in Vogue. Corey Seymour was working for Rolling Stone when Oasis's first album was released.
https://www.vogue.com/article/an-oasis-superfan-goes-all-in-on-the-reunion-tour
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While the rest of my friends, along with most of the staff at Rolling Stone, where I worked at the time, were still in thrall to what seemed to me to be the mere fumes of the grunge scene, that music didn’t really speak to me. Then my best friend, who worked down the hall, threw a cassette tape on my desk one day and said, “Welcome to your new favorite band.” It was the advance of Definitely Maybe, Oasis’s debut album, and it changed my life in ways that are still hard to articulate.
While grunge seemed peevish, grim, defeatist, and dour—and extended the kind of us-vs.-them culture most famously centered by the indie rock of the ’80s and ’90s, Oasis was celebratory, communal, and democratic while exploring themes of alienation, escape, and fantasies of triumph. (“Rock ’n’ Roll Star” makes a lot of sense when it’s being sung by one of the biggest bands on the planet; its true genius, though, is in the fact that it was written by a kid without even a dream of a record deal and sung, at first, to crowds of a dozen or so in local bars next to railway stations.) Oasis songs were also universal: If Noel was writing about the local streets, scenes, characters, and his personal hopes and dreams, what came out were songs that seemingly anybody could relate to.
-snipping to get to the recent concert he attended-
The bigness of it all—in virtually every way—was hard for me to take in. Here were the famously volatile brothers emerging onto the stage from the darkness, hands clasped together up high, Liam in a green-brown Burberry parka and brown corduroy bucket hat. Here was Noel, literally genuflecting in homage to the brother he’d spent years denigrating. Here were the amps kicked in, the crowd kicking off, and here I was, seeing my favorite band in something like their home stadium. (Oasis is famously from Manchester, which they played in earlier weekends, but they found their stride and their fame in London, where both brothers still live.) Liam’s voice is as urgent, insistent, and gorgeous as it’s ever sounded, and he remains the best rock frontman of his generation and probably beyond. The band (with members from both first- and later-generation lineups) sounds amazing. The songs—written mainly by Noel, with a setlist that doesn’t deviate far from the band’s first two landmark albums, and so far hasn’t varied at all—are the kind of anthems that made all 90,000 people at Wembley jump up and down together, singing every lyric. Many people around me were weeping tears of joy, some of them seemingly throughout the concert; people (men, women, couples, families, strangers) threw their arms around each other. People threw cups of beer and sat up on their friends’ shoulders, got high, screamed, cried some more, shook their heads. My own section was somewhere on the VIP spectrum (a many-layered confection here), and was thus ever-so-vaguely subdued, but it was clear from the get-go that the whole massive sing-along was something to be embraced, not avoided or critiqued.
In the middle of it all, it occurred to me: When have I ever been around 90,000 people having this much fun? Aside from me and my OG generation, there were tens of thousands of Oasis fans at Wembley who never dreamed that they’d get to see their favorite band perform together live, and their ecstasy was apparent. Setting the bar even lower: When have 90,000 people all agreed on something, and done it so raucously and so joyfully?
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Much.more at the link.
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