Be Here Now, the third album from Brit-pop behemoths Oasis, marked the moment when they turned everything up to 11, ingested enough Columbian Marching Powder to transform Tony Montana into a slobbering mess and singlehandedly toppled a musical subgenre. But it may not be as bad as you think. Or it may be even worse. Let's see...Now, it may not seem like the most logical approach to describing a subgenre by detailing its demise, but that's just the kind of album Be Here Now is. Overblown, self-indulgent and sometimes barely listenable, it represents all the failings of Britpop in about 71 minutes. That's right, 71 minutes, this puppy barely squeezed into a CD, and you can bet your bottom dollar that it would be even longer (somewhere in the realm of a three disc set) if they thought people would fork out the extra cash.
And that thing in bold up the top about toppling a subgenre wasn't used for drama or hyperbole...you can ask anyone who was anyone of importance around 1997 (and even regular chumps like yourself and I...but mostly me). It's rare that you can pinpoint the end of a genre to a single act (with possible exclusions being Cobain shooting himself, the Sid and Nancy massacre and Bob Dylan realising he despised hippies and beatniks), but an album causing this is almost unheard of. On the superb Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of Britpop documentary, popculture journalist and author Jon Savage sums it up pretty matter-of-factly:
"The end of Britpop was, if nothing else, that Oasis third album be Here Now, which actually isn't the great disaster that everybody says...there're two or three really great songs on it, but it was supposed to be the big, BIG triumphal record. Labour got in, Oasis were preparing their big statement, and it comes out three or four days before Princess Di is killed"
Ok, so he doesn't seem like much of a fan, and given his high praise throughout the rest of the doco, it would appear that he's making this judgment fairly objectively. But he is still, however, a 'popculturalist', which in my opinion is often akin to someone saying 'well, I watch a lot of TV and know stupid trivia so I figured I'd make a career out of it'. So let's look at two sources that you assume would be characteristically biased in their opinion of the album, who also happen to be the only original members of Oasis: Noel Gallagher (principal songwriter) and Liam Gallagher (principal drunken oaf with minuscule moments of idiot savant-like brilliance). On the same documentary, Noel describes the album in this way:
"It's the sound of a bunch of guys on coke, in a studio, not giving a fuck...all the songs are really long, all the lyrics are really shit, and for every millisecond Liam is not saying a word there's a fooking guitar riff in there in the Wayne's World style...air guitar gone mental. But Liam thinks it rocks".
Liam Gallagher, the enigmatic peacock frontman of the band, counters it with "At that time we thought it was fooking great and I still think it's great...it just wasn't Morning Glory". Well, to be fair, Liam Gallagher probably thinks his morning defecation is 'fookin great', so i'm still not sure who to believe.
Perhaps a little historical context is also importance to understand this album's place and fractitious nature. 1994 saw oasis release Definitely Maybe, possibly one of the most exciting debut albums to ever be releases, signalling a young band with zero hopes under the mundane existence of Thatcherism who wrote optimistic music for the everyman; universally specific subject matter with anthemic dreams. 1995 saw the bands follow-up (What's The Story) Morning Glory?, slightly treading water with similar songs, but still managing to break the highly sought after American market, something that had eluded most other Britpop bands (Blur, Supergrass, Pulp) with their characteristically ethnocentric 'English' songs. Riding this popularity, Oasis lived the rock n roll dream they imagined since living in squats in Burnage as children. Their partying became notorious, their onstage and offstage fighting even more so. Drug-taking reached mammoth heights, Liam would fornicate with any creature that didn't have an Adam's Apple, and somehow Noel (coked out of his mind) still got invited to meet Tony Blair at a function to celebrate his recent rise to Prime Minister with New labor, a political movement which went to considerable lengths to appear as 'fresh and vibrant' by sidling up to key members of Britpop. The much publicised feud between Oasis and Blur seemed to either have been won or called to truce, it was time for Oasis to return to the studio, put their considerable money where their constantly flapping mouths were and create a true masterpiece. Sadly it didn't happen like that.
