‘Be Here Now’: the album that killed Britpop
It’s no small feat to single-handedly create and dismantle an entire musical movement, but that’s precisely what the sibling overlords of Britpop managed to pull off. Fair play to them, really. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? catapulted the band to stratospheric success, with claims of being “bigger than God” (their words, of course). However, when it came time to follow up with 1997’s Be Here Now, the cracks in their empire started to show, and the magic began to wane.
Well, even that might be putting it kindly. Be Here Now has since been awarded the impressive accolade of killing the entire Britpop movement, not necessarily due to its sound but the intentions and execution behind it. That’s not to say it’s all bad – far from it – because it still features standout Oasis hits like ‘Stand By Me’, but it’s one of those cases where if you’ve heard that, you’ve sort of heard them all.
Then you get to the length. With only two of the album’s 12 tracks clocking in at less than five minutes, it does admittedly become a bit sluggish at points. Given that Britpop was defined by sharpness, acerbic tones, and in-your-face power, the relative air-headedness of Be Here Now didn’t ring true to the movement nor Oasis’ dominant presence on the scene.
That airheaded vibe doesn’t, of course, take a rocket scientist to decode. Everything about the record was infused – or more so commandeered – by cocaine, and the effect of that was a mishmash of multi-layered guitar dubs that provided more noise than it did any ingenuity. Furthermore, internally, the warning signs of the great Gallagher war were beginning to rumble, with Noel admitting that the band should have spent the time apart rather than in the studio following some ‘bigger’ spats – ‘bigger’ in the sense that they had another thing coming. All in all, fans and critics could sense the lack of heart and were in search of something more refined, which had happened to land right on their doorstep.
The difference came in the form of the soon legendary OK Computer by Radiohead, released just months prior to Be Here Now. Its conceptual, artistic standpoint in depicting dystopia, capitalism, and isolation probably seemed like a complete tonic to the repeated ‘we-don’t-care-let’s-get-pissed’ phenomenon of the preceding years that audiences had been oversaturated with. Suddenly, music was a politicised vehicle, and the offerings of Oasis were boyish and rudimentary by comparison.
As such, the downward spiral of Britpop was firmly in motion, favouring the edgier, darker material of Thom Yorke and Co. The atmospheric nature of the likes of ‘Exit Music (For a Film)’ marked a moody turn in the nation’s spirits, favouring acoustic to electric, reverb and echo to riffs and dubs. When you look at it that way, in a landscape now fighting against the ethos of the era in which they created their trademark, the Oasis split was a self-fulfilling prophecy, given that the cracks were already beginning to show.
Of course, although it sounds like the Mancunian mob has been thrown some absolute pelters here, there’s no way you can claim they were doomed forever. That split, just 15 short years in length, has now transformed into a hiatus, with Liam and Noel claiming the “guns have fallen silent” as they prepare to head back out on the road next year. Over in the Radiohead camp, things are still going strong, with the band members having taken on solo projects in recent years but seeming highly keen to still credit each other’s ideas and continue working as a group as and when the right idea appears. Britpop may have supposedly died with Be Here Now, but as this year and next has proved to us, anything is possible.
