where were you while we were getting high?

on oasis and kind of an apologia for twitter

It’s been a bad summer for my general project of staying off Twitter. First the Euros, then the Copa América, and now the return of Oasis. I am interested in all of these events, and I am especially interested in the memetic production that surrounds them; I want to see people’s reactions to them filtered through meme templates and formats; I want to laugh in ways both familiar and unpredictable to me.

I’ve been staying off Twitter, I have to admit, not for moral repulsion from its owner, but because the main thing that attracted me to it—access to other people’s consciousnesses, at high volume and high speed—is waning in quality. There’s still some of that, but in even greater measure there are people saying things that I find meaningless at best and offensive at worst, and I think it’s generally a bad idea to expose myself to that. I also find myself much less interested in the other reasons I once logged on: the exercise of reducing a thought to a limited number of characters, the challenge of writing a joke at my own expense without veering into humiliation, the delivery of a definitive take.

But over the last few months I’ve been logging on anyway. It’s like a gambling addiction, by which I mean I log on with the hope that something good and mostly out of my control might happen to me. (That analogy, by the way, I got from Twitter, where someone used it to describe going out compulsively. Apologies to the original writer whose identity I cannot remember.)

When an easily meme-able event happens, it’s more likely that I’ll get lucky. And when it does happen, it feels so good that I don’t even judge myself for having logged on. It’s like a disgusting bodily function. I’m not saying it doesn’t stink, but in that moment I feel that I might be dead if I couldn’t do it. 

For the twenty-four hours on either side of Oasis’s reunion announcement, I felt such an absolutely giddy joy, not just at the possibility of their coming back together, but at the experience of being part of a sort of collective psychosis that, in the middle of the work week, I really could only experience through this one social media platform. Just the thought of singing along to “Don’t Look Back in Anger” at MetLife Stadium was enough to make me feel euphoric. And it felt to me different from other moments of collective psychosis online, like the day Trump got Covid. Obviously that’s partly because the moment connected me with something that made me happy when I was kid, sort of against all odds: I was too young to know what it meant to love bands, didn’t understand what they were saying, and hadn’t experienced enough of the world or of anything to get what they were doing. (Still, that guitar solo was good enough for me.) But the Twitter-phoria over the Oasis reunion also felt (feels? Is it over?) different because they are a relic of a time when musicians’ public personas were less mediated by PR, when the biggest stars weren’t also shilling for brands on Instagram, when artists’ careers didn’t depend on cultivating an image that was also salable. I mean, I’m sure their shithead reputation sold some records, but it’s also true that, for example, MTV never distributed their Unplugged special, which Noel Gallagher played alone because his brother Liam didn’t show up. Hardly lucrative. There is a sort of magic in their balls-out dumbassery—not because it’s fun to gawk at, even though it is—but because it’s just so fucking regular. You probably know at least a few Noels and Liams; maybe you are one yourself. They hate each other and they love each other and despite of it and because of it they make music together that makes people lose their minds. They’re special precisely because they’re not. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about art lately, specifically what distinguishes good art from bad art. I got really into Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck Babe!” a few weeks ago, after a period of listening to Taylor Swift for a project I’ve been working on. Are you following the parallelism in those two sentences? Roan’s song feels so honest, even in its artifice; I don’t have to know what it’s about or identify with it or put myself in her shoes or do anything at all to feel what it’s capturing. The form and the content suit each other; there’s no trickery; no pulling at heartstrings; no calculation of a reaction. And insofar as we can consider musicians’ public images part of their art, I appreciate her drag-queen performance, the separation of Kayleigh Rose Amstutz from Chappell Roan, the correspondence, again, between form and content. Same with Oasis: Gallaghers’ public image, Liam asking Noel to unblock him on Twitter just so he could call him a bitch, Noel kissing Liam on the face during an interview, Liam getting drunk on stage and groping Noel while he plays the guitar, it acts as an extension of the content of the music, and it also feels true, and honest, in a way that not much does anymore. And if I, ironically, have to log on to experience it, at least a little, at least until I can sell my soul for a concert ticket, I am, for now, okay with that.