It is not very fashionable to like Oasis, but an awful lot of people do. They have always been popular in Canada, and while they have flirted with the top a few times in the US, I think they just might be too British for American stardom. At the risk of generalizing wildly, as a rule American stars are supposed to be embarrassed and repentant about drinking and drugs. The Gallagher brothers are not really repentant about anything. Their numerous fights, arrests, break-ups and a gleeful use of narcotics do just not fit in very well in a world of 12-step programs and celebrity confessions. Canadian celebrity culture tends to be a little more relaxed; maybe that is why Oasis have done well here.

In Europe, Australia and elsewhere, their long career has been embraced with some fervour. This is the only contemporary UK act, (besides maybe Coldplay), that has really entered the pantheon inhabited by people like U2. Even then, they tend to lack credibility, at least from a critical standpoint. Being in a band where our image has often triumphed over anything of substance we have done, I can almost sympathize.

Rock and Roll Star is one of their earlier songs, written when Noel was still a guitar tech for bigger bands, and you can draw a line between that song and his later more self-conscious work. While he has written a bunch of great songs, and at least two classic ballads, this is one of my personal favourites. The song essentially states his fantasy - a fairly typical teenage one - of getting in the car and driving really fast, escaping from a dull city, getting up onstage and setting a crowd alight. Like a lot of Oasis songs, it is actually fairly slow – it gets its power from the crashing guitars that Noel is so good at creating. It’s just a string of Ds, Cs and Gs, the same chords anyone could play. But he meshes layer after layer of them, distorted guitars piling on top of each other until they turn into a rock wall. He keeps adding hook after hook, each one a killer. I suppose he thought in those days that he would never run out of good ideas.

I saw an interview the other day with Iggy Pop, about what he ‘does’, talking specifically about the ‘band format’. He was trying to explain that while he can write great songs until doomsday, they have no real impact and reality unless he is playing with his band, the Stooges. Iggy was trying to explain the economic problem inherent in touring, but it got me thinking about Oasis. Everyone agrees that most good bands are a collection of individuals who together are greater than the sum of their parts. No band demonstrates this more than Oasis, especially in a song like this.

Noel Gallagher is a decent singer, and an accomplished writer, but if he hadn't recorded this song, I never would have bothered. His brother Liam is far from a great singer, and according to all reports a complete dick, but he is as essential to this song as the melody. Liam’s sneering, swaggering howl somehow makes it real. You know, without ever seeing so much as a picture of him that this guy utterly and completely believes it:

In my mind my dreams are real…
And tonight, I’m a rock and roll star.

Credibility and authenticity are hard things to pin down. They tend to mean a lot in the folk world, but are largely absent these days from pop music. There is no arguing that Liam Gallagher understood something that was never made explicit in the lyrics – that no one else in the world believed in him, or his brother - and was able to put all the anger and bile of the rejected outsider into every note. And that’s what makes a band great – the ability of disparate individuals to find something in each other’s ideas, and then twist and mold them, until together they are something else entirely. Arrogance and obnoxiousness can be assets in the hand of the right front man. Noel wrote the song, but he could never sing it. He is just not crazy enough to project that kind of rage against the world.  Liam is indifferent to the nay-sayers and critics; all he cares bout is his own unquenchable anger. Together, the combination is pure magic.