Andrew O'Hagan on Oasis
| For a good stretch of the 1990s the British rock band Oasis, fronted by brothers Liam and Noel Gallagher, channeled a certain laddish spirit into international superstardom. “It was splendidly old-fashioned working-class escapist art,” writes Andrew O’Hagan in the Review’s December 18 issue, “and it captured the country until the crash of 2008, when the hangover became so real that even Oasis found it was splitting up.” Sixteen years later the notoriously fractious Gallaghers (Noel on Liam: “He needs to see a psychiatrist”; Liam on Noel: “As for seeing somebody I bet you and the mrs have got a few on the go you pair of chameleons”) reunited for a sold-out, rapturously received worldwide tour, which just concluded yesterday in São Paulo. So what did it all mean? O’Hagan, a few months younger than Noel, went to one of the reunion shows at Wembley Stadium in July and found: the vibe was sing-along, remember-along, forget-the-state-of-the-country-along, and forgive-along. And I found myself to be fully into it—the £14 rum and Cokes, the bucket hats, the angsty working-class sentiment, the male hugging, the chicken in a basket. Whatever they had, I bought, then I went back for more. Once in a lifetime, right?
Below, alongside O’Hagan’s essay, are six articles from our archives about pop music. The Oasis reunion tour was a series of football stadium nostalgia-fests, with the fans the unmistakable stars of the show. “Two myths have long persisted about O’Connor. One is that she was a one-hit wonder, that her success began and ended with her chart-topping cover of Prince’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U.’ The other is that her career was placidly chugging along until in 1992 she decided, apparently out of nowhere, to pull out a photo of then-pope John Paul II and tear it up while staring directly into the camera on Saturday Night Live. But neither is true.” —August 5, 2023 “Björk Guðmundsdóttir blew onto the scene with a wide-eyed naiveté that was highly marketable without being entirely manufactured, seeming to sidestep all the contradictions of the music business.” —December 22, 2022 “It was an unlikely foundation for a band coming up in the punk scene of downtown New York City, but it meant that Talking Heads were destined to grapple with the meanings of family life. Here was a band led by a couple, with a strange, alienated man-child at the microphone.” —March 25, 2021 photograph by Thomas Uhlemann For a generation or two of listeners, Springsteen has been rock’s steadfast working-class hero, the self-made superstar who never forgot where he came from and a flesh-and-blood affirmation of tenacity against long odds. —December 22, 2016 “Marley was a brilliant synthesist of musical styles, and his influence on the world’s popular music can still be heard from rock to rap to samba to jazz. An ingenious songwriter who was also an electrifying performer, he made music whose ‘thud-sobbing,’ as Derek Walcott once wrote, evokes ‘a sadness as real as the smell/of rain on dry earth.’” —April 9, 2009 “The Brill Building sound clearly had not so much to do with ethnic confrontation or ethnic self-definition as with a fusion of influences...the radical alchemy it took to make a dissonant mix of styles and devices—blues, gospel, doo-wop, cha-cha, mariachi, lush string arrangements, echoes of Puccini or Irving Berlin, of country and western or Broadway musical—come out sounding as if all the elements naturally belonged together.” —December 15, 2005 Special Offer
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