11.07.16

Review — Oasis: Supersonic

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Rock 'n' Roll at 3:57 pm by George Smith

Watched Oasis: Supersonic this weekend, a documentary slated to run one day in the US before going to DVD and streaming services.

It’s a pretty good record of the band’s volcanic rise on the music of the Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? LPs, climaxing with a quarter of a million at Knebworth.

Which mostly meant nothing to me since I missed the boat on them, starting in 1994.

Supersonic’s also a good argument for strong social welfare programs as young people attempt to put something of their own together. “The dole,” informs the movie, financed the Gallagher brothers, first in a lifestyle of buying records starting out as strugglers and, more important, on the trip to a show as an opener in Glasgow. The Glasgow gig got them signed on the spot to Creation when the ower of the label showed up.

Oasis, Liam and Noel Gallagher, were from “council housing” in Manchester, an incredible cultural triumph of the working class, the young men being part of an English economic system that had given up on creating jobs for the working class and youth.

Noel Gallagher, it turned out, was a fantastic guitar pop songwriter. “Live Forever,” one of his first, is a tune the s band immediately realize is special when they hear it performed acoustically. His brother, Liam, is the perfect singer and frontman for the music. The debut, Definitely Maybe, immediately vaults Oasis into the first rank of British pop acts.

Until (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? it’s a continuous rise until Knebworth in front of a sea of humanity.

It had me listening to the three CD deluxe sets of their first three records, the two the movie follows and Be Here Now which marks a fall from peak popularity for music to constant notoriety for fighting and scandal sheet drug escapades.

Oasis singles’, delivered as the second disc of the Morning Glory package are quite an assembly of hits s ranging from rollicking goodtime rockouts to the wistful and elegiac: “Step Out,” “Down Are Way,” “Wonderwall/The Masterplan” and “Champagne Supernova.”

Like most of my countrymen, I whiffed. Attention deficit disorder mixed with a large dose of condescension. Our loss. In 1996 the appeal in their homeland is summed up by a quote from the New York Times:

“What Oasis has done in Britain, unifying an entire country under the banner of a single pop act, a band could no longer achieve in a country like the US. In Britain the band reigns unchallenged as the most popular act since the Beatles, there is an Oasis CD in roughly one of every three homes there.

In fact, for Supersonic the US is not in the picture, something for which the Oasis reputation is much better off. Their debut in country, at the Whisky in LA is shown as a now humorous disaster where the band and crew are so spun out on methamphetamine they were up for days. Rodney Bingenheimer introduces them and the wheels fall off. Noel Gallagher drily points out his set list, written up by a roadie, is different from everyone else’s. And that was only part of it.

Here in the land of the culturally splintered they were a passing fad, only for the coasts, written off by a gourmand at the New York Times as “low priced … cologne,” a band “more like the Rutles, the Beatles parody act of the 70’s that looked like the Beatles and played songs in the style of the Beatles but didn’t blatantly steal entire melodies and lyrics …” Even Noel Gallagher wears a “Rutles pin” jibes the writer.

After twenty years passage the disses are so over the top as to be hilarious, a comedy script from a lampoon of a rock critic as offbeat snob.

“[When] it all came together, we made people feel something that was indefinable … The love, the joy, the passion and the rage, and the joy that came in from the crowd,” says Noel Gallagher before the end credits. In Britain, Oasis were a reason for being, music to grow up to.

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