Will Oasis live forever?

One of my favorite living rock personalities is Noel Gallagher. There are plenty of assholes in show business, but no one is as good or as unashamed of acting like one than Noel.

The infamously quarrelsome Gallagher brothers were, in the mid '90s, the biggest rock band in the UK And they were pretty big here, too. They were rock stars. Still, they were really a couple of working class louts from Manchester. And Noel never pretended to be otherwise. He was always brash and egomaniacal, but never dishonest or pretentious. We would claim Oasis was the greatest band in the world, but never pretended he was doing anything more than he really was.

“All I ever wanted to do was make a record," he told one interviewer at the time. "Here's what you do: you pick up your guitar, you rip a few people's tunes off, you swap them round a bit, get your brother in the band, punch his head in every now and again, and it sells. I'm a lucky bastard. I'm probably the single most lucky man in the world -- apart from our Liam.”

As much as I love Noel for attitude and honesty, I've never liked Oasis very much. When the band's first single "Supersonic" became a modern rock hit here, it sounded like little more than a trippy Brit take on grunge -- a three chord rocker with a singalong chorus. I wasn't only underwhelmed by the song, though. Liam's nasal whine was one of the toughest voices to stomach in rock.

But nothing of the band's mediocrity seemed to stop it. That debut album, Definitely Maybe, became a huge hit in the UK (7x Platinum) and the U.S. (Platinum). Four years ago, the British mega music magazine NME called that album the third best british rock record ever, behind the Stone Roses' self-titled debut and The Smiths' The Queen is Dead.(1)

But that was just a warmup for the band's followup, (What's the Story) Morning Glory would go 14x platinum in the UK (top selling UK album, ever) and a healthy 4x platinum in the States on the strength of the singles "Wonderwall" and "Champagne Supernova," songs that were inescapable in '95 and '96. The band was the biggest rock band in the world. They had managed, even if for a brief period of time, to be as big as the Beatles.

SInce that time, it's been a slow and painful ride from fame to irrelevance and from mediocrity (more on that in a minute) to downright nauseating. The band's  brand new 2 CD retrospective Time Flies... 1994 - 2009  is a good document of that decline. The brothers Gallagher were never able to duplicate their prior success or tunefulness on five subsequent LPs (though they continued to top charts in the U.K. the entire time). The final tracks of Time Flies, "I'm Outta Time" and "Falling Down" off the band's 2008 album Dig Out Your Soul, could well describe the state of Oasis at the end of the aughts --- finally out of charms, washed up and split by family feuding for good.(2)

Perhaps if Oasis had followed those records with material that was more ambitious, more adventurous, those early albums might mean more today. Unlike Radiohead, which went on from the same Britpop sound of Oasis to practically reinvent rock at least two times and become arguably the greatest rock band of a generation, Oasis didn't have any other tricks up its leather sleeves. In 1997, Radiohead released OK Computer, the best album of the decade, and Oasis' eternal Britpop rivals, Blur, reinvented themselves on a brilliant self titled album(3) that left the Gallaghers in the dust with Be Here Now, which sounded completely obsolete in comparison. They had won the sales war but lost out on the art contest.

It would be easy to dismiss Oasis as little more than a flash in the pan. A bunch of derivative rockers who lucked into success with a sly blend of Beatles and Stones with some Stone Roses on top. Repackaged classic rock for kids who couldn't remember the originals. But I think it's tough to dismiss a band that managed to connect with so many people so successfully. While Time Flies succeeds in documenting the band's decline, it is also is a reminder of how simple and tuneful the first two records were. "Live Forever," "Roll With It," "Cigarettes and Alcohol" are good rock songs. "Live Forever," might be the band's best. And it's a hell of a song that sounds today like a classic.

Oasis didn't set out to be great artists. They did what they wanted: make good rock songs that would be loved by nearly everyone who heard them. They were able to -- like the working-class craftsmen they were -- connect with people on a populist level. In some ways they, like Nirvana, capitalized on a growing indie rock sound that they were able to make palatable to millions. Just as Nirvana worked the sounds of The Pixies and Dinosaur Jr. into a giant success, Oasis took the Stone Roses sound global. Perhaps it's not high art, but it's hard to argue with so many millions of records sold. They did the right thing at the right time.

Oasis may not live forever, but they'll always have 1995. And for Noel, that seems to be just fine. Immortality was not the goal. As he told an interviewer once during one of too many comparisons of his band with the Beatles, "I'm not like John Lennon who thought he was the great Almighty. I just think I'm John Lennon."

Footnote

1. In a poll run by NME a few years ago, readers voted it the album ever, ahead of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Revolver.

2. The Gallaghers split up last year vowing never to reform the band. Each expects to release solo albums in the next year.

3. Blur's Blur produced that band's best known U.S. song, "Song 2" with it's well-known chorus "woo hoo," a send up of silly rock that no one seemed to get because the song was just too cool (or, perhaps, too successful).