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Awesome Oasis/Britpop thing

Started by bgmnts, June 10, 2021, 08:03:28 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

greenman

Quote from: DJ Bob Hoskins on June 11, 2021, 01:12:19 AMETA: I'd perhaps even make a counter-argument in that the Britpop era also introduced me to bands such as Pulp and the Divine Comedy and Manic Street Preachers and Belle & Sebastian, and the idea that not only was it OK to be skinny, slightly effeminate, oddly-dressed and overly-sensitive in a hitherto conformist macho society, but that it was actually cool to be that type of person. So if that's Oasis's fault too, then cheers, Oasis.

My memory of the time was that somewhat of a justification for Oasis, Ocean Colour Scene, etc via the idea it would ultimately lead to more interesting music getting attention. I think you could argue for awhile after the Britpop peak in 94-96 that was actually the case but then there was by the millennium a reaction against that, the rise of the Strokes, Libertines, etc that really made surely bloke rock was here to stay long term.

Wet Blanket

Entertaining article but I don't know if I agree that Britpop had any lasting impact, positive or negative. Perhaps it was the soundtrack to Blairism and the birth of the neoliberal capitalist consensus or whatever but that's arguably more coincidence than anything else. It was all over within about four years, then there was the strange period of cheapo boy bands vs turgid rock balladry ala Travis, Embrace etc. and then that brief revival of New Wave before streaming more or less made pop music irrelevant.

I lay the death of pop culture on BBC2 and Channel 4's giving up on the avant-garde stuff and pivoting towards property and gardening programmes.

Sebastian Cobb

You still get lads warbling along to things like Champagne Supernova and playing it enough for it to be a bit annoying on pub jukeboxes so I'd argue it's had some impact.

druss

Quote from: jobotic on June 11, 2021, 11:23:39 AM
Who cares if he's nice in person? Most people are.

He's contributing to the Tory culture wars. Fuck him and his woke snowflake wanker words.
Fair enough, I try not to hate people for their politics, most of my friends are liberal but I don't disown the few who aren't, always try to see the best in people. Look to America to see how the "us vs them" narrative plays out. Hating the other side won't make them change their mind or make the world a better place.

jobotic

Quote from: druss on June 11, 2021, 12:29:48 PM
Fair enough, I try not to hate people for their politics, most of my friends are liberal but I don't disown the few who aren't, always try to see the best in people. Look to America to see how the "us vs them" narrative plays out. Hating the other side won't make them change their mind or make the world a better place.

Same here when it comes to friends, family and colleagues. Might be different if they were spewing shit about the "woke" in The S*n though.

Kankurette

Quote from: druss on June 11, 2021, 12:29:48 PM
Fair enough, I try not to hate people for their politics, most of my friends are liberal but I don't disown the few who aren't, always try to see the best in people. Look to America to see how the "us vs them" narrative plays out. Hating the other side won't make them change their mind or make the world a better place.
I doubt Noel Gallagher cares whether some randos on a forum hate him or not. Even if I was nice to him, he'd be set in his ways and I'm a woman so he'd just write me off anyway. Also, I have very little time for white people who use 'woke' as an insult. It sets off more red flags than Old Trafford on match day. And if someone's politics are actively harmful to me - e.g. they think disabled people are inferior - I don't see why I should tolerate it. Life's too short.

The Britpop era got me into Space, SFA, Catatonia, the Manics and Kenickie, so it wasn't all bad. There was some good/innovative stuff around at that time.

sevendaughters

Noel is someone who had quite a patch of depression in the late 80s and late 90s and got out of the rut at the same time he became famous and rich, thereby thinking that his cure was money and fame, and now acts as if taking the side of power is actually taking the side of himself. What has been hubris in others has never been popped in him, and so he continues.

Brundle-Fly

I completely understand why Neil Kulkarni and Simon Price despise Oasis as journos because they were in the eye of the storm from the off. They probably know stuff that goes beyond Noelypops being a reactionary old wind-up merchant who knows what buttons to press.

I really liked Definitely Maybe when it came out. It was only when I read more and more interviews with the brothers, banging on about 'real music', promoting this nebulous working-class heroes ethos, and generally being really arrogant oaves that I soon switched off. (And Noel wishing AIDS on half of Blur didn't help, although he did apologise for that). Cocaine abuse played a big part in him being awful back then but he doesn't have that excuse now. He's pretty much bulletproof, isnt he?

