than the rock ‘n’ roll dream. And certainly, nothing less.

Cast your mind back to 1994, before the success and idolatry, before their songs would be turned into design-for-life anthems, before the band would be permanently woven into the fabric of British music history. Strip all that away and try to imagine hearing a then-relatively unknown Oasis for the first time. Imagine being told that half the band was not yet 22 years old, that they were a new band, releasing their third-ever single? Can you imagine, however simple it may have been lyrically, hearing Live Forever for the first time? In particular, just 4 months after Kurt Cobain’s suicide, after many fans were left feeling like they were staring at the definitive end of an era of honest independent music?

In 1994, Oasis were ’77’s punk all over again. Entering a landscape of artists (a term Liam Gallagher has derided) who internalised their music and recoiled at the notion of explicit success, Oasis were a brash rejection of shoegaze and indie’s philosophies, even going as far as to instruct the presenters of BBC Radio 1’s Evening Sessions to tell the world that Oasis were not an indie band. They were a rock ‘n’ roll band, and a band that dared to aim high, openly and with no apologies (all apologies for the pun). 

That was a philosophy they would live by until the bitter end, for better or worse. In a world of falling ambition and no hope, as Britain emerged ravaged by the Thatcher years to find there was nowhere left for its young to go, Oasis were determined to write their own destiny, largely for themselves, but invariably, for their entire generation. 

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