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Oasis: The Three-Chord Soundtrack to a Lost Nation

Luckily, I won’t be in the audience

Ryan Frawley
7 min readSep 2, 2024
Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash

The algorithm struggles with me sometimes

It’s demographically impossible for me to not like Oasis. But I don’t. And Facebook feeding me videos of Liam Gallagher swaggering around and swearing at cups of tea isn’t likely to change my opinion this late in the game.

Still, I’m almost alone in that. When tickets for the Oasis reunion tour went on sale this weekend, my social media feeds went eerily quiet.

Everyone I knew from back in England, every person I went to school with, my family, everyone, was crouched in front of a laptop screen or hunched over a phone, sitting in an electronic queue of fourteen million people, hoping to snag one of the outrageously-priced tickets to see the comeback tour.

They were the soundtrack to my youth. I was eleven years old when their first album, Definitely Maybe, came out, and for the next decade or so, hardly a day went by I didn’t hear about the latest adventures of the Gallagher brothers.

There was Noel, hiding his face from paparazzi cameras as he stepped out of a top London restaurant. There was Liam, fingers raised in a V sign, spitting at a photographer.

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Ryan Frawley
Ryan Frawley

Written by Ryan Frawley

Novelist. Essayist. Former entomologist. Now a full-time writer exploring travel, art, philosophy, psychology, and science. www.ryanfrawley.com

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