Around 1994 something happened to music fans in Dublin. It was a great transformation.
Wispy indie kids who once sashayed vaguely started to swagger assertively. Long hair was sculpted into mod helmets.
Depressive romanticism was replaced with grumpy sarcasm. Plaid shirts were replaced with football jerseys. Timid apathy was replaced with bolshie confidence. It was what the kids these days call a “vibe shift”.
The best pop stars are the most easily imitated. Oasis were easy to imitate – swing the arms, helmet up the hair, approximate a defiant scowl – then, depending on your disposition, grunt like Liam or quip like Noel. That’s it.
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Fans of their arch-rivals Blur were less visible. Pulp-fans aped Jarvis Cocker but they tended to hide in the corner. And soon after that the whole world descended into an internet-enabled postmodern mush.
The Oasis-head is arguably the last truly visible pop-cultural fandom.
Who cares, really, that after the first wave of imitators the band never really had a sustained cultural influence? Their first album, Definitely Maybe was a genuinely exciting bellow of brash potential: four-to-the-floor drums, droney wall-of-sound guitars and catchy, context-free couplets snarled by a sullen man who seemed annoyed with us.
Their oddly punctuated second album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? had the illusion of forward momentum, but the third album Be Here Now answers a question nobody really asked: “What if too-much cocaine made a noise?”
They never sounded remotely like the Beatles; I have no idea what that was all about.
So Oasis’s greatest creation, really, was the Oasis fan. These strutting, mod-haired giants once roamed this island scattering depressed goths, hedonistic techno-fiends and doleful grunge-kids before them.
Now, approximately 160,000 of them are in the suburbs sculpting their barnets, pulling their weather-ambivalent big anoraks from the attic and placing their children in the care of their mocking, Beatles-loving parents, all set to invade Croke Park tonight and tomorrow for Oasis’s Dublin gigs.
I’m not going, but I’ll be marvelling at the fans. I mean, look at them. Aren’t they magnificent?
