The band Noel Gallagher was ashamed to inspire: “Fucking shit”
The only thing any musician can hope for is to be able to inspire the next generation of artists. The money and the fame may be great at the moment, but someone only becomes a legend when people start picking up instruments and trying to emulate what you did naturally. Then again, rock stars don’t have a choice of who they inspire, and Noel Gallagher was ashamed of having anything to do with the music of Maroon 5.
But it’s not like Noel didn’t realise that his influence would loom large over the rock community. He had boasted about himself being one of the defining artists of his generation, so you can’t really do that and expect people to twist the sounds of your group into weird directions out of your control.
Looking at where Maroon 5 started off, though, it would make sense that Oasis would be a primary influence on their music. Long before they became one of the most profitable music collectives in the world and the karaoke staple for wine moms the world over, Songs About Jane and It Won’t Be Soon Before Long were at least decent attempts at pop-rock for their time.
In fact, there’s a good chance that none of them identified as rock and roll during their prime, either. Regardless of how many times Adam Levine collaborated with acts like Pearl Jam and Slash later on in his career, tunes like ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘Makes Me Wonder’ veer closer to funk, soul and R&B than they do to the likes of Led Zeppelin or Nirvana.
Even with that sound, their roots in power-pop in the short-lived Kara’s Flowers at least put Oasis on their radar. ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ and ‘Wonderwall’ weren’t classics by accident, but the minute that the bass player thanked Noel for his contribution to music, the guitarist was shell-shocked and more than a little bit frustrated.
Upon meeting up with fans, Noel remembered telling the bassist how much he hated the group to his face, saying, “He said, ‘Hey man, you really inspired me to play’. I said, ‘What band are you in?’ and he said Maroon 5. I was like, ‘Maroon 5 are fucking shit. How the fuck did you get Maroon 5 from what I’m doing?’”
Regardless of who influenced who in their early days, it would be easy to say that any piece of rock and roll has been purged from Maroon 5’s DNA a long time ago. For all of the goodwill that they had from the pop-rock community up until the release of their third album, Hands All Over, it proved to do for them what it did to Oasis after Be Here Now, with each passing album never having the same relevance as their glory years.
Even though Oasis still hung onto their songwriting credentials and wrote great material in their later years like ‘Little By Little’ and ‘Lyla’, the glorified ‘Adam Levine Experience’ have spent the last few years of their career trying to become one of the more faceless rock acts in the world, where every passing track sounding like it’s being made to fulfil a quota than create something genuine.
Although Oasis knew the importance of the song before anything else, Maroon 5 doesn’t even feel like a musical collective anymore. If anything, they’re the kind of highly functional business model that somehow sees chart success.
