Oasis

Whilst “Definitely Maybe” is about dreaming of being a popstar in a band, “What’s The Story” is about actually being a popstar in a band.

(Noel Gallagher)

When it occurred to me to learn guitar, it was to learn to play Oasis songs. At the shop where I bought mine, a bargain-basement student model for less than a hundred thousand lire, they told me: "You'll pick it up in no time, it's always the same chords" (not that the secret to popular music is a B7 chord, I should have said). How many times has that same scene played out, around the world? Probably more than for any other band in the history of music. It's true, Oasis songs are easy to play: after a few months of lessons I could pick out "Wonderwall"; in under a year I was attempting the solo on "Live Forever".

The chords are always the same and, with a capo, almost always open ones, but it's above all the rhythm that makes Oasis songs so easy to replicate, being nearly all in a four-four time that generally never goes beyond cruising speed (as they say in your first guitar lesson, the right hand is "the hard part"). Even the more "punk-rock" Oasis tracks ("Headshrinker", "Bring It On Down") can be played without breaking a sweat.

It's largely for this reason that Oasis are viewed with a certain condescension, for this invariably mellow rhythm section, as if slowed down so everyone could keep up, which has fed a misconception that took root in countless teenagers (and not only them), mistaking a technique that's ordinary at best for a talent that's equally ordinary. Even today, plenty of people are convinced anyone could write albums like "Definitely Maybe" and "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?": just learn the basic chords (at most with some slightly showy flourish, like an E minor on the high strings — itself lifted from the Beatles anyway), and sketch out some melody you've already heard somewhere. Strange that in over twenty years no one else has managed it.

It must be said, Oasis are indeed among the bands most frequently found guilty of plagiarism, with lawsuits lost, tracks pulled at the last minute from the final tracklist, and so on. Why shouldn't this make us cry scandal and brand Oasis the biggest bluff in contemporary music? Because copying — and even mangling — is entirely consistent with what we expect from Oasis, destroyers and restorers in one, and, without further ado, they're also brilliant at doing covers (the hypertrophied "Cum On Feel The Noize", or the filthy "I Am The Walrus"). But it's in Oasis's relationship with tradition that the meaning of their music becomes even clearer.

Just try, if you don't believe it, listening to how the New Seekers' folk ditty "I Want To Teach The World To Sing" (who won $500,000 in damages) morphs in their hands into "Shakermaker": a dirty, ugly world superimposed onto hippie paradise, like watching some lout stumbling out of a pub throw up on a shy, prim young woman handing out leaflets for the parish on the street corner. It's an image that can be comic or disturbing depending on the context, but it captures the uniqueness of Oasis's music, purely hormonal, irreverent without being destructive, poetically clumsy and coarse. Instinctive in the way someone names an album, or even their own band, after how a kid answers the phone, or after an advert for a discount store in the local paper. Oasis's music is the music of adolescence.

When rock was mainstream

In the collective imagination, Oasis have remained the band of social redemption, evident on their debut "Definitely Maybe", less so on this second album (also due to the more "refined" fills and rolls of new drummer Alan White, compared to the more primitive Tony McCarroll, whom more than a few Oasis fans still prefer) — their true crowning moment: the working class hero who finds salvation from a colourless life only in rock'n'roll. The image is used to contrast them with the more "well-mannered" (and, later, longer-lived) Blur, but it can't be denied a grain of truth, both in how the band presented themselves outside strictly musical terms, and above all in the band's sonic aesthetic.

More than an album, "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" should really be called an era, given the sheer amount of more or less memorable material produced, only part of which made it onto the record. This era begins on 18 December 1994, when the band released a single straddling the two albums: "Whatever". "Whatever" is arranged and written in a rather new way for Oasis: in hindsight, it's hard to place it alongside any track from "Definitely Maybe". In short, it's their first big Beatles-derived ballad, but with that mix of production techniques (we're at the height of the loudness war, and it really does feel like a battlefield), performance style and songwriting that make the track an epitome of the pop song performed by a rock band, which is perhaps the form in which Oasis identify most often. Major chords (the beloved G, ultimately the most beautiful chord there is), sweeping strings, Liam's raw and brazen vocal, all deployed shamelessly and in overflowing quantity, in a dizzying six-and-a-half-minute embrace.

Maybe not at the time, but in hindsight the band's shift in perspective is already crystal clear: "We're here for you, and we're going to show you what it's like to be the last rockstars in history." And when the first strum of "Hello" kicks in, you know something is about to start that, for all its idiocy and squalor, will be unrepeatable, like the first summer holiday without your parents.

