I’m With the Band — How Music Made Me British

“Wonderwall” is all I remember. The rest of Oasis is a blur to me. I was still living in New York City when the band had their global breakthrough — and that song was everywhere. From the album (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, it’s one of the few mid-1990s songs whose lyrics this Boomer can remember. I admired its Beatles-like off-kilter poetics, its love-will-save-the-day (if not, maybe it’ll just save me) sentimentality. And Liam Gallagher’s voice, while not beautiful, was pure plaintive Britpop, a plangent inflection echoing from as far back as 1962’s “Love Me Do” by John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

Oasis would release its next album on Aug. 21, 1997 — but 10 days later, the world’s attention was inexorably drawn to the aftermath of Princess Diana’s death in a car crash in Paris. Or maybe it was just me. I was the duty editor for Time when we had to change the magazine’s cover that long weekend — US Labor Day — to a portrait with “1960-1997” under her name. For the next year or so, my journalistic career was spent writing and editing obituaries and tributes to the woman who would never be queen. By the time the next Oasis albums came out, I was the magazine’s news director and too busy with the contentious 2000 US presidential election, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and a global financial crisis to pay attention to music, much less the unbrotherly bickering of Liam and his older sibling Noel, the band’s songwriter. In 2009, Oasis broke up with a whimper (or Liam’s bout of laryngitis) that I didn’t really notice.