ALL THIS speculation about whether Oasis are better than the Beatles is telling stuff. As usual, the point is short circuited in a tangle of hyperbole, chauvinism and false oppositions. It is true that on the first Oasis album, Liam contrived to sound like John, and on the second like Paul. But imitation, whether for the purposes of flattery or deception, is not the issue. The true question is why is a band that contrives to sound like the Beatles so popular in the dying days of the millennium?
As usual, our arrogance leads us to assume that the creation of music is in the gift of mankind. In truth, artists, musicians, singers are but the channels of the sound from beyond. "I used to go through hell," John Lennon once confided, "thinking I didn't own any of my songs, and then it dawned on me that I never owned them in the first place. The real music comes to me, the music of the spheres, the music that surpasses understanding ... I transcribe it like a medium. I have nothing to do with it other than I'm sitting under this tree and this whole damn thing comes down and I've just put it down".
If this is true, then not a note is written anywhere, any time, by mistake, or at random, or unconnected to a hidden, mysterious plan. The sounds presented to us by our composers and musicians are the latest bulletins from beyond, the sounds seeking to guide us to harmony. Even music which is itself lacking in harmony arrives to make us aware of our disharmony. Comparisons, therefore, are not simply invidious - they are ridiculous. Music, as Jacques Attali wrote in Noise: The Political Economy of Music, is prophecy in which change is inscribed "faster than it transforms society ... It makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible".
But Attali, being given to excessive rationalism, missed the point of his own insight. Much of his book is given over to bemoaning the sad state of modern pop. "It is not that song has become debased," he lamented, "rather, the presence of debased songs in our environment has increased. Popular music and rock have been recuperated, colonized, sanitized ... Today ... the most rudimentary, flattest, most meaningless themes pass for successes if they are linked to a mundane preoccupation of the consumer or if they signify the spectacle of a personal involvement on the part of the singer.
Although at pains to deny it, Attali was making the common mistake of bringing subjective value judgements to bear on what is much more interesting. He wrote eloquently about the "repetitive society", but his own pessimism prevented him seeing the annunciation in his own words. Having sat with his subject through the darkest hours, he nodded off before the dawn.
Why are certain periods characterised by what appears to be innovation, and others by what appears to be cannibalism of the past? Answer: hope and unhope. Why is imitation and nostalgia such a feature of pessimistic times? Answer: because, in periods of gloom we remain fascinated with those in which the blockage of unfinished business resides.
Great music is shocking, yes, but it is the shock of recognition rather than of the unexpected. The restless hand on the dial is searching, not for novelty but for affirmation. We pre empt fashion and future by anticipating the next noise before it is made, and signal our recognition of it when it arrives by looking up momentarily from our production line to say, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Successful music is so because it makes us think, "I knew that already".
Oasis have taken the essences of certain elements of 60s pop, extended them to just short of the point of tedium, and pumped up the volume. It is as though they believe they hear things in the music they're imitating which its creators had themselves failed to recognise. Their massive appeal lies in this lack of subtlety, for which their audience has a corresponding craving. Their mission is to pick up the unfinished business of the 60s and bring it to a conclusion, and in this they are acting out the frustration of perhaps three generations now under the age of 64.
THE REAL question, therefore, is: why are we still fixated on the same sounds we were 30 years ago? Why is our collective consciousness trapped in the aural landscape first revealed by, or rather to, Lennon and McCartney?
The answer, I believe, has to do with the unresolved nature of the 60s dream. Just as in our individual human lives, life in our collective existence throws up the same issues again and again until we face and resolve them. The 60s dream offered freedom, peace and love but none except as a tantalising whiff on the breeze of progress. The soundtrack carried the ideal in all of its glory and promise but the reality remained unrealised. Politics refused to accommodate itself to anything other than the downside of the new culture, which eventually turned inward in a haze of smoke, hedonism and alienation.
We wanted the heroes of the 60s culture to tell us how to live, but they themselves proved ill equipped for mere survival. The confusion of trying to reconcile the sounds they had heard and passed on with the lives they had to live led them to drugs, madness and death. Elvis and Hendrix died of an excess of expectation, Lennon got plugged by a man giving voice in the most extreme fashion to the disappointment of a generation. Ironically, Lennon was the one who seemed closest to a breakthrough, bringing his experience of rearing his son, Sean, to bear on the music he made with his wife, Yoko, on Double Fantasy, an album which at least acknowledged the problem: how those who didn't want to be alive when they were 25 might grow old gracefully.
This process is emblematic of a deeper one. The 60s represent the Golden Age not just of pop music but of the aspirations of the century. And because this is the first century in which the globe began to be "self aware" through the mass media, the 60s have come to represent the Golden Age of mankind's sense of hope as we collectively understand it. And now, it is as though the onset of the millennium is creating a build up of pressure to resolve the questions which arose during our most optimistic period.
Of course, the music of Oasis owes as much to the Sex Pistols as it does to the Beatles. But Punk, too, was an effort to reconcile ourselves with the essence of our own optimism, to strip away the superfluous and re find some core value. That this desire was shrouded in cynicism simply added to the pathos.
We have this habit of demonising some parts of the past and venerating others, seemingly unaware that nostalgia and anti nostalgia are not opposites but the same thing in slightly different forms. If we are still hearing the same old soundtrack it is because we have still to deal with the awkward questions of reconciling freedom and responsibility, individualism and love. The echo in Oasis denotes not imitation but the insistence of the Zeitgeist that we cannot move on until we have absorbed the lesson so far.