Guy's pitches are better than other people's pieces

Friday 8/30/24

And I won't even be doing this one, it seems.

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Greetings. So: Had been planning to pitch you an Oasis piece circa now before word came out of the reunion yesterday and the piece you ran about said reunion. As this is completely different--and tweaked a bit further on account of the response to the reunion--I figured I'd run it out anyway.

Regarding the reunion: I have zero doubt that it will be absolutely f---ing horrendous and just a big, sloppy sing-along for people who think getting drunk and belting some choruses out there in the crowd constitutes a great gig. Liam Gallagher's voice went in the autumn of 1997. You can listen to those gigs and pinpoint when it fell apart for good. So you're going to have a bellowing frog as a frontman, and yeah, I don't like any of this. 

But there was a time--and I think people are clueless about this now--when Oasis was not only the best rock and roll band in the world, but one of the best we've ever had, true makers of art for this medium, and that brings me to this reissue of 1994's Definitely Maybe and, crucially, the unreleased material it contains, which is some of the very finest rock and roll there is. 

What we're getting on social media and the like with Oasis is all of this "They were so overrated they only had a couple hits" nonsense, and people saying, "But it's good nostalgia." 

Let me be plain: I hate nostalgia. I hate the concept of nostalgia. It makes my soul vomit. This idea of looking back, and things were better then, and if only it could be as it were, etc. Sickens me. It's so defeatist. 

What I care about is blazing, deathless art, and that's what Oasis made. Blazing, deathless art matters as much later on as it did then. And I don't think anyone thinks of Oasis this way. They played these gigs in the spring of 1995 that make for one of the great runs in rock and roll (and we can link to one that will take your head off). They talked big, sure. Liam Gallagher would say that he could sing as well as John Lennon. For all of the fighting between Liam and Noel, the latter could still speak honestly about what was what. He gave this interview one when he brought up Lennon and Liam, and said, essentially, people might be surprised, but Liam could give John Lennon a run for his money as a singer once upon a time. 

And you know what? He could. He was that good. Briefly. 

I want to put the kibosh on this nostalgia nonsense and talk about that blazing, deathless art. These weren't louts who battled Blur and that's they're thing for history. They brought it artistically. There is no album that has drumming like Definitely Maybe. Nothing has ever sounded like it. Been produced like it. For all of the bits allegedly cribbed from other songs--which was always overstated anyway.

It irks me to no ends how lazy we are. People are free to know these things, but everyone just talks out of their ass, usually dismissively, and they miss out on stuff.

This is too good to miss out on. We're here for stuff like this, to partake of it. Not to just to get hammered and shout out the chorus of "Live Forever."