Maybe the songs on "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" don't have the soul of those on "Definitely Maybe", and they're certainly more reassuring than the implicit unease of the misfit proclaiming "I'm a rock'n'roll star". "Live Forever" sounds as raw and true as "Wonderwall" might sound contrived and slick. "Might", because in the end "Wonderwall" is what explains the visceral, almost "preternatural" bond people form with Oasis songs. What would "Wonderwall" be without that strum, without Liam's voice, which always seems to sing without knowing why? Probably little more than a passing hit for a Ryan Adams, or for anyone else (Noel included) who's tried to reinterpret it, succeeding only in laying bare its construction, the cheesiness lurking in Noel's songwriting. "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" in this sense condenses, with the welcome slackness of its numerous "situationist" bits of nonsense ("Walking slowly down the hall/Faster than a cannonball", "The sink is full of fishes/She's got dirty dishes on the brain"), the "You can make it" message that, however threadbare, is what sets apart so much of the most celebrated pop music — assuming, and it's not a given, that a literal message is even needed.

Everyone now recognises that Noel is certainly no fine wordsmith (anyone hoping for a Paul Weller-style career — Weller, incidentally, was something of a godfather to this record — has sadly had to think again), and Noel himself has said his writing process went: melody (often just before falling asleep) — syllables — lyrics. "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" is brilliant, precisely, in how it foregrounds the melody of the songs, with bridges and build-ups leading into the huge choruses, with Noel's rudimentary but booming, "orchestral" solos, with a production that flattens and thickens the "average" signal, letting the songs' unbeatable melodic potential explode. The two-dimensional effect (mono too, you might say), generally frowned upon by those looking for depth in music and art, is here overwhelming on the listener, like a naive painting in bold colours: "Some Might Say", the album's first single and the one most in continuity with the previous record (the only one on which Tony McCarroll plays, with his caveman beat), is the musical equivalent of having the sun in your eyes, for better and for worse. It's a powerful, cathartic feeling, in its own way.

Despite the odd misstep of "Roll With It", which crashed miserably against Blur's "Country House", six singles were pulled from "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?": whatever you think of it, it's the kind of record you simply don't see anymore. Even though the music world has changed enormously, are there rock bands today who could expect to place six songs from a single album on the streaming charts of any platform? That's fairly objective testimony to just how exceptional this record is, and the point is amplified further when you consider how many B-sides from that era have become firm favourites among fans and the band alike (celebrated in more recent setlists and in the band's various greatest hits collections).

Alongside the famous "Don't Look Back In Anger" and "Champagne Supernova", two of the Oasis tracks most accused of — and most envied for — their Beatles comparisons, there's enough material left over to fill an imaginary third record from the 1994-1995 period: worth mentioning are "Acquiesce", through and through a peace anthem between the Gallagher brothers (worth remembering that the album cover doesn't feature either of them, as originally planned, because the two had a row shortly before the photo shoot), and "The Masterplan", the song that, a great britpop classic in the "singer-songwriter" vein, with its tone of grown-up, existential-spiritual preaching worthy of the best solo Lennon/Harrison, gave hope for Noel Gallagher's future career (also worth noting is the meditative hobo-song "Talk Tonight").

Instead, even if it's hard to admit for those who lived through it firsthand, for reasons of age (and given how late things tend to arrive here, I imagine in Italy it's not only those who were too young at the time), it's only the post-Knebworth Oasis (a double concert with 250,000 people a night, against a demand for 2.6 million tickets, the highest in British history — we're talking about '96) for whom "(What's The Story) Morning Glory?" contains within it so much of the band's artistic last will and testament.

In its songs, generosity and contentment coexist, along with the sense of wanting to seize — or rather, of having seized — a chance that will never come again, as in the triumphant nostalgia of "Don't Look Back In Anger", or in the prayer of "Cast No Shadow", historically dedicated to their friend Richard Ashcroft, at the time still far from commercial success, but easily reapplied to any songwriter or band on the verge of leaving the stage. It's an arc you can trace across the whole record, which begins with the opening "It's good to be back" of "Hello" and ends, it's now clear, with a farewell, as spectacular as rock'n'roll's goodbye to the world as we knew it was always going to be:

Someday you will find me

Caught beneath the landslide

In a champagne supernova in the sky

Ride the wave of great music

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19/06/2016