Video Game Fan 2000

#38
Quote from: turnstyle on June 11, 2021, 09:59:42 AM
Columbia's good innit.

Original version is indispensible. Definitely Maybe itself has always sounded like dogshit. Be Here Now is fascinating as an artifact but not in the way anyone intended, shit like My Big Mouth finds a middle ground between Loveless and Complete.

Noel Gallagher has gone from making me laugh regularly to being totally insufferable but he'll have to do a lot worse than talk like a Facebook Uncle before I take fucking Prince Harrys side against his cmon. Fuck the grift and cynicism. Harry is one of the worst human beings in the public eye right now and its only the ire of twats like Penis Morneg that is blinding people (temporarily one hopes) to how nasty him and Meghan are and how damaging their concoction of woke banter and "mental health awareness" might turn out to be if enough vulnerable people fall for the brand.

JamesTC

Should preface by saying that I love Oasis. Noel and Liam are cunts but different types of cunts.

Liam is a dumb cunt. Regularly does and says shitty things but also occasionally has these weird moments of likeability and self awareness. Just yesterday I looked at his Twitter and saw him just chatting away with fans and answering questions (albeit in his own shall we say enigmatic way). For all of his many faults, he does at the very least seem to care about the fans. Low bar, I know. Hitting rock bottom a few years ago and repeatedly begging Noel to get Oasis back together probably helped.

Noel is smarter. He should know better. But he just comes out with more and more culture war right wing bollocks as time goes on. Back in the 90s the arrogance was part of the image And it seemed like he just played it up but now it just comes across as a sad old man. And the people he seems to hate most these days are actually the Oasis fans (makes a change from Oasis drummers). He seems to have a bee in his bonnet that Liam is doing well by just doing Oasis knockoffs and playing old Oasis songs while his experimental shite isn't getting the praise he thinks it deserves.

I'd already decided not to buy his best of album (it comes with a bonus disc of new stuff) but if I hadn't then I definitely wouldn't have been buying it after he did an exclusive interview with The Sun. Sell out prick can fuck off now as can any future release of his.

Video Game Fan 2000

Is that a man with legs made of sausages? That's not real.

Video Game Fan 2000

Pissing on Bourdieu books and flicking Vs at fideist analysis of pop culture: ♪ you and I are gonna live for ever ♪

dr beat

Quote from: Wet Blanket on June 11, 2021, 11:40:01 AM
Entertaining article but I don't know if I agree that Britpop had any lasting impact, positive or negative. Perhaps it was the soundtrack to Blairism and the birth of the neoliberal capitalist consensus or whatever but that's arguably more coincidence than anything else. It was all over within about four years, then there was the strange period of cheapo boy bands vs turgid rock balladry ala Travis, Embrace etc. and then that brief revival of New Wave before streaming more or less made pop music irrelevant.

I lay the death of pop culture on BBC2 and Channel 4's giving up on the avant-garde stuff and pivoting towards property and gardening programmes.

I'm thinking about Taylor's article.  I can understand the disappointment of people who remember the early 80s, when it seemed like a load of bands were becoming genuinely widely popular, like say 2-tone or New Romantic stuff, which looked like it was challenging attitudes around race and sexuality in Thatcher's Britain. But then it fizzled out by the mid-80s.  I can also understand the disappointment people have might have felt in the 90s with what Britpop became and stood for. after an initial optimism when the decade turned. 

I take his point about the complacency masked as optimism in Britpop, but I don't think you can just blame that on Britpop.  There was a lot of complacency (arrogance?) around generally in the early 90s.  I'm thinking mainly about the whole Fukuyama End of History 'we don't have to worry about politics anymore, its all sorted' which was rife for a while.  David Stubbs (to pull in another of the CMP gang) has talked about the lack of perceived threat to the Western world in that period, and that politics was a given.  Everyone knew the Tories were fucked pre-97 and assumed that Blair would walk it, and no-one saw anything to really fight for or rail against.  I'd say Britpop was a symptom of that attitude rather than a cause. 

turnstyle

Quote from: JamesTC on June 11, 2021, 01:16:05 PM

He seems to have a bee in his bonnet that Liam is doing well by just doing Oasis knockoffs and playing old Oasis songs


Genuine question: Is he? His Beady Eye (christ) and solo stuff seems to be entirely irrelevant, at least as far as I can tell. Maybe there's a contingent of hardcore Oasis fans who have followed him, and I imagine that pre-pandemic he was making some decent cash with gigging, but otherwise I get the impression that his post-Oasis work has been pretty weak and received with a lack of general interest. I could be totally wrong about that. Regardless, I'm sure the Oasis money will merrily keep him in cold Fosters and Kangol bucket hats for the next 8000 years.

