Oasis Definitely Maybe, Alex Niven
Oasis Definitely Maybe, Alex Niven
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Oasis' Definitely Maybe

Author: Alex Niven

Series: 33 1/3

Narrator: Matt Haynes

Unabridged: 3 hr 37 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 05/13/2025


Synopsis

Oasis’s incendiary 1994 debut album Definitely Maybe managed to summarize almost the entire history of post-fifties guitar music from Chuck Berry to My Bloody Valentine in a way that seemed effortless. But this remarkable album was also a social document that came closer to narrating the collective hopes and dreams of a people than any other record of the last quarter century.
In a Britain that had just undergone the most damaging period of social upheaval in a century under the Thatcher government, Noel Gallagher ventriloquized slogans of burning communitarian optimism through the mouth of his brother Liam and the playing of the other Oasis ‘everymen’: Paul McGuigan, Paul Arthurs and Tony McCarroll. On Definitely Maybe, Oasis communicated a timeworn message of idealism and hope against the odds, but one that had special resonance in a society where the widening gap between high and low demanded a newly superhuman kind of leaping.
Alex Niven charts the astonishing rise of Oasis in the mid 1990s and celebrates the life-affirming, communal force of songs such as “Live Forever,” “Supersonic,” and “Cigarettes & Alcohol.” In doing so, he seeks to reposition Oasis in relation to their Britpop peers and explore one of the most controversial pop-cultural narratives of the last thirty years.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Mattia on December 06, 2019

Definitely Maybe through a Marxist perspective. It is horribly, hideously new historicist in its argument ("Oasis were not musical geniuses who rose to fame and glory through sheer white-hot talent and mercurial creativity. Probably, no one ever is"), but it presents it with such a unity of thought......more

Goodreads review by Tom on December 10, 2015

So much to like about this excellent, brief book - a model for how to reframe and refresh a classic record. The way Niven seals Definitely Maybe off from the rest of the band's career. The thoughts on elemental and water imagery in 90s culture. The precision of his explorations of Oasis' relationshi......more

Goodreads review by Peter on June 11, 2018

As urgent and as direct as the Oasis classic that is it's subject, this book comes as close as any (that I have read) to realising the potential of the 33 1/3 format. Rather than serve as a love letter to the band, as many of them do, Alex Niven does an excellent job of placing the album in the cont......more

Goodreads review by ayşe on June 16, 2021

In an era in which deconstructive cynicism was threatening the very existence of a counterculture and the mainstream left, Oasis offered an anomalous vision of radical positivity. And the fact that this was indisputably a working-class vision – one founded in the solidarity and fraternity of working......more

Goodreads review by Jiro Dreams of Suchy on December 28, 2024

A classic album and a decent write up, often the 33 1/3 series tells a story about an album whether it be its creation, its social impact or its impression on the writer. This one contextualizes the best Oasis album in the post Thatcher Britain. Big dreams, stealing back the lights from heaven, beer......more