Quite the arduous task, isn't it? But despite being frequently brilliant, though at times merely good, Oasis has never been a critic's darling. Even their successes are swept under the rug: check out this brief comment on "Live Forever" if you don't believe me [http://pitchfork.com/features/staff-lists/7852-the-top-200-tracks-of-the-1990s-50-21/]. It's all their own fault, really, and it wasn't just their in your face attitude - Blur never gets half the posthumous dissing even though Damon Albarn has every bit of the attitude that the brothers Gallagher have, but if you start acting like The Beatles, suddenly people think you think you are The Beatles. The fact that Oasis never were about reinventing the wheel brings about challenges of plagiarism that are in some cases accurate. That Oasis seemed to want to be their idols just makes them more susceptible - in 1993 Liam was wearing Ian Brown's hair, in 2003 he was wearing John Lennon's glasses. That post-Be Here Now Oasis was a mere shadow of their former selves makes them fruit ripe for the picking, when the transition between pop stardom and indie quaintness is seen as the ultimate sin, even as bonafide indie stardom becomes more and more real, and Bon Iver and Arcade Fire take home Grammies.
Oasis don't come off to me as just a bunch of wannabe rock star copycats, though. Sure, they didn't make much of an effort to differentiate themselves from their influences, but the music they recorded was so much more than The Beatles, 1990 Edition. The Beatles never had the power or the passion that reveals itself in Oasis, and for that reason, we can at the very least thank Oasis for bringing The Beatles to the sensitive chap. In this sense, Oasis is the ultimate fusion of popular music. The older styles can't be missed, and I won't try to pretend they aren't there, but Oasis takes them to infinitely more dizzying heights. "Don't Look Back In Anger" may take some of the piano bit from "Imagine", but it then does what Lennon never could, which was write a boy meets girl song with some reality and some emotion in it. This realism is the real core of Oasis' music. The images they present are intense and powerful, yet they're grounded in reality, and Liam's vocals and Noel's guitar have the power and passion to match these forces.
Definitely Maybe, being Oasis' first album, is able to avoid a great deal of criticism. Where it's heavy, this gravity is palpable - "Live Forever" and "Slide Away" display a passion that many would deny Oasis ever had. These songs not only have a desperate energy that can't be missed by the listener, but treat subjects very real to our own life: the unachievability of lasting life and love. The difference on Definitely Maybe, when it comes to the critic's perspective, is that when Oasis doesn't try to be weighty, they don't end up being straight pop. In a sense, perhaps the critics are too generous to Oasis' debut. "Rock 'n' Roll Star", "Supersonic", and "Shakermaker" cover subjects of no greater intellectual and emotional vitality than the banal moneymaking songs of Bon Jovi or Aerosmith. On Definitely Maybe, however, this comes off as a sort of innocence that I don't think is at all absent. "Rock 'n' Roll Star" may be the sole song about wanting to be a rock star that is actually genuine. The realism of Oasis' early music is that they're true working class Mancunians, and therein lay much of their charm for the Britpop fanatics of the '90's. When Liam says it, he really means it. This is what makes "Digsy's Dinner" and "Married with Children" such timeless works of art. The former is an endlessly charming song about the lightest of romantic interactions and the permanence they can achieve, and the earnestness in Liam's voice is an instant winner. The latter is almost the opposite: an unashamed yet not gloating break-up litany, yet it manages to be this without either complaining or ranting. It's character assassination is so gentle as to be non existent, and this makes it seem so real. Definitely Maybe is an album of blue collar urbanites showing their softer side, and maybe not quite knowing how to do it, making it an absolutely likable album.
What's the Story (Morning Glory)? is a step toward the Oasis everybody knows, and many don't love. There is indeed a sense of self-importance here that was missing in their debut, but this is not a hindrance. Instead, it enables the true flowering of Oasis' musical genius. How so? This sense of self-importance does have the drawback of making any flaws not only apparent, but painful. On Definitely Maybe, the band could get away with a pointless or pedestrian lyric, or an inaccurate observation, because it had an aura of carefree innocence, like it was just a practice round that shouldn't be judged too seriously, and any "Live Forever" type triumphs become a sort of spontaneous burst of musical genius, the sort of thing Blake, Byron, or Pushkin would be proud of. On What's the Story, this safety net is gone, and the stakes are much higher, because this is a serious album, not playful stuff. Nonetheless, they hit it out of the park more often than not. It starts slowly, "Hello" sputtering at times, and "Roll with It" alternating bland pop with touching sincerity, but it soon hits its stride. Though not the biggest "Wonderwall" fan, I must admit the popularity it has gained for being the sort of serious song of which I speak, and the album only goes up from there. "Don't Look Back in Anger" takes the predictable, and flips it, taking optimistic and wide-eyed imagery and crafting from it a song about failure as well as success, a song about people being people, warts and all, just trying to get ahead. Listen to it again: it's more real than it would seem. "Hey Now!" goes past this mark, mixing not joviality into it. It is very much a patchwork of dark and moody symbols, whose refrain brings us to think about our connections to the past as individuals. After a brief instrumental that is like a 40 second slice of the '90's as I remember it, "Some Might Say" ensues, with its intense guitar riff turning into a message of secular faith and hope, reminding us that our daily lives may indeed have a purpose. "Cast No Shadow", perhaps the deepest song of the album, is a comment on the essence of the songwriter, a modern poet taking up the labor of that the imagists left undone. "She's Electric" is a bit of neo-Digsy's nostalgia that is to some extent repeated in "Champagne Supernova" with the added question, "how many special people change?", while the title track is the most intense song on the album, raising more questions than it answers. What's the Story (Morning Glory)? is a serious work of songwriting, and perhaps it was too serious. For Be Here Now and it's successors, Oasis adopted the soul of What's the Story (Morning Glory)? and took it farther than it could perhaps ever go. It's philosophical soul was lost for the Oasis creed of optimism in the face of ever darkening times, while its fragile seriousness was preserved even when the material didn't match this atmosphere. Thus the decline of Oasis, which for many became a caricature of rock stardom, the very essence of taking one's self too seriously. Oasis' first two albums, however, show that this seriousness was very justified.
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