“It seemed like an everyperson record,” he says. Wilkinson remembers hearing a pub full of pensioners sing along to Wonderwall when it came on the jukebox. (What’s the Story) Morning Glory was simply unavoidable. Definitely Maybe permanently moved the goalposts for alternative rock in general and Creation Records in particular. The starting point in revisiting the album is the acceptance that in 1997, Oasis were woven into Britain’s cultural fabric like no other band since the Beatles. I asked four of the critics who praised it – Paul Du Noyer (Q), Roy Wilkinson (Select), Paul Lester (Uncut) and Taylor Parkes (Melody Maker) – what happened and whether something like it could happen again. It was like a performance of the collective psyche.”
“You were watching something crass and horrible but it was compelling and you had to watch it to get a sense of what Britain was like at that moment. “It’s almost like Big Brother,” says Alex Niven, author of a book about Oasis’s 1994 debut Definitely Maybe. Dem a come fe mess up de area, seeeeeeeeerious.” In hindsight, the hysteria resembles a mass frenzy. Mojo’s reviewer was even moved to patois: “This is Oasis’s World Domination Album. “Right here and right now, this is the place to be,” trumpeted the Daily Telegraph. The glowing reviews have become an opportunity for schadenfreude: evidence that music critics had, at best, lost all perspective and, at worst, deliberately misled their readers. It can’t be just a collection of songs – some good, some bad, most too long, all insanely overproduced – but an emblem of the hubris before the fall, like a dictator’s statue pulled to the ground by a vengeful mob. If it couldn’t be Britpop’s zenith, then it must be the nadir. As Be Here Now returns in the form of a deluxe box set, and the band’s story is retold in the documentary Oasis: Supersonic, the album still inspires extreme reactions.
0 kommentar(er)