What we instead find on Be Here Now is the biggest band in the United Kingdom (and arguably, at the time, fair chunks of the world), not being told what to do. It was like giving the keys of a 24-hour candy shop to a bunch of preschoolers, telling them to behave themselves but not checking up on them for six months. And just like what happens when preschoolers get too much sugar in them, the monumental drug abuse around the time made these five kids irritable, hard to put to sleep and with a desire to kick everything in their limb radius. The honest to god truth is that Noel gallagher was running out of ideas, the burden of being sole songwriter was wearing away at him and he basically locked himself in his room for days until he came up with what he thought could be drawn out to an entire album. Well, to some extent he was right, he definitely made an entire Oasis album...it just happened to be the amalgamation of the first two albums. Stand By Me was an attempt at replicating the flag-waving anthems of Live Forever or Don't Look Back In Anger, All Around The World was this albums Champagne Supernova, while Fade In-Out showed that celebrity friends and collaborations aren't always a success (the track features slide guitar from Johnny Depp and *ahem* some brilliant tambourine work from Kate Moss). Even the album cover, with props referencing Keith Moon's Rolls Royce incident, the beatles and even more of The Who, signaled a creative dead end. Magic Pie takes lyrics from a Tony Blair speech...what was their editing process like?!?
Ok, now the good stuff.............................................ummmmmmmmmmmmm *cough*
Oh yeah! D'you Know What I Mean, for all its 8-minute pomposity, fucking rocks and served as a perfect first single. There, I said it: there's a drum loop from N.W.A., Noel uses a Flying V in the filmclip (itself a bombastic mess of helicopters and a massive budget), but the idiotically simplistic chorus created one of the most swagger-worthy tunes of the 90s. Likewise, Stand By Me has moments of transcendent beauty, but those moments probably should've been edited into a 3 minute song. And don't go way, written after Noel learnt that his Mother had a cancer scare, finds his typically bulletproof confidence touchingly wounded. Actually, on second thoughts, if this album was cut down to about half its length (like the first two), you would have a tidy package, a distillation of their prowess that would overpower the feeling that you'd heard it before. Too bad their producer, Owen Morris, was good friends with the group and just as big a coke fiend as the rest of them, so he never mustered up the balls to just say "hey, you know what...do we really need this 2 minute feedback intro or 64 bar guitar solo?"
It's still sold 8 million copies worldwide, so it clearly couldn't be the disasterpiece that everyone remembers it as. It did a lot better than, say, The Stone Roses' Second Coming. But no, it's now somehow become nothing more than a footnote of musical history, with the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll only feeling fit to say that the album "with its '70s arena-rock sound, was met with mixed reviews and relatively disappointing sales". Piss poor, Rolling Stone...you gave more attention to Milli Vanilli!
And my final verdict? Wow, I'm still undecided, even with my unwavering adulation of this band. It fell on its ass due to the inevitable build-up and high expectations of a nation and its bloodthirsty media, something that the band didn't ask for. Ok, sometimes they did, but even The Beatles were not subjected to this much scrutiny (case in point: Let It Be is still heralded as a masterpiece, merely because of its shoddiness and documentation of the world's greatest band imploding in on itself). So Be here Now is very much this bands Let It Be, a symbol of their youthful enthusiasm and dreams for world domination going head-to-head with an immovable object (the public). Perhaps all we need is thirty more years of analysis and retrospection for Oasis' fall from grace to be put on an equal pedestal with Definitely Maybe or (What's The Story) Morning Glory.
Noel Gallagher himself has spent much of the last decade distancing himself from the album, scarcely allowing those songs into live performances and leaving out any tracks from their 2006 compilation. This may be for practical reasons, given the sheer length of most songs located herein, but a part of me believes Gallagher has moved on from defending the album, preferring to focus on present and future projects like the highly-enjoyable Don't Believe The Truth or whatever they're tinkering away on right now. I think the best you can do with Be Here Now is grab a couple of favourite tracks (I would suggest the first single, Fade-In Out for its curio factor and All Around The World for sheer pomposity), append them to their other works and only dust out the full album when you want to get drunk and kick chairs over at a house party. It's actually even more fun than it sounds.
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