An Oasis in the Desert of Reality

This photo of Liam and Noel Gallagher has accompanied the announced Oasis reunion tour

Perhaps my opinion on the announced Oasis reunion tour is distorted by me being an American who streams British media online. This makes Oasis seem both larger and smaller than they actually were: they planted twenty-four singles in the UK Top Ten, but only one in America. “Wonderwall,” obviously. Two other songs, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and “Champaigne Supernova,” have also had lingering afterlives on alternative radio.

Thus, although I appreciate the panicked rush to purchase reunion tickets, I can’t participate. Oasis represents a place and time, one in which I couldn’t participate because worldwide streaming scarcely existed before the Gallagher brothers stopped working together in 2009. I realize that lost era means something important to those who lived through it. However, the timing seems exceptionally pointed, knowing what I do now.

The Gallagher brothers announced their reunion tour as Oasis almost exactly thirty years after the release of their record-setting debut album, Definitely Maybe. Released on 29 August 1994*, this album outsold any British freshman album until that point, and all four singles went Gold or Platinum. Though Oasis wouldn’t have an American breakout until their second album, they didn’t need one; they already had Beatles-like acclaim on their first try.

Nostalgia vendors always seem to think things were Edenic approximately thirty years ago. Growing up in America in the 1980s, popular media regaled me with giddy stories of how wonderful things were during the Eisenhower administration. TV series like Happy Days an MASH, or movies like Stand By Me and Back to the Future, though they commented on then-current events, nevertheless pitched a mythology of prelapsarian sock-hop ideals.

Importantly, these shows all spotlighted not how the 1950s were, but how the aging generation remembered them. MASH endeavored to humanize the horrors of war, during a time when Vietnam was still too current for commentary, but it did so in ways that only occasionally included any indigenous population. Happy Days was set in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, one of America’s most racially segregated cities, but featured almost no Black characters.

This whitewashed nostalgia reaches its apotheosis of silliness with Back to the Future, in the prom scene, where White Marty Mc-Fly shows a Black backup band how to really rock out. The maneuvers he tries might’ve looked shocking to the White kids on the dance floor, because they lived pre-Jimi Hendrix. But they were hardly new; Marty didn’t do anything Charly Patton and Son House hadn’t invented in the 1920s.

For Oasis to reunite almost exactly thirty years after they deluged British music, puts them in the same position. The announced reunion lineup currently includes only the Gallager brothers, omitting the revolving door of sidemen and rhythm sections that supported them for fifteen years. The band was contentious even before the brothers stopped working together; they never produced a dark horse, like George Harrison, to emerge from the wreckage.

I’ve written before that the nostalgia impulse produces the illusion of inevitability. Because events happened a certain way—because the Beatles hit number one, because Dr. King bested Bull Connor, because America beat the Soviets to the Moon—we believe things had to happen a certain way. This removes human agency from history, giving us false permission to go with the flow, like a dead salmon floating downstream.

Oasis hit the mainstage when John Major’s Tory government was walking wounded. Though Major had received a Parliamentary mandate in 1992, he was already deeply unpopular by 1994, helping Thatcherism limp timidly across history’s finish line. Like their beloved Beatles, who broke just as Alec Douglas-Home’s doomed premiership ushered the Tories out, Oasis arrived to supervise a Conservative collapse.

And now they’re reuniting as Rishi Sunak has nailed shut another Conservative coffin.

But history isn’t inevitable. Tony Blair’s nominally progressive government, like Bill Clinton’s, openly embraced moralism and militarism, before ending in the massive moral sellout of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Likewise, Kier Starmer is possibly the blandest person ever elected PM, winning only because the Tories squandered every advantage. Starmer, like the Oasis reunion, bespeaks a rare British optimism, without much of a plan.

I’d argue that most people don’t really want an Oasis reunion. I strongly doubt anyone wants to watch two White men pushing sixty warble about the troubles of 1994 onstage. Their largely British audience simply wants to time-travel to a moment when they didn’t have to know what Brexit was, who Boris Johnson is, or why a down payment on a London house is triple the average annual income.

*Out of respect, I use British dating conventions in this essay, and only this essay.