Vinyl Maelstrom
Weekly podcasts providing an expert briefing on a wide range of intriguing musical themes.
Vinyl Maelstrom
Oasis and the 90s Nostalgia Delusion
Oasis are reforming for a reunion tour. Have you heard?
What marks out Oasis as so different from their contemporaries? It's hard to believe it's their musical sophistication or their profound lyrics. But something makes them incredibly popular.
We also take a look more broadly at why people get so misty-eyed about the 90s. Is it just harking back to a non-existent recent golden age, or is there something specific about the 90s themselves? Something to do with technology or society that was very different from now?
Join me, Ian Forth for an entirely reasonable discussion.
Be expertly briefed each week on a wide variety of intriguing musical topics.
The Oasis Reunion and The 90s Nostalgia Delusion
“I genuinely believe Oasis are the most damaging pop-cultural force in recent British history. It’s easy to attack them for being musically regressive: after all, they didn’t just Stop The Clocks, to quote the title of their 2006 best-of, but rewound them by 30 years. Oasis offer nothing but a sludgy, trudgy, brontosaurus-bottomed waddle, perfect for that adult nappy gait so beloved of their singer and fans. Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager. Is there anything more useless than a rock band that doesn’t rock? Lyrically they’re useless. But the real problem is that they set social attitudes back even further.”
Not my words, but those of Guardian columnist writing in the Guardian. But is that polemic fair? After all, people are falling over themselves to get tickets for their reunion tour which has just been announced. Let’s take a medium-sized dive.
The Medium Sized Dive Dive
Oasis are an English rock band formed in Manchester in 1991 and are headed by the Gallagher brothers Noel and Liam. They released their record-setting debut album Definitely Maybe (1994), which quickly became the fastest-selling debut album in British history at the time. The following year they released (What's the Story) Morning Glory? in the midst of a highly publicised chart rivalry with peers Blur. The Gallagher brothers featured regularly in tabloid newspapers throughout the 1990s for their public disputes and wild lifestyles. In 1996, Oasis performed two nights at Knebworth for an audience of 125,000 each time, the largest outdoor concerts in UK history at the time. After that it was all downhill and the group gradually dissolved over many painful years into a morass of bickering, bile and boring songs.
What was and is the seductive power of Oasis?
Positivity. Although your mental image of Oasis might be a sneering scowl which eventually turned into vitriolic bile, that wasn't their original vibe. The songs were called things like Champagne Supernova, Supersonic and Live Forever. In fact, the latter was a direct response to a Nirvana song called I hate myself and want to die. When that first album came out in 1994 people were ready for some positivity after grunge and Kurt Cobain's death. The band were a breath of fresh air. They weren't by the end, but that's how they started.
Relatability. They looked a bit like guys you met down the pub, at a football match or standing in the queue at the late-night burger van. This was not totally a new look but they owned it.
To take a sports parallel soccer players like Gazza or Wayne Rooney look like the sort of guys you could imagine going down the pub with. Bob Hawke became the old Australian Prime Minister in part because he was a regular guy, a man of the people who held the record for downing a yard of ale. The most effective way to win an election is to be the candidate people can imagine inviting to a barbeque and having a beer with. Same with Oasis. To quote a football chant, they’re one of us.
Simplicity. This is related to relatability. Noel described his guitar playing as average at best. And he wasn't lying. There are almost no guitar effects on the first album. But the novels that sell are not the novels with the longest words. If you wanted to play along to Definitely Maybe you could. The drums were arguably too simple and they actually got a decent drummer in after the first album.
But, to start with at least, the idea was not unlike the early days of punk rock. If those guys on stage can make it anyone can make it. They wrote catchy sing-along anthems that blokes could bawl into the night sky at pub closing time.
Loudness. They were loud. Not just loud, but really loud. Again, not a new idea - see the joke in Spinal Tap about the amp going up to 11. But nor was it just their live performances. Their producer Owen Morris claims he invented a technique called brick walling, pushing the volume to the very limit of what a CD could produce without distortion. One of the things people loved about Definitely Maybe, when they played it in their car or while they were doing the washing up, is its replication of live performance. It stood at the opposite end of the spectrum to an album like Unknown Pleasures which was totally distinctive from Joy Division's live performance. And it clearly worked.
Finally, Charisma. And by charisma, specifically Liam. Sure he's an archetype - the rock'n'roll bad boy. But in order for this whole thing to work you had to have Liam’s swagger and self-belief. He had the looks and, to start with at least, the singing chops. Before long they were a car crash – listen to the Wembley performance from 2000 if you can stand it. But bands like Oasis demand a charismatic frontman and drama to fill the column inches. Liam with his brother provided all that.
Why Oasis are problematic
People can like what they want and spend their money on whatever they want within reason. But some concerns and doubts about Oasis are worth airing.