Noel's solo output seems to have met the same fate to me, though again, I'm sure he has a supportive audience.

Ironic really considering all the Beatles worshiping they did in the 90s, that their own solo output should be so flaccid. Most of the Beatles went onto write some cracking songs immediately after they disbanded, where as I couldn't hum you a single Noel or Liam solo song.


sevendaughters

As You Were by LG went platinum. Second one only gold. Beady Eye declined too, gold then silver.

turnstyle

Quote from: sevendaughters on June 11, 2021, 01:43:38 PM
As You Were by LG went platinum. Second one only gold. Beady Eye declined too, gold then silver.

Thanks for that info, off to top myself.

peanutbutter

Noel's solo stuff has tipped along with some kind of moderate interest but we're probably around the point where even in his own head he's just a nostalgia act so the pivot into being a reactionary old cunt would make sense to happen around now.
Blame the poor performance of the next album he had zero faith in on wokeness.


sevendaughters

I reckon his Best of High Flying Birds will go to number 1. Can only name one song from it.

Video Game Fan 2000

I hated how because everyone enjoyed that youtube condensation of his DVD commentary he included a skit referencing it, or acting out one of the bits, in his next video. Which had Marr on it and all.

Couldn't just acknowledge that people find his curmudgeonly comments funny when he lets his guard down, he had to enshrine it in a stupid skit. The man seems incapable of enjoying anything unless its officially pronounced as a classic moment. How can you be a devote Beatles fan and have zero appreciation for spontaneity and serendipity, and want every song to have a proper middle eight like a proper song. The Beatles, the band famous for only doing things properly and only making proper classic rock n roll songs.

SOMK

Brit pop was a culture war, it was a mostly media driven phenomena that lumped together a few bands influenced by the music coke-head middle-aged people in executive positions liked when they were teenagers, as opposed to the three-headed hydra of rave culture, grunge and rap/hip hop.

It went hand-in-hand with the middle class discovery of football post Hillsborough, the Premiership breakaway & 'Fever Pitch'. And other reactionary cultural phenomena like, Lads magazines, the YBA's, 'reclaiming' the symbology of Empire from racists (union jacks and English flags ahoy!), Four Weddings and a Funeral (which led directly to Boris Johnson's Churchill/Hugh Grant schtick) & the grotesquely unearned 'end of history' thesis that the best and only system of Anglo-centric free market capitalism had 'won' (and the resulting unearned self-confidence) that emerged following the fall of the Soviet Union.

It was the creative manifestation of a tiny few members of a generation of people who Thatcherism was content to spunk the North-sea oil money on giving dole payments in lieu of employment and housing was still vaguely affordable before New Labour hit on the bright idea of welfare to work, a 'hand up' not a 'hand out', meaning same people on dole had now to perpetually present themselves as looking for work and absolutely could not spend their spare time fucking around learning guitar. Leading fairly rapidly to working class music acts in general getting filtered out of pop music.

As dreadful as Oasis are in many respects (though I've have a soft spot for Liam Gallagher's Zero Fucks Smash Hits interviews about spots "cut them off with a razor, I've never had them" and urinating on public transport "I just sat there and let it swish around and pretended it had nothing to do with me"), they are positively Shakespearean when compared to Mumford and Sons.

Favourite random Brit Pop fact, is when Bret Anderson first met Justine Frischmann's found her accent so posh he thought she had a speech impediment.

Quote from: Key on June 11, 2021, 07:14:07 AM
The thing that really puts me off about Oasis' music is that it's so stodgy. Listening to the plodding sludge makes me feel like I've just eaten six pies. Everythings always at this low-mid tempo, not fast enough to be exciting and not slow enough to be compelling  but the exact bmp of dullness. Then the guitars and Liam whine over the top like drunken bagpipes, a 5 mile trek through a bog. the Sex Pistols as heard through the ears of a dysthymic. God Noel where is the spirit? Where the invention you pentatonic cunt.

