In the peculiar counterfactual 2019 romcom Yesterday, the Beatles suddenly and mysteriously vanish from history, remembered by just one man. In the interests of a cheap joke, writer Richard Curtis improbably suggests that every band in the world would still exist in the Beatles’ absence, bar one: Oasis.
But what about a world without Oasis? As the Gallaghers themselves would admit, they weren’t innovators like the Beatles, whose every move changed the course of popular music. If Noel had never joined Liam’s band at the end of 1991, Creation Records might well have gone bust, Manchester City would have had less pop cachet, and The Royle Family would have needed a different theme tune, but music wouldn’t have sounded significantly different. Today, new bands are more likely to cite the spiky intelligence of Radiohead or the Smiths than Oasis’s broad strokes, and very few younger than Arctic Monkeys expects to fill stadiums.
What Tracey Emin beautifully described as the “brightness of things happening” did not depend on Oasis – from club culture to the Young British Artists, Trainspotting to Kate Moss, New Labour to Euro 96, the era’s colour was turned up with or without them. Nor did Britpop flow from Oasis. By the time Definitely Maybe came out in August 1994, Suede and Pulp were crashing the charts and Blur’s Parklife was on its way to going four times platinum, their paths smoothed by Matthew Bannister’s rejuvenation of Radio 1. The commercial bar for indie rock had already been raised, up to a point.
Instead, as the mania around their reunion demonstrates, the Gallaghers’ unique achievement was unprecedented scale. They made alternative culture mainstream, because nobody else craved success so unapologetically: daytime airplay, No 1s, stadiums, the whole shebang. For some of their peers, this breakneck acceleration and magnification produced new opportunities. Oasis’s example made possible the second acts of Manic Street Preachers, the Verve and Robbie Williams, before inspiring the formation of younger bands such as Coldplay, the Killers, Arctic Monkeys and Kasabian. It wasn’t the sound so much as the possibility: music for the masses.
Oasis made dreaming big not just an option but a necessity. “It wasn’t: ‘Who’s good?’” the Boo Radleys’ Martin Carr complained of the cash-burning A&R hunt for the next Oasis. “It was: ‘Who’s going to be famous?’” Bands like his, accustomed to modest commercial goals, were suddenly deemed failures if their latest single missed the Top 20, and derailed by these impossible expectations. Even Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker soon overdosed on pop celebrity and sought stranger escape routes.
Oasis alone sought and achieved true mass appeal by tapping into a communal, aspirational hedonism that suited the times. But in shrugging off indie’s underdog mentality, they also devalued its eccentric outsider’s point of view. The Britpop boom scrambled the music papers’ bearings, turning them into cheerleaders for what was popular rather than champions of what was interesting. “[Oasis] shut down the argument, shut down experimentation,” the artist Jeremy Deller once complained. “They took all the oxygen out of the scene and became the only band.”
Nothing summed up the new sports-like obsession with victory more than Blur and Oasis’s news-making battle for No 1 in August 1995, which also established a crude and artificial class dynamic. Contrary to the rich and varied history of British popular music, the discourse around Oasis defined the only “authentic” working-class music as simple, direct, white, laddishly male and aggressively anti-intellectual. Noel insisted (sometimes disingenuously) that his songs meant next to nothing – they were “just about a feeling”. Oasis were a vibe, an energy, and one that lent itself to gung-ho patriotism. Contrast Albarn’s sharp ambivalence about British identity with the blunt hurrah of Noel’s union jack guitar. Oasis can’t be blamed for all these unintended consequences but they were the giant catalyst.
Today, the Gallaghers are in every 90s nostalgia montage – Liam in bed on the cover of Vanity Fair’s Cool Britannia issue and Noel shaking hands with Tony Blair at Number 10. They remain a magnetic force, bending our collective memory towards them.
So let’s again imagine that Oasis never came to pass. What’s different? Most of 90s culture proceeds anyway, only its busy diversity is more apparent. Britpop remains, but in a less anthemically populist form, closer to journalist Stuart Maconie’s original 1993 manifesto of “glamour, wit and irony”. Alternative music still crosses over but its growth is more sustainable and commercial success does not become a do-or-die metric. Tabloid gossip columns rarely overlap with the NME. Flags and politicians are still regarded with suspicion. The lows aren’t as low – but maybe the highs aren’t as high.
