On Definitely Maybe, Oasis Sought Escape From Deindustrialized Northern England

I was ready to hate it and, more than that, I wanted to. Today marks the 30th anniversary of Oasis’ debut album, Definitely Maybe, which, accordingly, marks 30 years of Liam and Noel Gallagher being, if not at the heart of British and, to an extent, Irish pop culture, then certainly close to it. For three long decades, they’ve been there in the tabloid gossip pages, arguing away, spouting bollocks to whoever will listen, and otherwise being very loud, very crass nuisances. Now that their reunion has finally been confirmed, it looks like they’ll be getting louder all over again. I, having arrived into this world in 1995, have only ever known an Oasis-inflected world, where every English or Irish street busker or knobhead holding a guitar at a party can be guaranteed, without exception, to break into a rendition of “Wonderwall.” I was so ready, almost gleeful in my anticipation of hating this record upon listening to it again for the first time since adolescence.

Definitely Maybe found immediate success after its release on August 29th, 1994, debuting at #1 on the British album charts and enshrining itself forever into the country’s rock music lore. The record swiftly made stars out of the men who made it, though most people would likely struggle to recall the names of rhythm guitarist Paul “Bonehead” Arthurs, bassist Paul “Guigsy” McGuigan or drummer Tony McCaroll nowadays. Oasis, by and large, was about the Gallagher brothers: Noel, who played lead guitar and wrote the songs, and Liam, his little dickhead brother who sang his words, looked the part and shook the tambourine. The siblings appeared to genuinely hate one another, too, which, for reasons Freud would probably have had some thoughts on, was a feature of the band that the public seemed to find profoundly gripping.

The Gallaghers grew up in Burnage, a suburb of the northern English city of Manchester, which Noel himself once described as “a little shitty town where fuck-all happens—it’s one pub and a chippie and a bookie and that’s it.” It was an unremarkable place, which, paradoxically, is what makes it so noteworthy within the context of Oasis’ rise. It was an area in the grips of a decline unleashed by the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.

By 1994, Britain was midway through the reign of Tory prime minister John Major, but it was his predecessor, Thatcher, who had proven so consequential to the fate of Britain and its working class. By the time she resigned from office in 1990, she’d been in charge for 11 long years, during which she managed, through a project of privatization, deindustrialization and union destruction, to crush the power of the working class and utterly reshape the country, which had, in the wake of World War II, constructed a strong welfare state. Poverty soared under her rule, especially in the areas outside of England’s south, as jobs in industry were lost, public services were privatized, and public housing was sold and, in large part, turned over to the rental market. Thatcher successfully unleashed a neoliberal revolution upon the UK. The members of Oasis were a part of the first generation of young adults to live through this new reality. They were stuck in dead-end lives in a part of the country which had been decimated by the Iron Lady, pissing away whatever money they could get on cigarettes and alcohol, dreaming of escape from the humdrum.

It may be overstating things to declare the emergence of Oasis as a direct, conscious response to Thatcherism but, on the other hand, her legacy can’t be ignored entirely. Definitely Maybe blares into life with huge guitars which almost anticipate the band’s eventual rise to stadium rockers, and the song “Rock ’n’ Roll Star” begins: “Live my life in the city,” Liam’s snarling, nasally voice moans, “there’s no easy way out.” His frustration is evident, his need for greater things brought immediately to the fore at the album’s onset, and he—or, arguably, Noel, as it was he who wrote the lyrics—speaks for an entire generation of disillusioned young men left behind in Thatcher’s wake. The Gallaghers relish their moment in the spotlight, recognizing it as a means of obtaining the affluent, hedonistic lives they crave. “Tonight,” Liam declares, “I’m a rock ’n’ roll star.”

The irony is that, in seeking to emerge from the toil and indignity of Thatcher’s post-industrial north, the Gallaghers conform to perhaps her most important ideological legacy. She sought to instill a sense of hyper-individualism within every Briton, propagating a view of the world which understands social issues such as poverty to result from the personal failings of those experiencing it, rather than as symptoms of a wider systems failure within society. To escape poverty, viewed through the lens of Thatcherism, one need only stop being lazy, pull themselves up by the bootstraps and work hard. It is down to individual effort, and it’s most certainly not the government’s job to help. It’s every man for himself out there.

Liam Gallagher, if nothing else, is an individual. He may not have written the words—“I need to be myself / I can’t be no one else”—but he came to own them, to imbue with them with his own particular air of cockiness and swagger and to personify Oasis’ quasi-Thatcherite, vacuous ideology, if we can go so far as to call it that. A lot of the lyrics on the album are just plainly nonsense, like when Liam sings, “She done it with a doctor / On a helicopter,” on “Supersonic.” It’s gibberish, but he makes it sound good.

The vast majority of Definitely Maybe sounds good, in fact, though we could hardly call it groundbreaking. While it bears elements of psychedelia, shoegaze and even grunge, the sworn enemy of the burgeoning scene that would come to be known as Britpop, the most obvious influence upon the album is the sound of the Swinging Sixties, a time when the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks and the Who were the biggest bands on both sides of the Atlantic. This ’60s nostalgia would ultimately come to define the wider Britpop movement as it entered the mainstream.

