33โ ๐ธ Long Playing ๐ธ DEFINITELY MAYBE by Alex Niven #Didsbury
EARTH ๐
โWhen middle-class musicians resort to appropriation and collage it is often applauded as 'allusion' or 'pastiche'; when working-class musicians do it they are dismissed as plagiarists, or prosecuted as outright thieves. The notion - still popular in some quarters that Oasis were chancers who rose above their station by stealing other bands' creative property is patronizing and ultimately untenable. Whatever can be said about their musical conservatism in later years, on Definitely Maybe, Oasis's appropriation of the past was just as valid, and just as creatively successful, as the sample tapestries on a work like Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions.โ
FIRE ๐ฅ
โPerhaps the ultimate dole hymn, 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' speaks of a life reduced to an absolute zero point of poverty and animal nihilism. While most of the songs on Definitely Maybe celebrate abundance and limitlessness, this is a song about a scorched earth that contains nothing but the two legitimized capitalist drugs (though the not-so-legitimate 'white line' also makes a cameo appearance). If 'Live Forever' is a song about breaking into heaven, 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' describes a hellish landscape just about to burst into flames....
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarettes_&_Alcohol
...As in the archetypal early-nineties British novel, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993), the world 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' inhabits is one in which the existentialist appeal to 'choose life' is turned on its head. Self-fulfilment is to be found in artificial hedonism, and the only thing really worth living for after genuine self-empowerment has evaporated is the simulated escape. After society has ceased to exist, as it apparently had in post-Thatcher Britain, there is no life left to choose, or rather, the individual becomes a purely bodily entity capable only of choosing between different forms of material satisaction and physical intoxication. Famously the film version of Irvine Welsh's novel framed this dilemma as a 'choice' between the lobotimised nightmare of late-capitalist consumerism and addiction to heroin.โ
Author Alex Niven en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Niven
On Oasis: The Debut en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe
via the Bloomsbury series en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33โ
and the album cover
Taken by this photographer
33โ ๐ธ Long Playing ๐ธ DEFINITELY MAYBE by Alex Niven #Didsbury
EARTH ๐
โWhen middle-class musicians resort to appropriation and collage it is often applauded as 'allusion' or 'pastiche'; when working-class musicians do it they are dismissed as plagiarists, or prosecuted as outright thieves. The notion - still popular in some quarters that Oasis were chancers who rose above their station by stealing other bands' creative property is patronizing and ultimately untenable. Whatever can be said about their musical conservatism in later years, on Definitely Maybe, Oasis's appropriation of the past was just as valid, and just as creatively successful, as the sample tapestries on a work like Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions.โ
FIRE ๐ฅ
โPerhaps the ultimate dole hymn, 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' speaks of a life reduced to an absolute zero point of poverty and animal nihilism. While most of the songs on Definitely Maybe celebrate abundance and limitlessness, this is a song about a scorched earth that contains nothing but the two legitimized capitalist drugs (though the not-so-legitimate 'white line' also makes a cameo appearance). If 'Live Forever' is a song about breaking into heaven, 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' describes a hellish landscape just about to burst into flames....
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cigarettes_&_Alcohol
...As in the archetypal early-nineties British novel, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993), the world 'Cigarettes and Alcohol' inhabits is one in which the existentialist appeal to 'choose life' is turned on its head. Self-fulfilment is to be found in artificial hedonism, and the only thing really worth living for after genuine self-empowerment has evaporated is the simulated escape. After society has ceased to exist, as it apparently had in post-Thatcher Britain, there is no life left to choose, or rather, the individual becomes a purely bodily entity capable only of choosing between different forms of material satisaction and physical intoxication. Famously the film version of Irvine Welsh's novel framed this dilemma as a 'choice' between the lobotimised nightmare of late-capitalist consumerism and addiction to heroin.โ
Author Alex Niven en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Niven
On Oasis: The Debut en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitely_Maybe
via the Bloomsbury series en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33โ
and the album cover
Taken by this photographer