The reunion is primarily there to raise funds for Noel’s 20 million quid divorce settlement. So, this tour does not start off with the purest of motives. Of course, it's not unique in that respect. Reunion tours are always about the money.
We've mentioned the fact that Oasis are brutally simplistic from a musical point of view. But that’s nothing compared to the wretched state of their lyrics. This is where they differ from their 60s heroes The Beatles The Stones, The Who and the Kinks. You get the sense that the words in an Oasis song don't have any purpose at all. It's generally quite easy to cherry pick bad lyrics from any band even the best ones, but hell here is some.
Play with your toys even though they make noise
It will not fall and not from the sky and it don't eat no humble pie
I dig his friends, I dig his shoes
I'd like to be under the sea stolen - from The Beatles obviously - but I'd probably need a phone
It's hasta manana. You’re on your own banana skin feet now
When the voices in your head gets so loud and your problems are the size of a cow.
Hopefully you take my point. Nobody listens to an Oasis song for the lyrics - which is just as well - but it’s the thoughtlessness that gets me; the will-this-do attitude. It’s an insult to the audience. What exactly is a wonderwall (apart from something George Harrison once wrote)?
It's easy to think of the 90s as a happier, more innocent time – more on that in a bit. But some ‘90s attitudes deserve to stay dead and buried within that decade. The Gallagher brothers are essentially old school reactionaries. For them, Robbie Williams is gay and Kylie Minogue’s a lesbian. Jay-Z can’t headline Glastonbury, because he’s not a white rock star. Glastonbury’s too woke. Prince Harry’s a snowflake. Nigel Farage has got a point, actually.
The thing is other working class NW musician icons are available who aren’t xenophobic, homophobic or misogynistic. Jarvis Cocker of Pulp is arch, wry and fun. Mark E Smith of The Fall always had women in his band and read a lot of books. Oasis is a boy’s club and one of their members is called Bonehead. Celebrating an Oasis reunion feels like a retrograde step.
But is their some deeper seated hankering for the 90s which underlies this misplaced fondness for a golden age that never was. Let’s have a look.
Why Do We Feel Nostalgic For the 90s
There are three main reasons why people feel nostalgic about the 90s.
The first is generic. Humans always have this sense that there was a golden age roughly one generation before today. In 1100 the Anglo-Saxon chronicle is pining for the days of Edward the Confessor who died in 1066. Why 30 years ago? There is a theory that humans cycle through 3 decades and then start again. In the 90s we looked back at the 60s as a golden era. In the 2020s we’re doing the same with the 90s. Perhaps it’s as straightforward as generational change. Children who never experienced Oasis the first time want the experience their parents banged on about while they were growing up. The parents are buying the tickets for old time’s sake.
But I think there are two other reasons as well which aren't generically generational but specific to the 90s.
The second reason is technological. It was the last decade before the Internet. Children of the 90s enjoyed video games, but still played outside. Paging, emailing and embryonic chat communities seemed modern and interesting, not intimidating and overwhelming. The Pandora’s Box of the Internet back then suggested endless exciting possibility. Today, in a law of unintended consequences, everyone feels a little paranoid. We are more acutely and instantly aware of social injustice, wars, security infractions, identity vulnerability, the extinction of resources, diseases, crises of food, water, electricity, land, air, morals and values. As someone online put it the other day – sorry, citation needed – the 90s were the last decade when we still dreamt.
Then the third reason many people hanker after the 90s is because it was a unique slice of time - post-Cold War and pre-9/11.
Bad things on a global scale did happen in the ‘90s. At the same time as Oasis were releasing their debut album in Rwanda a million people were being killed in a genocide. Even within Europe there was a terrible war in the Balkans throughout the 90s. But that’s not typically how people tend to remember it. Francis Fukuyama wrote a famous book in 1992 which seems laughable now called The End of History and the Last Man in which he argued that with the ascendancy of Western liberal democracy, humanity had reached "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
It felt like a good time for most of us - in technology, the economy, the arts and music. After an early 90s recession, everything was booming for the rest of the decade. In Britain there was the brittle optimism of Britpop, then the dawn of New Labour. In the US, the Clinton Era. In one survey when people were asked what was the worst thing that happened in the 90s, a popular answer was the acquittal of OJ Simpson.
But 9/11 in 2001 bought a belated curtain down on the 90s holiday from reality. For most people life was never the same again. I think for Americans in particular it was that sense that people have after their house has been burgled. A place that you had previously thought was secure and happy was violated. The ‘90s were the last time when people felt optimistic with a sense that the world was heading in a positive direction.
This isn’t a political podcast so I won’t rehearse all the consequences of 9/11 we’re still living with. But I think for a lot of people Oasis, bizarre as it might seem, have the same sort of symbolism as childhood Christmases. Happy and uncomplicated. If mum and dad did argue in the kitchen, that’s the bit we choose to forget.