"I need to be myself/ I can't be no one else," sneers Liam Gallagher to start this 2xCD singles anthology. As a one-line encapsulation of Oasis, it still can't beat the refrain from the first song on the band's first album: "Tonight I'm a rock'n'roll star." And yes, there was a time when many indie-minded listeners' first reaction would've been to point out everyone else Liam and brother Noel apparently wanted to be, from the Beatles on down through glam and the Creation back catalog.
In the aftermath of Oasis' 2009 breakup, however, the sentiment (such as it is) behind 1994 debut single "Supersonic" rings startlingly true. The men from Manchester lived out a certain simple, populist idea of rock'n'roll stardom: They drank to excess, did lots of drugs, brawled, waged sibling warfare like the brothers Reid and Davies before them, sold millions of records, and made arrogant statements against anyone who saw the role of a popular musician as anything different. At the same time, as their all-too-human 2000s output proved, they could never be more or less than themselves-- simultaneously swaggering and down-to-earth, and, at their best, indelibly melodic.
This combination of characteristics helped spark an unprecedented 2.6 million applications for tickets to the 1996 English gig that gives Oasis' latest compilation its otherwise anonymous-looking cover image. Where 2006 2xCD best-of Stop the Clocks delved into album cuts as well as some of the band's once-sterling B-sides, Time Flies compiles only the 27 UK A-sides, plus, for the U.S. edition, the full album version of stateside smash "Champagne Supernova". As a product, then, it's equal parts redundant and incomplete, lacking album cuts like "Rock'N'Roll Star" as well as B-sides like "Talk Tonight" while adding three mostly unspectacular singles from 2008's Dig Out Your Soul. As strictly a listening experience, though, it's a decent document of a bunch of relatively unexceptional guys who willed themselves to greatness for a couple of years there but couldn't stop being relatively unexceptional.
Oasis never made a record with Brian Eno. They didn't do dystopian electronic concept albums. So to criticize their singles for being obvious or conservative feels almost as beside the point as dismissing Belle and Sebastian for being fey, Lil Wayne for being foul-mouthed, or Rage Against the Machine for, well, raging-- it's just sort of what they do. And what Oasis did really well was take their favorite musical influences and their favorite lyrical subjects and communicate them to a mass audience in a meaningful way, without ever trying to present themselves as if they were doing something that was over anybody's head. The songs hit you or they didn't. In that way, being unexceptional was the band's secret weapon; the further removed the Gallaghers & co. got from their listeners' reality, the less their music seemed to resonate with many people. They had nothing else up their sleeves.
A big selling point of this compilation is meant to be the inclusion of two non-album singles, 1994's "Whatever" and 2007's "Lord Don't Slow Me Down". Which, whatever. The first is drenched with enough strings to explain why soon-rival Damon Albarn, himself about to release orchestral material such as Blur's gorgeous "The Universal", might introduce the tune on "Top of the Pops". Noel takes the lead vocal on "Lord Don't Slow Me Down", a generically bluesy rocker that understandably earned the group's lowest chart placement in more than a decade; fans obsessive enough to want this already have it on the Dig Out Your Soul bonus CD.
At the very least, these songs exemplify the two basic types of singles Oasis have released over the years. On one hand are the slow, strummy, majestically nonsensical singalongs. Whether acoustic-based like "Wonderwall", piano-backed like "Champagne Supernova", or with a touch of Coldplay-predicting falsetto like "Live Forever", these songs tend to be more yearning and idealistic than is Oasis' general reputation. On the other hand are the cocky, muscular, more uptempo numbers: "Cigarettes & Alcohol", "Roll With It". Either way, the singles from 1994's Definitely Maybe and 1995's (What's the Story) Morning Glory? still sound like the instantly hummable, immaculately recorded work of outsiders who imagined themselves in their idols' shoes and, for a fleeting moment, convinced millions they just might fit. You're still better off buying the albums.
Since then, Oasis' full-lengths have fallen off sharply, a pattern the singles follow a little imperfectly. For example, while the songs on 1997's Be Here Now are a notch below their predecessors, they're still a cut above most of the tracks that followed; you'll see that here from the deafening helicopter assault of "D'You Know What I Mean?", but not so much from the 10-minute "Hey Jude"/"All You Need Is Love" orgy of "All Around the World". Despite ever-worsening lyrics, the singles from 2000's Standing on the Shoulder of Giants are no longer such disappointments in fuller context. However, the five-- yes, five-- A-sides from 2002's Heathen Chemistry are absolutely as appalling as you remember. 2005's Don't Believe the Truth offers two rollicking, Highway 61 Revisited-style tracks and one drippy piano ballad, all so-so. Dig Out Your Soul comes off best: Noel-sung "Falling Down" fits neither of the two Oasis single categories I've tried to establish here, and it's actually a pretty moving swan song, like "Setting Sun" a decade older and wiser.
In a typically unrestrained interview last year with the Sunday Times, Noel admitted that "I don't fucking know" what "Champagne Supernova" means. "But are you telling me, when you've got 60,000 people singing it, they don't know what it means?" he asked. "It means something different to every one of them." With Liam already prepping his next band-- called, of all things, Beady Eye-- a bit of Oasis nostalgia is probably inevitable. These singles will mean something different to everyone, but the question is whether they will mean anything to a generation that doesn't already remember them fondly. Here's betting a few of them will. Oasis' view of pop stardom was confining, it's true, but their fatal flaw wasn't wanting to communicate with the masses-- it was their eventual failure to communicate. They were only human, after all.
