Are Oasis Socialists?

Definitely Maybe contains, as writer Alex Niven notes, “some of the most reviled lyrics in recent pop history.” For all of the adoration that it still enjoys, it is a record commonly and furiously derided – especially, it seems, in London, where Britpop and its adherents are now ghettoised either in the pubs of Camden or the offices of the NME.

But on its release, and in the years following it, Oasis’s debut album was the primary cultural signifier for a wave of energy that, for a while (and especially in retrospect), seemed nearly to unite the country. For all of the perfectly reasonable criticism that can be levelled at the band and the album, there has not been a cultural movement as all encompassing since – even if Oasis soon became grotesque self-caricatures, happy to spearhead the Cool Britannia movement whose function became to PR a New Labour government that was rolling back of the meagre gains seen in the sort of working class towns and cities from which the band and many of their fans came.

It is Oasis’s intensely political dimension that Niven re-examines. For him, Oasis’s ability to play on a working class “cultural memory” was not only one of the primary reasons for their success, but also remains an illustration of the need for that cultural memory as the foundation for a radical left project to shunt the country out of our contemporary political malaise - the same malaise in which Oasis were birthed. Here, Niven talks about the Thatcherite depression that inspired early Oasis, and explores how we might forge a new aesthetics by learning the lessons of the mid-90s.

It's worth mentioning that Niven uses the language of social theory to talk about music. It can seem a little obtuse but sometimes you need to use big words to make a big point. If you don't like it you're welcome to go back to browsing /r/cringe pictures on Reddit.

Noisey: I was five when Definitely Maybe was released, so I don’t really have any memories of that time. Can you describe the national mood?

Alex: I was 10, so not too much older. I certainly wouldn't want to make this sort of NME argument that music was in the doldrums, and Britpop and Oasis heroically rescued British music from dance, electronic music, and hip-hop. Nevertheless, in the early 90s there had been a reaction gathering to Thatcherism and its associated culture for a long time. Culturally, the big precursor to Britpop, or the mid-90s moment, as I would prefer to have it called, was rave, and that late 1989, '90 moment. I think by '92, '93, that wave had kind of died down a bit. There's a sense of disillusionment that the Tories had got in again in '92.

You talk about the idea that periods of economic downturn tend to birth a folk culture that is more interested in history than it is in innovation, and that links to what you were saying earlier about Oasis being a very 'authentic' force.

I think it's important to redeem the concept of authenticity. For postmodernism, authenticity is a dirty word - it's something to be messed around with, because nothing is authentic. But if you deny that art has authentic connections to the lived experience of certain people and certain classes, then you'll just have the most powerful class appropriating whatever it wants to its own ends. Mumford and Sons are the classic example of upper-middle class people appropriating a culture that isn't theirs, and has no authenticity at all.

The familiar criticism of looking at Oasis as a working class band that you get from music theorists like Mark Fisher and Owen Hatherley is that of "prole-face": Oasis as a caricature of the working class. I can see that Britpop as a whole is definitely guilty of that, most obviously with Blur's “Parklife”. But Oasis were a proletarian band. They might have been caricatured as that period wore on by the media and by New Labour spin doctors, but it was an authentic, working class music.

At the time, was there deemed to be any contradiction between their own working class background, and their appropriation of artists that were heritage acts?

Yeah, they had that "Retromania" sense of pilfering music from the past. While I agree with all those critiques, and while we have become a very retrogressive and conservative culture, I think what we need now, and what we needed then are necessarily the same. At this moment in time the left needs innovation but I don't think innovation and leftism are necessarily synonymous. Futurism, for example, was hardly a leftist project. Lots of modernism was rightist. Conversely, much of 19th Century leftism was quite heritage. There's the William Morris medievalism, the Ruskinite medievalism, the kind of communitarianism of the union movement.

In the case of Oasis, the were surrounded by a metropolitan culture that feeds on novelty wasn't really accessible to them. For the sake of getting on with things, I think populist, political artistic movements just have to draw on heritage, for the sake of cohesion and binding people together. Obviously that can go very wrong - you can have the kind of fascism at the extreme, and you can have UKIP or New Labour slightly less extremely. But a more positive example would be something like the birth of the socialist movement in the 19th Century. It was taken as given that you would be indebted to the past and try to draw on the past, and I think that's a positive.

You talk about "Live Forever" in particular as a very specific form of escapism - escaping into the world rather than out of it. That seems to be a very obviously political form of escapism.

There's two different kinds of romanticism. There’s a tradition of romanticism that's conservative - all about obfuscating material conditions and social relations in order to preserve hierarchy. But there's another, radical romantic tradition - the tradition of Blake and Hazlitt. In order to come up with a radical or revolutionary idea, you have to venture into a world of radical imagination, and radical hopefulness. You have to draw on myth, and some kind of spiritual idea. I think Oasis, at their best, did. It a radical escapism that says things could be better. I think radical politics needs that. It has to have that spiritual dimension. Oasis's escapism was of that variety.

The alternative is musicians turning inwards when society rejects the working class. Is that something that's being replicated today?

Yeah. Alongside that positive escapism in the Oasis narrative, there are lots of themes of entrapment on Definitely Maybe. You have that sense of feeling like you've been abandoned. There’s all these lyrics about sliding away, slipping away, fading away. There's this sense of being buried. I think that is sadly more where we are today - that landscape of musicians being buried in their bedrooms. It would be difficult to even describe what our cultural, musical landscape is.

I think probably there is something in the criticism of Oasis as parochial. They didn't contend with global issues. But I think the achievement of uniting a country is good enough. It was a tribal summary of post-war popular culture, with the Labour Party and the 1966 World Cup, and glam rock, and bits of rave, and the Irish immigrant experience - I think that's at the very least much preferable to the cupcakes and Victoria sponge, Mumford and Sons view of Britishness. Again, to single out “Parklife” as the strawman, it wasn't that narrow, Home Counties Englishness.

Do you think it would be possible to have another cultural wave like that?

I think the material circumstances of culture have to change. You only get a really big wave of progressive art of the kind that you had, for example, in the 60s, when you have a massive reorganisation of society.

I've personally come to the conclusion that we're living in a pre-revolutionary style moment, where we're realising that you can't just mess around with things on the surface. You have to start at the root, and change the whole material makeup of society, before you'll get new music. It's not that difficult to hear isolated examples of music that is new, but the real chasm at the moment is between small-scale instances of that, and something catching on socially, and becoming a big social movement. I think that's where newness comes from.

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You can purchase Alex Niven's 33 1/3 book on Definitely Maybe from independent bookseller Amazon.com

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