00:00Oasis is the last big UK pop phenomenon before the digital tsunami hit.
00:07You can say that Take That was and you can say that the Spice Girls were,
00:11but the point about Take That and the Spice Girls,
00:13Spice Girls was a manufactured girl group and Take That was a manufactured boy group,
00:19but Oasis was the real thing.
00:22They come uncompromisingly out of Manchester
00:27and they represented a certain kind of attitude.
00:31So they weren't Britpop.
00:32I mean, Britpop was a little slightly phony kind of Blairite piece of branding.
00:38What they represent are the voice of the disenfranchised
00:41and the disenfranchised has grown in Britain.
00:44There are now 850,000 young people not in employment, education or training.
00:50I don't know what, you know, what are we doing here, right?
00:53There are all those kids all around the UK that actually Oasis anticipated in many ways
01:00because they were neats as well to use that expression.
01:04You know, you couldn't imagine Liam Gallagher working in Tesco's
01:08and you couldn't imagine, I mean, what jobs were those guys going to do?
01:13So what they represented has grown and spread in Britain.
01:17It's a disenfranchised young people.
01:19Now, they're not young people anymore, but that doesn't matter.
01:22Their music comes from a time where they were ahead of a curve
01:27and the other curve that they were ahead of was social media
01:30and they were ahead of digitization.
01:33So in many ways, they're the peak of Britain's pop music
01:38from the old way of doing things, making records and releasing records.
01:43Liam is so photogenic, it's unbelievable.
01:46And he's uncompromising, you know, he doesn't pose.
01:50You don't feel that he puts it on for the cameras.
01:53That guy is that guy.
01:54He's got those cheekbones.
01:56He's got that attitude.
01:57He's a really good looking guy and that really helped, you know.
02:01So, I mean, when I talk to my students, I say that all pop,
02:07people in pop music have three things in common.
02:09That they all make a noise, they all look in a certain way
02:14and they can all tell a story about why they make the noise they do
02:18and why they look the way they do, you know, the values that they represent.
02:22So everybody's got a sound, a look and a story.
02:24And Oasis ticked all three boxes in a big way.
02:29They sounded great, they look great and the story was always great
02:32because the story was authentic.
02:34I mean, they weren't messing around.
02:36I mean, I've met them on numerous occasions.
02:37I mean, that tension is a real tension.
02:41It isn't pretend, you know, they weren't play acting.
02:44There's a real rub between them.
02:46So in terms of the narrative, then the narrative is
02:52what happens behind the scenes?
02:54We all want to know what happens behind the scenes.
02:56What's it really like?
02:58And those two just let us know.
02:59It's like this, I ate him and, you know, I could give you this
03:02the string of expletives to go with it.
03:04But I mean, soap opera, isn't it?
03:06It was like a living soap opera.
03:08And that's why people, one of the reasons why people were so excited by it.
03:13So funny that, like, one of the great rivalries in music is within the same band.
03:19And then, of course, you know, the Oasis and Blur lore.
03:22But something must have happened where they're getting along
03:24and it'll be interesting to see what exactly that was.
03:29But I think culturally it makes a lot of sense for them to reunite too.
03:32Blur just played a bunch of dates.
03:34Pulp, I know, has reunited, played in the UK
03:37and they're coming to America next month in September.
03:41Culturally, I think Britpop is sort of experiencing a kind of revival.
03:46I mean, the Dua Lipa album from earlier this year was influenced by Britpop.
03:52A.G. Cook, who is known as the producer on Charli XCX's Brat,
03:55put out a Britpop album titled Britpop earlier today.
04:00I mean this year, excuse me.
04:02The Fontaine's DC album, I feel like very heavily I was, you know,
04:06listening to it and like there are a lot of Oasis-y moments on this.
04:08So it sort of makes sense for them to be like,
04:10all right, if we're back in the cultural zeitgeist, might as well get back together.
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