The description 'drummer sounds like his shoes are wet' is a great line.
Not sure where I read it, recent though

The Culture Bunker

Quote from: A Hat Like That on June 11, 2021, 03:29:31 PM
The description 'drummer sounds like his shoes are wet' is a great line.
Not sure where I read it, recent though
You look at the supposed inspirations behind Oasis - the Beatles, the Smiths, Stone Roses, Slade: they all had very good rhythm sections. But then I always presumed their wall-of-sludge guitar sound was more by design, as the idea of having any kind of "groove" might be seen as a bit soft.

JamesTC

Quote from: sevendaughters on June 11, 2021, 01:43:38 PM
As You Were by LG went platinum. Second one only gold. Beady Eye declined too, gold then silver.

Beady Eye were pretty much DOA. The name killed them off alone. Still think their first album is the best post-Oasis release but I admit that isn't a popular opinion. I guess a knockoff version of Don't Believe The Truth was what I fancied at the time.

Obviously Liam isn't hitting the heights that Oasis did or even that Noel did with his first album but he is doing much better than Brady Eye ever were. Three number one albums and a few songs that have done well (Wall of Glass, For What It's Worth and Once). Playing on bigger stages too.

Video Game Fan 2000

Quote from: The Culture Bunker on June 11, 2021, 03:43:17 PM
You look at the supposed inspirations behind Oasis - the Beatles, the Smiths, Stone Roses, Slade: they all had very good rhythm sections. But then I always presumed their wall-of-sludge guitar sound was more by design, as the idea of having any kind of "groove" might be seen as a bit soft.

I don't know how intentional the effect was but this is exactly how most of Definitely Maybe was recorded, I think.

The band laid down a skeleton of a track. The engineer would sweeten the drums by making them metronymic, sometimes plastering them with drum machines (really obvious in "Bring It On Down") and Noel would come in and "coat it", put enough guitar on it to make it unrecognisable then it would all get compressed into the sound of million farts escaping a hotwater bottle. For all Oasis' alleged realness this is exactly how I imagine Stock Aikten and Waterman would have done it if they decided to have a piece of the grunge pie.

I think this why the original release of "Columbia" is the choice keeper track for Oasis: Noel hadn't got the image in his head straight enough to efface the influence of the Smiths and the Roses and its the only elastic sounding track he's ever recorded unless "Setting Sun" counts as his. Its a shame he didn't record stuff like "Acqueisce" with the same attitude. I've wondered if the reason he hates Standing on the Shoulder so much, other than how fucking terrible is it, is that he went back to try something looser with a bit of menace and a bit of a wiggle on it, and he just ate shit even though the riffs and hooks (Gas Panic and all) were miles better than anything he'd done in years. The next record was well away from anything dancy pure fartcore wall of guitar ballad bullshit and one of the worst albums I've ever heard.

Kankurette

Quote from: SOMK on June 11, 2021, 02:55:56 PM
Brit pop was a culture war, it was a mostly media driven phenomena that lumped together a few bands influenced by the music coke-head middle-aged people in executive positions liked when they were teenagers, as opposed to the three-headed hydra of rave culture, grunge and rap/hip hop.

It went hand-in-hand with the middle class discovery of football post Hillsborough, the Premiership breakaway & 'Fever Pitch'. And other reactionary cultural phenomena like, Lads magazines, the YBA's, 'reclaiming' the symbology of Empire from racists (union jacks and English flags ahoy!), Four Weddings and a Funeral (which led directly to Boris Johnson's Churchill/Hugh Grant schtick) & the grotesquely unearned 'end of history' thesis that the best and only system of Anglo-centric free market capitalism had 'won' (and the resulting unearned self-confidence) that emerged following the fall of the Soviet Union.

It was the creative manifestation of a tiny few members of a generation of people who Thatcherism was content to spunk the North-sea oil money on giving dole payments in lieu of employment and housing was still vaguely affordable before New Labour hit on the bright idea of welfare to work, a 'hand up' not a 'hand out', meaning same people on dole had now to perpetually present themselves as looking for work and absolutely could not spend their spare time fucking around learning guitar. Leading fairly rapidly to working class music acts in general getting filtered out of pop music.

As dreadful as Oasis are in many respects (though I've have a soft spot for Liam Gallagher's Zero Fucks Smash Hits interviews about spots "cut them off with a razor, I've never had them" and urinating on public transport "I just sat there and let it swish around and pretended it had nothing to do with me"), they are positively Shakespearean when compared to Mumford and Sons.

