“It runs right through”: The rap song hidden inside a classic Oasis track
No artist is meant to just latch onto one genre for the rest of their lives. Music operates on a spectrum, so it’s not surprising for someone to focus on writing the heaviest rock song imaginable one day, then start listening to hip-hop the next day and get hooked on writing a pop tune by the weekend. Oasis were more inclined to do exactly what it said on the tin for a rock and roll band, but Noel Gallagher knew a good drunk break when he heard one when he sampled NWA for ‘D’You Know What I Mean’.
But ‘the Chief’ did always have a touch-and-go relationship with hip-hop. He may have been a fan of certain acts like Public Enemy when he was growing up, but his dismissal of Jay-Z from headlining Glastonbury did make a lot of people question whether he was even interested in the genre, to begin with.
If you zoom out just a bit, though, what Oasis were creating for their fans wasn’t all that different from what the early guard of hip-hop was doing. Tunes like ‘Live Forever’ and ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’ gave the impression of some guys living on the streets of Manchester, but if you change the location to Compton, Ice Cube and Dr Dre were doing the same thing for their old stomping grounds.
And do we even need to bring up the idea of sampling? Yes, the practice is common in hip-hop today, but if anyone in Oasis were to chastise rappers for using other people’s work, they would have had some explaining to do once people started pointing out the similarities between ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ and John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ or wonder exactly how much money T Rex would make had they been given credit on ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’.
After the Manchester legends conquered the music world, though, it might have been time to go beyond rock and roll altogether for the next album. So outside of the symphonies used on ‘All Around the World’ and the borderline Zeppelin stylings of ‘Fade In-Out’, Noel managed to knick the drum break from ‘Straight Outta Compton’ at the very beginning of the tune.
While Noel isn’t one to give away his influences, he did admit it when he pinched this one, saying, “It runs right through the song and Alan sort of drums on top and you can’t really tell what it is, there’s a bit before the guitar solo and, anyway, like a knobhead, I did this interview for Rolling Stone and said, ‘There’s an NWA sample on the new single’ and my manager goes, ‘Doh! Why did you say that, you daft c***, gotta pay ’em now!’”
But it’s not like some rap-rock hybrid that most people would have been hoping for or dreading from the Gallaghers. It just seems to add a texture, and when paired with Alan White’s drums, the whole thing sounds like a hurricane of percussion, which probably isn’t helped by the fact that millions of guitar overdubs sound like white noise in the background as well.
This may still have been considered Oasis’s classic era, but there were still fragments of where they would go next. Be Here Now was a distant memory by the early 2000s, but you can’t tell me that Noel didn’t see how this worked and then immediately tried sampling another drum beat for the intro to ‘Go Let It Out’ one album later.
