Mark O'Connell: I salute Oasis as the comrades they have lately become

I was never much of an Oasis fan. I was 15 by the time their debut album Definitely Maybe came out, and was by then well on my way to becoming the pretentious cultural elitist and far-left poser you are now obliged to tolerate every Saturday in The Irish Times. Their brand of sensible, meat-and-two-veg Blair-rock was incompatible with my general teenage vibe, which was more efficiently served by apoplectic American hard-core and sneering British anarcho-punk. If a record didn’t sound like it was attempting to blast a hole straight through “the system”, and my own frontal lobe along with it, I was not at that point interested.

But my teenage self was wrong about Oasis. Despite hanging out with Tony and Cherie at 10 Downing Street, and despite Noel Gallagher’s more recent grumbling about the wokeists, they have, in the short time since announcing their upcoming reunion, gone further towards bringing about the downfall of capitalism than Gang of Four, Crass, or Fugazi ever managed. And for this, I must salute them as the comrades they have lately become.

They have achieved this, of course, not thro...
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