I discovered Oasis when I was around thirteen.
At the time, I had already been playing guitar for a few years, but Oasis changed what I imagined music could become in my life. Before them, playing guitar was something I did. After them, becoming a musician began to look like my destiny.
I wanted to write songs. I wanted a band. I wanted, in some vague adolescent sense, whatever it was that Noel Gallagher seemed to have. I did not know enough about music to understand what that was.
Years later, after studying music seriously, I found myself returning to the same question from the opposite direction.
What did Noel Gallagher know?
There is a story he has told about Live Forever.
Years after writing it, he contrasted the song with Nirvana’s I Hate Myself and Want to Die. He remembered hearing the title and rejecting the attitude behind it. Whatever else might be said about Kurt Cobain or the song, Gallagher did not want to occupy that position. He saw Live Forever as moving in the opposite direction. Cobain himself later described the title as a joke. That makes Gallagher’s reaction interesting in a different way: perhaps it tells me less about Cobain than about what Gallagher refused to make of music.
The contrast becomes more interesting when placed beside Gallagher’s own childhood. He has described his father as violent and has spoken openly about being beaten by him. He has also described withdrawing into his own world, with the guitar becoming that world. Yet he has also pointed out that he never really wrote songs about the abuse.
There is an easy story that could be constructed from this. One person suffered and wrote despair. Another suffered and chose affirmation. Therefore one attitude toward suffering was somehow superior to the other. I do not think that conclusion follows.
I know very little about what either person actually experienced, and suffering does not impose a particular artistic obligation on the person who experiences it. Nor does Gallagher’s childhood make Live Forever a better song. A song does not become more valuable because the person who wrote it earned the right biography beforehand.
What interests me is narrower.
Gallagher appears not to have regarded pain as something he was required to explain. Something happened to him. It mattered. It may have shaped him profoundly. But it did not therefore have to become the subject of the work.
Instead, when I listen to early Oasis, I hear an almost unreasonable movement in the other direction.
I’m a rock ‘n’ roll star.
You and I are gonna live forever.
We’ll find a way of chasing the sun.
— Oasis, “Rock ‘n’ Roll Star,” “Live Forever,” and “Slide Away”; written by Noel Gallagher.
There is something almost ridiculous about it. Perhaps that is part of why it works.
When I was thirteen, none of this struck me as technically remarkable. I did not have enough knowledge for that. I heard songs I loved, learned the chords, tried to play them, and wanted to do the same thing.
Then I went to music school.
I learned harmony more systematically. I studied recording, arranging, performance and composition. I learned to identify structures I had previously only heard. I acquired names for things. I became better able to say why a chord might function in a particular way, why a melody creates or avoids tension, why an arrangement becomes crowded, why one recorded sound sits differently from another.
For a while, acquiring that vocabulary made music appear more intelligible.
It also made Noel Gallagher more confusing.
There is not much point in pretending that early Oasis represents some sort of harmonic sophistication. Many of the songs can be played with a small number of open chords. Gallagher himself has joked about spending his youth strumming the same three chords.
I knew more chords than that.
Eventually I knew secondary dominants, modal interchange, tritone substitution, altered dominants, chord-scale relationships and several different ways of describing harmonic motion that Noel Gallagher probably did not need in order to write Live Forever.
None of them taught me how to write Live Forever.
Formal musical knowledge is real knowledge. I do not think it should be diminished simply because someone can make excellent music without possessing all of it. If I am asked what a secondary dominant is, there are more and less correct answers. If I am arranging for instruments with different ranges, knowing those ranges matters. If I am recording something badly, ignorance of acoustics will not become artistic authenticity merely because I refuse to learn the relevant mechanics.
But mechanics do not expand indefinitely into the whole.
I once made a conscious effort to prioritize technical understanding over artistic approach, as I knew that I lacked musical talent. I thought that if I knew enough harmony, enough arrangement, enough recording, enough history, perhaps what made a song work would become increasingly available to explanation.
Some of it did, and the remainder became more visible.
Noel Gallagher seems to occupy that remainder unusually well.
This is not the same as saying that he works by instinct, if instinct means some mysterious capacity untouched by learning. He spent years listening to records. He played guitar for a long time. He worked around bands before Oasis succeeded. He wrote songs, discarded songs, absorbed things, repeated things, changed things, and developed preferences about what a song should do.
That is knowledge too. It is simply not knowledge that necessarily presents itself as a theory.
Perhaps he knew when a melody needed to rise. Perhaps he knew when another chord would weaken rather than strengthen a section. Perhaps he knew that a lyric did not have to survive literal interpretation if the vowels, rhythm and emotional direction were right. Perhaps he knew when four minutes of music felt complete.
Perhaps he knew that Live Forever should not become a song about why life is worth living.
I am guessing, of course.
That is part of the difficulty. If I ask what Noel Gallagher knew, I immediately want to translate whatever answer I give into propositions. I want something that can be stated, checked and transferred.
Know this progression.
Understand this form.
Use this voicing.
Place this melody over this chord.
Avoid this frequency.
Those are useful forms of knowledge because I can make them explicit.
But perhaps some artistic knowledge is visible most clearly not in what a person can explain, but in what they repeatedly choose.
The chord they leave unchanged.
The third fret on the B and high E strings, held through one open-chord voicing after another.
The exact same spot used for bends in the pentatonic box.
The line they keep despite not knowing exactly what it means.
The section they refuse to make more complicated.
The song they decide is finished.
If someone makes those decisions well for long enough, it becomes difficult to say that they do not know what they are doing merely because they cannot produce the explanation I would have wanted.
This presents an uncomfortable problem for the younger version of me.
I spent a great deal of time trying to understand music by making it explicit. I still think that effort was worthwhile. There are things I understand now that I simply did not understand before, and technical knowledge gave me access to them.
But it also taught me where technical knowledge ends. When I was thirteen, Noel Gallagher made songwriting look possible because I did not yet know how much there was to know. After studying music, he made songwriting look difficult for almost the opposite reason.
I had learned enough to recognize how little of what matters is guaranteed by knowing the mechanics.
I could analyse the chords.
I could hear the arrangement.
I could describe the structure.
None of that would tell me how someone knew to write that song rather than another one.
Perhaps Noel Gallagher could not have told me either.
He may simply have picked up the guitar and done what he wanted to do.
I am not sure that this counts as knowing less.