Archives for November 2018

Certain Songs #1366: Oasis – “Champagne Supernova”

November 9, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
Year: 1995

And so it came to pass, that on April 13 1996, Rox, Steph and I journeyed across the Bay Bridge to see Oasis in concert at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

As you can imagine, after nearly six months of non-stop playing of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? we were tremendously excited to see Oasis do their thing in person in a place that wasn’t either a stadium or arena, despite the fact that those were the venues that they were aiming for.

Certain Songs #1365: Oasis – “Morning Glory”

November 8, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
Year: 1995

What’s the story morning glory?
Wellllllllllll?

Oh fuck yeah. I love this song so fucking much, from the opening near-industrial guitar stabs to the massive hooks in the middle to wall of sound at the end, “Morning Glory” just kills me. Brit-pop? More like Brit-ROCK!

With a riff that splits the difference between Neil Young’s “Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)” and R.E.M.’s “The One I Love,” and a druggy lyric that crashes into a desperate chorus, “Morning Glory” is the sound of what happens when you ingest the exact right amount of cocaine.

Certain Songs #1364: Oasis – “Wonderwall”

November 7, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
Year: 1995

What was the tipping point with “Wonderwall”??

When did it transform from a massive, but slightly silly, worldwide hit single to a song that Slate recently declared to be part of the “New American Songbook,” sandwiched between two other songs written by non-Americans, “Rolling in the Deep” and “I Want It That Way.”

Certain Songs #1363: Oasis – “Roll With It”

November 6, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
Year: 1995

Coming out in the autumn of 1995, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory? was the soundtrack to a pair of different life-changing events. The first one was my job at a company in San Francisco called Art & Science, an agency that built websites for other companies.

In late 1994, I’d discovered the World Wide Web, so in early 1995 I taught myself HTML, built my own personal web page (which still exists!), and that summer, responding to an ad on Usenet, got myself a temporary gig with Art & Science building the first website for The American Association of Neurological Surgeons.

Certain Songs #1362: Oasis – “Fade Away”

November 5, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: The Masterplan
Year: 1995

While I’m sure that many of you are all, “what? Oasis sucks, man!” there are at least a few of you who are wondering just how deep I’m going on Oasis. And the answer is “pretty fucking deep,” as I think there are great songs on even their duffest albums, and a bunch of amazing b-sides that remain totally underheard, at least here in the colonies.

Today’s case in point is “Fade Away,” which was originally one of the b-sides of “Cigarettes and Alcohol,” and ended up being a key track on The Masterplan, a 1998 compilation of some — not all — of the ace b-sides they stuck on their singles.

Certain Songs #1361: Oasis – “Slide Away”

November 4, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Definitely Maybe
Year: 1994

I think that one of the things that’s always impressed me about Definitely Maybe is just how confident it is. Some bands are a bit tentative on their debut album, like they’re all “hello world, we hope you like us,” but Oasis just automatically assumed that there was an audience out there for what they were doing, and the resulting swagger was at least part of what helped build an audience for their music.

And so, even on Definitely Maybe, the songs went on longer than they strictly needed to — let’s add Led Zeppelin to the list of influences! — but there was always so much going on that it really didn’t matter.

Certain Songs #1360: Oasis – “Live Forever”

November 3, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Definitely Maybe
Year: 1994

When I first came up with the Certain Songs idea, about a decade or so ago, it wasn’t originally about my writing about my favorite songs, but rather was even more specialized: it was going to be about songs that reminded me about specific periods or even incidents in my life.

That really didn’t go anywhere, so I did a couple of posts and retired the idea until four years ago, when I resurrected the name and changed the concept to whatever it currently is. After all, not every single song that I love or wanted to write about had a memory moment attached to it.

Certain Songs #1359: Oasis – “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star”

November 2, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Definitely Maybe
Year: 1994

For a while there in the mid-1990s, before they decided to throw their lot in with reality TV, VH1 had show called Four on the Floor, which was basically a Capital Gang or McLaughlin Group type of show, but dealing with the subjects that music writers cared about.

I know, it probably sounds horrible — especially these days — but it was exactly the type of thing I loved back then. Hosted by Anthony DeCurtis, who was kinda ubiquitous for awhile also featured JD Considine (who was most famous for his single-word review of the GTR album in Musician: “SHT”), Vibe’s Scott Poulson-Bryant and freelancer Amy Linden. It was also where I first heard of Oasis.

Certain Songs #1358: N.W.A. – “Express Yourself”

November 1, 2018 by Jim Connelly

Album: Straight Outta Compton
Year: 1989

The final single from Straight Outta Compton totally flipped the plot, and compared to songs like “Gangsta, Gangsta,” “Dopeman,” “Fuck Tha Police” and “8 Ball” was enough of a curveball to feel like a breath of joyous fresh air near the end of the back half of the album.

I guess it’s also a bit of a preview of Dr. Dre’s upcoming solo career, as he steps out from the turntable to rap Ice Cube’s lyrics that simultaneously celebrate art as a way out of the gangsta life as well fit in the middle of the great hip-hop tradition of getting extremely meta about the process of creating hip-hop lyrics.