The only American artists Noel Gallagher ever deemed worthwhile
It was in America, in cities like Memphis, that the rebellious sounds of rock and roll first took root back in the 1950s. As the years went on, however, it was on the other side of the Atlantic that the style was truly perfected.
During the 1990s, Mancunian upstarts Oasis were the ones carrying the torch of rock and roll rebellion like it was nobody’s fucking business. Taking their cues from the trailblazing sounds of the swinging sixties, with groups like The Beatles, The Kinks, and The Rolling Stones high up on the list of influences for the Gallagher brothers, they were essential in causing a resurgent tornado of guitar-led indie outfits during an era dominated by dance music.
A core part of the band’s enduring power was down to the fact that Noel and Liam Gallagher were, in essence, common lads from Manchester. There was no art school background or secret relatives in the music industry – the phrase ‘industry plant’ had yet to be coined. No, Oasis were working-class kids from the North, who grew up on council estates and that shitty reality could only be escaped through art. That sense of escapism, according to Noel Gallagher, is what differentiates British rock from its Yankee cousin.
After all, Oasis came up during the early 1990s, when the abrasive sounds of grunge ruled the American rock mainstream. Although Gallagher has routinely praised the likes of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain for his songwriting mastery, he could never get on board with the depressive tendencies of the grunge scene.
In fact, Oasis’ beloved hit ‘Live Forever’ was written as something of a response to Nirvana’s ‘I Hate Myself and Want to Die’. “That’s fucking rubbish, kids don’t need to be hearing that nonsense,” he said in the Lock the Box interview back in 2006.
Kurt Cobain wasn’t the only American artist that Gallagher took umbrage with, though. In fact, during a 1995 interview with Elsewhere, he only highlighted two American artists that are worth listening to – and one of them is Canadian. “Neil Young and the Stooges, that’s it,” he declared. Admittedly, those are two pretty solid choices.
Neil Young typified the counterculture age with Buffalo Springfield and went on to explore a vast array of different styles over the course of his illustrious solo career, penning some of the best songs of all time along the way. Meanwhile, The Stooges formed an essential moment in the development of wildly anarchic punk rock, with sweating lunatic Iggy Pop as their wild card frontman. So, you can’t really fault Gallagher’s tastes.
“American music’s always talking about how bad their lives are,” the Oasis songwriter continued, expanding on his disapproval of American rock during the 1990s. “Some 15-year-old kid from a council estate doesn’t want to hear Eddie Vedder going on about how he was abused as a child if you’ve been abused yourself.”
He explained, “You think, ‘I know all that, I want something to make me feel happy’. It’s all about escaping for three and a half minutes.”
To his credit, Gallagher was an expert in providing that escapism for kids in Britain, like him, who didn’t have much to look forward to in their everyday lives. Anthems like ‘Supersonic’, ‘Live Forever’, and even the more abrasive style of ‘Bring It On Down’ were essential in lifting the spirits of Britain’s youth during what was a pretty depressing period in time for a lot of working-class people, and that’s one of the prevailing reasons why Oasis remain so beloved to this very day.
