The one singer Noel Gallagher was disgusted with: “Distasteful”
There are only a few human beings on this planet who could manage to be as unfiltered as Noel Gallagher has been over the years.
Sure, he has mellowed out over time, but when Oasis were hitting their peak, there weren’t many artists that got by without getting a verbal flogging from him, whether it was talking up The Beatles like they were the greatest band in the world or calling out Phil Collins for being one of the worst artists that he had ever heard. But if you think it’s bad enough for him to take rock and roll stars to task, imagine what he sounded like when he wasn’t talking about his own genre.
As much as Noel may have been absolutely cutthroat, there were probably a few times when he could have held back a little bit when it came to some of his more controversial opinions. He even found ways to reel himself back in when he was in the midst of his ongoing rivalry with Blur, but if you started to talk to him about some of the biggest names in other genres, it would only take a few minutes before he got agitated.
He absolutely despised jazz and most heavy metal music for most of his life, but it’s not like he couldn’t find ways to bend genres to his will, either. ‘Going Nowhere’ is the kind of easy-listening song that could have been played by Burt Bacharach back in the day, and ‘Headshrinker’ does sound like the kind of song that any heavy band could do a decent version of if they managed to get the right amount of fuzz on their guitars.
At the same time, there weren’t too many rock and roll fans back in the 1990s who had much good to say about hip-hop. The genres seemed to be bitter enemies in many parts of the world, and while rap-rock did come into the picture around the time that Oasis released Be Here Now, it’s not like people were holding up artists like Fred Durst with the same reverence as Kurt Cobain. If anything, Noel felt that the whole rap genre had become an embarrassment by the time he reached the 2000s.
He was still a massive fan of the old-school rap collectives like Public Enemy, but the idea of him working with someone like Eminem was a pipe dream. He didn’t feel like the world needed another version of a kid whining about his problems, so when Eminem started making room for people like 50 Cent, Noel felt that the New York rapper was one of the worst things that could happen for the charts.
50 Cent definitely had the tunes to back it up, but Noel felt that there was no need for him in the public eye, saying, “I fucking despise hip-hop. Loathe it. Eminem is a fucking idiot, and I find 50 Cent the most distasteful character I have ever crossed in my life. It’s so negative.” But if we take an outsider’s view for a second, there isn’t much that they were doing that was all that different from how Noel approached things in the 1990s.
Their version of hip-hop style machismo did end up having a fair bit of misogyny laced throughout it, which doesn’t look so good years later, but their passion for their music wasn’t all that different from the punk bands Noel loved. He was looking to provoke the same way that John Lydon did when he first arrived on the scene with Definitely Maybe, and 50 Cent was doing his street-level version of that in a way.
The consequences that he had to deal with were a lot more lethal than what Noel dealt with, but it’s not like he was overtly trying to make negative music for negative people. His songs weren’t the greatest things in the world, but for a few years in the mid-2000s, there was hardly anyone who was able to resist a song like ‘In Da Club’ whenever it came on.