Favourite random Brit Pop fact, is when Bret Anderson first met Justine Frischmann's found her accent so posh he thought she had a speech impediment.
Oasis at least wrote some songs that were fun to dance to, or catchy, or even moving (yes, I am going to get sneered at but I can't help my reaction to music, you know?) Mumford & Sons don't even have that going for them. They could only dream of writing something like The Masterplan or Cast No Shadow.

Lemming

I can't imagine having much of a reaction beyond bemused laughter to anything the Gallaghers do or say. Noel does come across as somewhat more of a cunt than Liam, who is either genuinely a complete fucking idiot or has perfected the persona of such. Both of them are funny in small doses as ridiculous caricatures, a pair of fuckwits who have essentially been reduced to court jesters due to the fact that they now exist in a world in which they're simultaneously behind the times and no longer really relevant, and yet still firmly embedded in popular culture. Liam seems to be at least somewhat aware of this, which renders him occasionally likeable.

As for the eternal "is Oasis shit" discussion, Definitely Maybe is a great album, especially the big deluxe edition that has Cloudburst and all that on it. Columbia and Supersonic are great, and then there's a lot of good songs holding the rest of it together, ie Shakermaker, Cigarettes and Alcohol, what-have-you. I even love Liam's vocals. A lot of the hate for the music feels like a semi-performative reaction to the Gallaghers and the cultural impact of Oasis, rather than to the music itself. I can see why people fucking hate (What's The Story) Morning Glory though.

Video Game Fan 2000

I don't really buy that Oasis were more of a culturally conservative proposition than other bands who were desperately trying to make crossover guitar pop a thing before them. "Noel Rock" definitely was, but that's a different issue.

Stereolab ended up recording some subtly anti-marxist libertarian songs
Luke Haines might have been a lefty early on but he transformed into a full reactionary over a decade.
There is very dodgy stuff on the Denim record ("fake make up boys", "we hate the IRA", "i hate funk and I hate soul")
Gedge might be a nice man with good opinions but his thing was bringing the sexual/gender ambiguity of stuff like the Smiths or lofi back into traditional boy meets girl story songs.
Despite the aesthetic, MSP were/are bothsideism: the band.
Radiohead dedicated a record to Bill Hicks.
New Order were called New Order.
Loads of throwback bands like the La's were uncomfortably nationalistic in their ideas of what good music should be about.
Blur were rich boys sneering at paups. One them sells McDonalds in the Sun now.
Suede immediately dove into 70s revivalism and all its unpleasantness.

I could go on.

The same guy who posted the Oasis rant has a similar one about the Stone Roses. How many other hit albums have a song about May 1968 on them? Oasis' "is it worth the aggreviation/to find yourself a job when nothing is work working for?" still stands apart as a cutting statement of disaffection even if neither of them really meant (or just lucked into such a good line)


Brundle-Fly

Quote from: Video Game Fan 2000 on June 11, 2021, 04:28:47 PM
I don't really buy that Oasis were more of a culturally conservative proposition than other bands who were desperately trying to make crossover guitar pop a thing before them. "Noel Rock" definitely was, but that's a different issue.

Stereolab ended up recording some subtly anti-marxist libertarian songs
Luke Haines might have been a lefty early on but he transformed into a full reactionary over a decade.
There is very dodgy stuff on the Denim record ("fake make up boys", "we hate the IRA", "i hate funk and I hate soul")
Gedge might be a nice man with good opinions but his thing was bringing the sexual/gender ambiguity of stuff like the Smiths or lofi back into traditional boy meets girl story songs.
Despite the aesthetic, MSP were/are bothsideism: the band.
Radiohead dedicated a record to Bill Hicks.
New Order were called New Order.
Loads of throwback bands like the La's were uncomfortably nationalistic in their ideas of what good music should be about.
Blur were rich boys sneering at paups.

I could go on.

So what are we left with? Chumbawamba? Woop-di-doo.

turnstyle

Quote from: Brundle-Fly on June 11, 2021, 04:38:02 PM
So what are we left with? Chumbawamba? Woop-di-doo.

Them and the Levellers. Unless they're doing adverts for high street bakery chains now, I don't really follow their activities.

'There's only one, steak bake, and that's at Greggs, that's at Greggs, that's at Greeeeggggs'

Video Game Fan 2000

I mean singling Oasis out is mistaking correlation for causation. Nearly every band is guilty of the same things if you squint hard enough. I don't think club music or electronica would fair that much better either.

What makes Oasis stand out isn't their success, its that there was a stupid music journalism scandal about how good they really were.