The genre Noel Gallagher hates the most: “It’s fucking nonsense”
Noel Gallagher is famous for two things: good music and controversial opinions. If you put those two aspects on a Venn diagram, they would overlap pretty frequently, as many of Gallagher’s controversial opinions pertain to good music. In this instance, what he believes to be the worst genre is often cited as one of the best and most revolutionary throughout music: jazz.
His disdain towards the genre seems to stem from how it willingly embraces experimentation, which is interesting given Gallagher’s recent controversy when he decided to have one of his band members play the scissors. During an interview, he gave an insightful look into what an evening at a jazz club is like and why it should be avoided.
“If you’ve never been to a jazz club, this is what happens at a jazz club,” he said. “A jazz club is like four guys on stage enjoying themselves more than the 50 people in the audience. That’s what it is. They’re all playing a different song, all at the same time, in different tempos, in different keys, and they call it jazz. It’s fucking nonsense.”
In another interview, Gallagher criticised jazz music further, asking the interviewer to name a good jazz song before claiming that there is no such thing. It’s an opinion that certainly ruffled a few feathers, given that many people are incredibly devoted to the genre; it is also arguably one of the easiest of Gallagher’s hot takes to dispel.
A lot of the time, when Gallagher reels off an opinion like this, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. We live in an age where his opinions have overtaken his music when it comes to what gauges public interest, and as such, he has a particular affinity for making bold claims with little backing. It’s more likely that Gallagher sprouts these hypothesise without any real investment in how correct he might be, so long as people talk about it… which we are… so bravo, Noel.
But just for the sake of argument, it is worth diving slightly into how he describes jazz music. Playing out of tempo and out of key is what is commonly referred to as free jazz, a style of play which was political in its discovery and revolutionary in its development. As musicians such as Ornette Coleman stopped limiting themselves to the confines of theory, they could experiment far and wide with what they played, which caused a snowball effect that would eventually lead to the blues, rock and roll and, further down the line, Oasis.
Without the genre that Noel is so ready to dismiss, he wouldn’t have a career, and to take it at such face value is the equivalent of someone ruling out one of the lines in his songs if the meaning isn’t spelt out in plain English. Whether he likes it or not, there would be no Oasis without jazz.
