Noel Gallagher on Jez
Here. Old Noel going off on one:
I must confess, I decided about a year ago that I will always love Noel Gallagher. I decided it after reading some of Alex Niven's stuff (various articles and short book on the debut Oasis album) and after some of my own, rather obsessive research on Noel's changing character over the years.
Noel Gallagher's character is the George Galloway of music. Constantly oscillating between the principled and the barbaric, between alienated serf and royal lord. A good example is this - here is Gallagher eviscerating X-Factor for what it is: a Thatcherite nightmare designed to sell young people down the river and into the gap between Simon Cowell's teeth, and an abhorrence to the very idea of original music. And two years later we see Noel riffing on about the show's "greatness", and then, in sheer parody, lamenting the muso-types who bother to spend any time at all criticising the show.
Why the sudden change?
The X-Factor reversal is the trademark of Noel Gallagher. For Noel Gallagher's entire life, since 1993, has been a wild, parodical feedback of itself, the death of everything he knew for the triumph of everything he hated. A man who was didn't receive a single qualification from school and worked on a building site, living in council estates in Manchester writing lyrics such as: "hey you / up in the sky / learning to fly / tell me how high / do you think you'd go / before you start falling" and "you got how many bills to pay and how many kids / and you forgot about the things that we did / the town where we're livin' / has made you a man / and all of your dreams are washed away in the sand", found himself jetting around the world in First Class carriages, attending A-List cocaine-parties and dating North London socialites.
Gallagher was cut from a fabric long-lost from the texture of British music: a figure who believed that aspiration as a word, should be defined by the creative idealism of ordinary people, a term which should be used to emancipate, destroy and reconstruct, used by people as a means of doing whatever they wanted with and within the world. Check this quote from a 2000 interview: "who's gonna go and do their bit? the beatles done their bit, the jam done their bit, the pistols done their bit, the roses done their bit and we did our bit, so now who's gonna go and their bit? cos i don't see it at the minute". It's this belief in music as a means of searing liberation from the mundane, a means of proving to people that they, just like John Lennon, Paul Weller, Morrissey, John Squire, Ian Brown (and the entire, original Oasis line-up), can achieve whatever the hell they want to, which defined the young Noel Gallagher, a definition which was subsequently obliterated in his meteoric rise to international fame.
This helps to explain why a man who now throws around the word 'aspiration' in the Tory context of money-making dickheadishness, was the very same who once penned the resounding lines:
Is it worth the aggrevation
to find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for
it's a crazy situation
but i all need or cigarettes and alcohol
you can wait for a lifetime
to spend your days in the sunshine
you might as well do the white line
cos when it comes on top
you gotta make it happen
"The Tories don't care about the vulnerable, and the communists don't care about the aspirational"
I must confess, I decided about a year ago that I will always love Noel Gallagher. I decided it after reading some of Alex Niven's stuff (various articles and short book on the debut Oasis album) and after some of my own, rather obsessive research on Noel's changing character over the years.
Noel Gallagher's character is the George Galloway of music. Constantly oscillating between the principled and the barbaric, between alienated serf and royal lord. A good example is this - here is Gallagher eviscerating X-Factor for what it is: a Thatcherite nightmare designed to sell young people down the river and into the gap between Simon Cowell's teeth, and an abhorrence to the very idea of original music. And two years later we see Noel riffing on about the show's "greatness", and then, in sheer parody, lamenting the muso-types who bother to spend any time at all criticising the show.
Why the sudden change?
The X-Factor reversal is the trademark of Noel Gallagher. For Noel Gallagher's entire life, since 1993, has been a wild, parodical feedback of itself, the death of everything he knew for the triumph of everything he hated. A man who was didn't receive a single qualification from school and worked on a building site, living in council estates in Manchester writing lyrics such as: "hey you / up in the sky / learning to fly / tell me how high / do you think you'd go / before you start falling" and "you got how many bills to pay and how many kids / and you forgot about the things that we did / the town where we're livin' / has made you a man / and all of your dreams are washed away in the sand", found himself jetting around the world in First Class carriages, attending A-List cocaine-parties and dating North London socialites.
Gallagher was cut from a fabric long-lost from the texture of British music: a figure who believed that aspiration as a word, should be defined by the creative idealism of ordinary people, a term which should be used to emancipate, destroy and reconstruct, used by people as a means of doing whatever they wanted with and within the world. Check this quote from a 2000 interview: "who's gonna go and do their bit? the beatles done their bit, the jam done their bit, the pistols done their bit, the roses done their bit and we did our bit, so now who's gonna go and their bit? cos i don't see it at the minute". It's this belief in music as a means of searing liberation from the mundane, a means of proving to people that they, just like John Lennon, Paul Weller, Morrissey, John Squire, Ian Brown (and the entire, original Oasis line-up), can achieve whatever the hell they want to, which defined the young Noel Gallagher, a definition which was subsequently obliterated in his meteoric rise to international fame.
This helps to explain why a man who now throws around the word 'aspiration' in the Tory context of money-making dickheadishness, was the very same who once penned the resounding lines:
Is it worth the aggrevation
to find yourself a job when there's nothing worth working for
it's a crazy situation
but i all need or cigarettes and alcohol
you can wait for a lifetime
to spend your days in the sunshine
you might as well do the white line
cos when it comes on top
you gotta make it happen
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