Three things are eternal: death, taxes, and Oasis. No matter how many times they break up, they get back together. As well as announcing a new tour for next year, the band have just released a documentary sanitising the snark and brotherly in-fighting that made them what they were. ‘The little things that used to annoy us about each other,’ smiles Noel Gallagher at one point, ‘have all gone away.’
Most fans don’t want preaching to
Those who want their musicians to mellow with age, and maybe become an award-winning cheesemaker like that chap from Blur, will be delighted by the film. I say, no. Turn the prickishness back to eleven. To all rockers, young and old, I implore you: stay loud, loutish and dangerous to know.
After all, why do we demand ageing artists evolve their sound or soften their manners just because they’re quasi-OAPs? The Gallagher brothers have made a dozen group and solo efforts, all of which sound identical, which means that even their bad albums are perfect for bopping along to when you’re three pints deep. Who can ask for anything more?
But there’s good news for lovers of bad behaviour like me. Look at other interviews or clips aside from the Don’t Look Back in Anger documentary, and you can still find glimmers that, three decades on, Oasis have retained the attitude of snarling 20-somethings you daren’t bring home to mother. And thank God; surely without that greasy spunkish vibe, you cease to be a rocker? As Lester Bangs, legendary critic for Rolling Stone, put it:
‘For performing rock ‘n’ roll, or punk rock, or call it any damned thing you please, there’s only one thing you need: NERVE. Rock ‘n’ roll is an attitude, and if you’ve got the attitude you can do it, no matter what anybody says.’ Rock, Bangs added, is not an art form, but ‘a raw wail from the bottom of the guts.’ It’s not clever, but it is big. Sometimes volume matters more than skill, just so long as you’re blowing the hair back of the crowd, and turning a wet Tuesday for your average rat racer into a tinnitus bacchanal.
Being a rock star is a job, at the end of the day. That job is to make me envious. Each war-torn week should be filled to the gills with groupies, bloviating stadium solos and enough alcohol to poison a medium-sized river. Bad decisions should abound. Childish behaviour will be not just expected, but rewarded. Not for nothing has a certain story of Keith Moon, legendary wildman drummer for The Who, been told with glee for half a century as the apex of rock stardom. (In brief: be Keith Moon. Drive a Rolls-Royce into your hotel pool, then calmly ask the front desk for your room key.)
We don’t have stories about Greek heroes slaying gorgons any more, or journeying to lands unknown. We must look to real men and women – stupid, brash, chemically unbalanced mega-children – for tales that are, if not inspirational, then at least evocative of awe in us. As we totter to work in morning traffic, save wisely for our pension, and don a mildly silly hat at the office Christmas party, we can dream now and then of what it would be like to wear ludicrous pants, buy mega-yachts we never use, and occasionally chew the head off a bat. To ape Billy Idol and party so much on a tour in Bangkok that you cause $US140,000 worth of damage, and end up (quoth Idol) ‘tranquilised and lashed to a military stretcher’ by the Thai army, who promptly kick you out of the country.
Do we want to do these things ourselves? Not really. But we’d like to pretend that a universe exists where we too could be a star (or, if you’ll forgive the pun, a Moon). The more outlandish their behaviour, the more enjoyable it is to live vicariously through them.
The opposing example is to be like U2: the wannabe saints of the music world. Solid, pleasant players who release a free album to the entire world on iTunes (remember that?) and spend most of their interviews talking about feeding the poor. These are laudable acts. The problem is they leave the kindly singer universally hated. Don’t ask me why, but it proves my point. Righteous piety gets tiring fast. We like stars who act like incorrigible children, not schoolmarms.
For proof, here’s the infamous story of Bono trying to spread awareness of hideous rates of infant mortality from famine at a gig:
BONO: Every time I clap my hands, a child in Africa dies.
FAN IN THE CROWD: Stop fucking clapping then!
The tale, like all the best anecdotes, is sadly false. But the sentiment is real. Most fans don’t want preaching to. We ain’t a choir. Nope, we want devils who can make us dance. Give us louts like Liam, still putting in the hard yards by (despite what the cheery recent documentary purports) ageing not one iota, mentally or physically, since Tony Blair was in power and Oasis were the biggest band on the planet.
You can even follow Gallagher Junior, and his still somehow-gloriously-sexy-I-don’t-know-how-he-pulls-it-off monobrow on Twitter. Do so, and you’ll be rewarded richly by nonsense one-word posts like ‘BUMBACLART!’ (For those of you unfamiliar: a Jamaican phrase, Merriam-Webster tells us, coined from bumbo, a coarse patois term for female genitalia, and claat, a Jamaican type of cloth. Combined, the words literally mean ‘menstrual cloth.’ It can be used to express anything from anger to joy to wild surprise.) Or wisdom like this little Liam gem: ‘There’s only 2 sauces worth there wait in gold that’s HP and HEINZ the rest can kiss my arse JESUS SAVES LG x.’ And really, who can argue with that?
The acid test is this: as long as their music stands the test of time, musicians are allowed a platinum-level get-out-of-jail-free card. If you wrote ‘Jumping Jack Flash’, or ‘Seven Nation Army’, songs that can make a mere mortal feel like a god for a minute or three, you may act the fool as much as you like. Because you make air guitaring feel like a high-octane escape from life, where even losers like me can prance like a golden god in four-four time. I guess what I’m trying to tell you is, I said maybe, you’re gonna be the one that saves me. And after all, you’re my wonderwall-l-l-l.
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