It is no coincidence that the young white men who primarily, though not exclusively, constituted Britpop looked upon the Swinging Sixties with such reverence. This was the highpoint of the British post-war settlement, a time when the welfare state was strong and the white working class was in a historically comfortable position. There’s a reason the country was able to produce so many innovative bands at the time: Many of them grew up in social housing and had access to social services which eased the burdens of being poor. For the young men of the 1960s, comparatively free to experiment and hone their art, the future looked bright, while for those stuck in the ’90s, struggling in a bleak, neoliberal wasteland, it did not.

In its nostalgia for the country’s lost past, Britpop expressed a longing for the security of the post-war, social-democratic settlement. But nostalgia can be a poisonous tonic, and it wasn’t long before the scene’s more reactionary tendencies had become dominant. It would be unfair to rubbish all of Britpop or to claim that its sound was uniform across the bands that constituted it, but, taken as an amorphous blob, it came to represent a reaction against the currents of multiculturalism and feminism that were swirling throughout the UK at the time. The ’90s produced some of Britain’s most exciting and innovative music, but it wasn’t made by Oasis or Blur. This was the time of artists like Tricky, Massive Attack, 4hero and Aphex Twin, an eclectic, multicultural array of artists indebted, in their own way, to traditions like dub reggae, hip-hop and techno. Like the “disco sucks” movement in the US before it, Britpop was a reaction to Black dance music which offered a safe space to feminists, queers and ethnic minorities.

Seeming to forget that bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were inherently multicultural in their approach, borrowing from cultures from all over the world, not least African-American blues, Britpop appealed to a very narrow idea of Britishness. Looking back to a time before the women’s liberation, Black power and gay pride movements had fully constituted themselves, it pined for a time in which men were men, before cross-dressing weirdos like Kurt Cobain owned the American airwaves, and when the white British male rocker reigned supreme. Britpop was music for The Lads.

That such a scene would be so seamlessly co-opted by Tony Blair’s New Labour project is hardly a surprise. The British Labour Party, after repeated electoral losses to the Tories, was beginning to remake itself under Blair’s leadership in 1994, abandoning its more socialist policies and willfully succumbing to the whims of the market. Rather than challenge the neoliberal consensus that Thatcher had imposed upon Britain, the party reinforced it, a fact which Thatcher herself recognized with glee. When asked in 2002 about what her greatest achievement was, she answered, “Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.” After coming to power in 1997, New Labour continued Thatcher’s mission to dismantle the welfare state, and, along the way, demonized single mothers, stoked the flames of Islamophobia and, in the end, launched the disastrous War on Terror alongside the United States’ George W. Bush.

As early as 1995, New Labour shrewdly noted that its project could do with a soundtrack—and that Britpop was perfect for it. Hoping to shoulder his way into the movement, Blair invited Blur frontman Damon Albarn for a meeting, where gins and tonics were sipped and, one should think, cringe-worthy words were exchanged. Albarn, naturally, was freaked out by the experience, but one man who was all too happy mingling with Blair and his clique of weird technocrats was Noel Gallagher. Not long after Labour and Blair swept to power, Noel was papped, champagne in hand, happily schmoozing with Blair at a party. The photographs couldn’t be more on the nose: the alliance of Britpop and New Labour, personified by two leaders of movements that had once offered the potential for radicalism, but which ultimately abandoned it, having a laugh. To this day Noel defends Blair, even after his failures couldn’t be more apparent to those of us living in their wake.

Thanks to what I’ve seen described as the “proleface” of Damon Albarn—a reference to the fake cockney accent he affected with Blur—and the cocky, laddish individualism of the Gallagher brothers, I have long dismissed Britpop, despite the fact it boasts some interesting artists as part of its oeuvre. I was so ready to hate Definitely Maybe, as I geared up to listen to it again for this piece, marking its 30th anniversary, but, in truth, I didn’t. I rather enjoyed it.

Before all the nonsense with Blur and Britpop, Oasis were a group of working class boys with lofty ambitions and some songs that sound good loud. They were frustrated, ambitious and talented young men, traits that are quite plain to discern within Definitely Maybe. The album sizzles and cracks with a righteous sort of rage that could only have come from young people stuck in England’s post-Thatcher north. Of course they’re obnoxious little knobheads—and quite proud of it, too—and their instinct toward individualism and pining for the good ol’ days in which the white rock man reigned supreme is hardly progressive, but, throw the record on and try not to be swept along with it. In their early days, at least, Oasis knew how to make a good tune. Definitely Maybe remains Oasis’ greatest record. Before it all went to shit for them, before they became consumed by fame and the tabloids and found themselves unable to put together a decent album, Oasis were young lads overcome with a raw longing for a better life than the ones they’d been dealt, and they poured it all into their music. In times quite as shit as our own, there’s something powerful in that.