That To Me Was Just A Day In Bed

Oasis “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” – There’s a sentiment, and I suppose it is particular to the British music press since they care about Oasis far more than anyone else, that “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” is one the great album openers of all time, and I don’t disagree. It kicks off their debut album with an exciting rocker that sums up their appeal without being one of the big hit singles (“Live Forever,” “Supersonic,” “Cigarettes & Alcohol”) or the best song on the record (“Columbia”). More importantly, it does a fine job of setting up the major themes of Definitely Maybe, as well as the rest of their discography.

People usually take “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” as a fantasy borne out in the reality of Oasis’ massive, instanteous success, but that level of appreciation is shallow and only enjoyable if you happen to be a triumphalist superfan who gets off on a song that can be read as self-fulfilling prophecy specific to Noel and Liam Gallagher. The beauty of “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” though, is that it’s not about actually being a rock star, but rather about being a fan who recognizes the power dynamic of an artist and their audience and desperately wants to feel the rush from the other side. Even though sensible, pragmatic people tell the character in the song that the art he loves is not important, he is adamant that the communication between the audience and that art is key to all the pleasures that he knows, and the resentment for those people who diminish both sides of the spectacle only fuel his ambition to break out of his boring life of passivity.

It’s helpful that the sound of the song gets across exactly why the guy cares about the music in the first place. “Giddy rush” may be one of my most overused and hackish expressions, but that’s exactly what the song is, and really, no other singer besides Liam Gallagher could possibly do it justice.

Liam’s voice is a highly specific and wonderful thing; this weirdly elastic instrument with a child-like tone that mixes gleeful brattiness with a simple, guileless conviction that should not be be mistaken for po-faced earnestness. He elongates and mutates words in a way that wrings poetry from banal phrases, and his drone never drags down the pace of the fast songs, instead implying the musical equivalent of speed lines in manga.

Not every lyric is a gem, but as with most every song from Oasis’ prime (1994-1996, along with about half the songs from the Be Here Now period), Noel Gallagher displays an understanding that pop lyrics need not be consistently good as long as the emphasized parts have the proper resonance, whether it is literal (“you might as well do the white line!,” “you and I are gonna live forever,” “I can’t tell you the way I feel because the way I feel is oh so new to me”) or inspired gibberish (“someday you will find me caught beneath the landslide in a champagne supernova in the sky”, “flash your pan at the song that I’m singing,” “I know a girl called Elsa, she’s into Alka Seltzer”) that just sounds right.

Noel’s guitar style tends to favor a thin yet overbearing sort of heaviness that can make listening to too many of his songs on end a bit of a chore, similar to how you might not want to eat an entire meal of rich, buttery pastries. The sound suits “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” and the rest of Definitely Maybe well, but lately I’ve been thinking about how great it could be if many of its songs were made over with nimble dance arrangements. I am certain that “Columbia” in particular would sound brilliant in this way — after all, stick around to that song’s fade out and you can clearly hear the baggy dance beat buried underneath those dense layers of distorted shoegazer guitars. It’s not usually the beat that makes me imagine the songs in this way, it’s mostly in the melody and the spirit of the recordings. There’s some sort of continuity of tone, if not direct stylistic compatibility. (Click here to buy Definitely Maybe, and here to pre-order Stop The Clocks, both from Amazon.)

Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh mp3 column is up on the ASAP site, and features a mutated version of “Galang” by Mico, an especially pretty song by +/-, and one of the best songs from the new Sloan record, which is slowly shaping up to become one of favorite albums from this year.