Oasis: A Reunion that Mended a Brotherhood and Reinvigorated Joy for Thousands [PENNY 4.2]
- Jeremy Malizola
- 8 hours ago
- 3 min read
Personal Essay by Jeremy Malizola
This piece originates from the brand new Penny print issue, Penny 4.2. Find links to read the printed version below, with this piece starting on page 8.
I was 11 and waiting for someone to tell me something important. A desire for cultural awareness had suddenly exploded in the previous year, and I spent late school nights traversing Wikipedia for anything — but mostly music — that would make me into a real person. There were flashes: I froze in the back of our family minivan at the first chords of Cat Power’s “He War”, playing off an older sister’s burned CD. My father spoke in hushed tones, describing his memory of hearing The White Album for the first time in 1968. My mother closed her eyes at a red light and sighed wistfully at Neil Young’s “Old Man” on the classic rock station.
One such flash occurred while I was holding a plastic toy guitar designed for Rock Band, a rhythm video game that had completely taken over our family home, strewing plastic drums, guitars, and microphones all over the living room. Despite its silliness, it actually comprised a decent musical education, exposing me for the first time to R.E.M., Hole, and Queens of the Stone Age, among others. But nothing hit so hard as when, perusing new songs to download with my older neighbor and babysitter, I stumbled on a pack of tracks with the artist listed as Oasis. My neighbor, 18 and probably stoned, perked up: “Oasis is like… the best of all time, dude.”
It didn’t take much else. Before long, the colored buttons on the Rock Band controller were clicked to “Don’t Look Back in Anger” hundreds of times, “Supersonic” was on my 6th-grade MySpace page, and Nevermind was deleted from my 1GB MP3 player to make way for What’s the Story.
These songs were as raw and simple as could be — just rock ’n’ roll — but made bigger by their sheer scale, the imagery, the Gallaghers, the backdrop of Britpop. I felt immersed in a larger world, understanding a cultural context that I had missed, but one that instilled a sense of belonging just by knowing it.
In the midst of the aforementioned reunion tour, there’s been a consistent commentary speaking to the universality of Oasis’ classic material — how screaming every word to “Cigarettes & Alcohol” with 80,000 people in a stadium is the balm we need in these turbulent times. I don’t disagree with this sentiment (I locked arms with my seatmate and jumped until my legs ached when “C&A” was played at MetLife), but more so, sharing in songs so universal reminded me — as I often am — of how the severe flattening of culture by algorithms has made very little music, or much of anything, feel universal anymore.
This is an obvious observation, yes, but one that weighs on me often when I think about my entry point into music: chasing a moment when someone or something introduces you to something that pulls you into a larger context — whether it’s a neighbor or Rock Band — and joining in something that feels so large. It cannot be denied that Instagram, Spotify, etc., simply aren’t providing this anymore — only siloing and fracturing.
But for several hours at MetLife Stadium, I could forget. I had the same Adidas jersey on as the teenagers and old men behind me, and we all knew every word to “Hello”.
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