Oasis? Derivative and dire: 14 cultural ‘sacred cows’ that are actually terrible
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‘Oasis’s fratricidal angst is nothing but PR’
Guy Kelly
I was asked recently whether I would ever stop going on about how puzzling I find the popularity of Oasis. I said mayyyybeee… Apologies. A very old joke, but it’s not as if rehashing other people’s ideas and delivering them in a louder, more sneering way ever stopped Noel and Liam Gallagher.
I will happily concede that Definitely, Maybe is a great album, heaving with attitude, kicking the nihilism of grunge in the face, offering a fresh, raw rock n’ roll that was too urgent even for dancing. As the soundtrack to a new era, I can understand why the hype started. It’s just that it got so incredibly out of hand.
The trouble with being hailed as the voice of a generation is you tend to never say anything original or interesting again. And so the second album was worse. The third was worse still. The fourth, the fifth, the sixth and the seventh were completely forgettable.
It is a cliché to point out that Noel’s lyrics are invariably dire, but if you ever stopped by the library to read a copy of the complete Oasis songbook, you’d soon be slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball, and right out of the door without gaining any insight whatsoever.
Yet the nation adored them; the common consensus elevated them above far superior 90s bands; buskers couldn’t stop imitating them; and everybody pleads for a reunion while, so tiringly, the brothers conduct a public therapy session via occasional magazine interviews and social media posts.
A showbiz conspiracy theory hill I’ve decided to die on is that Noel and Liam never fell out at all. That they secretly enjoy Sunday roasts and family holidays together, and all the fratricidal angst is nothing but a PR performance.
That way they can ratchet up the tension, the demand, and the eventual cash offer before reuniting for a month-long Co-Op Live residency and inevitable Glastonbury headline slot in 2027. When it happens, I will sigh very heavily. From the Other Stage.
Everybody says we’re enjoying a 1997 moment with the general election. That’s great – I’m all for it. But please, let’s not include Oasis.
‘Prince’s greatest cultural contribution was appearing in the third season of New Girl’
Poppie Platt
Back in lockdown, when the rest of the country was busy running half marathons or learning Spanish on Duolingo, I decided to expand my own horizons and listen to a different album, in full, each day. It was the perfect time to tackle an artist I had always found borderline unlistenable and wholly overrated: Prince.
Before you shout “philistine!”, hear me out: Purple Rain, in particular, sounds like a naff relic from a low-budget Eighties movie. The title track’s lyrics don’t make sense (if you ever see purple rain falling from the heavens, run, because chances are we’ve been nuked by the Russians) and his howling, prolonged guitar solo at the end is an exercise in narcissism. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m usually loath to criticise artists on moral grounds – imagine a world without Morrissey, Dickens or Picasso – but Prince, with the overt sexism of Purple Rain’s sister film, reports of domestic violence and bullying, can be the exception.
Prince’s brilliance is almost always attributed to his prolific output – he released 39 albums, nine compilation albums and 97 singles prior to his death in 2016 – but since when did quantity override quality? Look at the work of Otis Redding or Jimi Hendrix, just nine albums between them; admittedly, both men died tragically young, but their songs sound so timeless because you get the impression they were carefully crafted, edited and polished to be their absolute best. Prince, though, seemed to slap a purchase label on anything he recorded, executives too scared he’d throw a hissy fit to say “maybe shorten that solo a little, huh?”
If you ask me, his greatest cultural contribution was appearing in the third season of New Girl.
‘I can’t overlook the fascist dishonesty at The Sound of Music’s core’
Robbie Collin
Look, I’m not saying that Adolf Hitler would have put The Sound of Music on his Sight & Sound top 10. But if he could have overlooked the odd moment like Christopher Plummer tearing the swastika in half, he would have found a lot to like.
To be clear, Robert Wise’s Best Picture-winning musical – which, almost 60 years after its release, remains one of the most successful films ever made – is not a pro-Nazi film. In fact, its central family of singing Austrians, the Von Trapps, are famously quite down on the whole business, bravely resisting the Third Reich’s meddling functionaries during the 1938 annexation of their homeland.
But just look at who is doing the resisting. Blond, pristine, schooled in traditional song and dance, and romping o’er the Alpine pasture with fresh air filling their aryan lungs. Adolf could well have had a poster of this lot on his bunker wall – perhaps posed alongside Julie Andrews’ bonny, blue-eyed kinder-küche-kirche-queen Maria – under the heading ‘#goals’.
And what about Hans Zeller, Captain Georg Von Trapp’s sneaky nemesis and the Nazis’ chief delegate in the Salzburg region? Slimily courteous and impeccably tailored and groomed, he’s uncomfortably akin to the antisemitic ‘rootless cosmopolitan’ trope. As the provocateur-philosopher Slavoj Žižek astutely pointed out in Reality of the Virtual, the underlying dynamic is of good, honest fascists resisting a bureaucratic Jewish takeover: “while officially agreeing with our democratic ideology,” he says, “it at the same time addresses our secret fascist dreams.”
When I happened upon Žižek’s critique as a student, The Sound of Music had already been making me groan since childhood, when it occupied around six hours of valuable TV-watching time every Christmas break. Punishingly sappy and preposterously long, with performances that had aged like a cod behind a radiator, even Plummer (the film’s only redeeming feature) had little time for it, and would refer to it in interviews as ‘The Sound of Mucus.’
But Žižek’s words, for me, finally pinpointed the creepy dishonesty at the film’s core. I’d say I haven’t been able to watch it since, but I wasn’t able to before, either.
‘Performance art is now artistically equivalent to a mindfulness app’
En Liang-Khong
There are times as an art critic when you question who’s the real idiot in the room. I think of the exhibition, somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, where I once watched a naked man slip and slide around a bathtub filled with kelp, before leaping out and roaring like a Viking – to rapturous applause.
Another time, in a Moscow museum and as the guest of a (now sanctioned) oligarch, I groped my way through a pitch-black gallery filled with sweaty, beat-boxing dancers. “Did you enjoy it?”, the oligarch’s earnest daughter asked me later.
What an idiot. Maybe I was just born into the wrong decade for performance art. Nothing I’ve seen has been a patch on Günter Brus in 1968, who was sentenced to prison for simultaneously masturbating, smothering himself with faeces and singing the Austrian national anthem – or that other great Viennese Actionist, Hermann Nitsch, who was fond of crucifying slaughtered lambs. At least they must have made you feel something.
Since then, the shock jocks have been swapped out for the artistic equivalents of a mindfulness app. At an eco-themed biennial, I followed an artist in sipping kombucha and writing “messages of hope for the future” in biodegradable ink. In Istanbul, not too long ago, I watched an Indonesian artist wave a flag with the word LOVE on it, for what felt like hours, and then joined the crowd in clapping like seals.
These scripted experiences give me the sinking feeling that I might be the mark – for politely pretending to lap the stuff up. Sure, these days, it’s a truism that every attention-seeker is a performer: Paris Hilton, Donald Trump, anyone on Instagram. But who’s the greater performance artist: the do-gooder, or the grifter?
Still, performance artists might be able to revive the glory days. If they heeded the example of the 4th-century BC Greek philosopher Diogenes – often hailed as the grandfather of the artform – they might yet quicken the pulse. The mad old dog lived in a wine barrel, urinated in public, while also finding the time to write numerous tragedies, and, eventually, held his breath until he died. You wouldn’t want to have missed that.
‘Just because a tradition dates back donkey’s years doesn’t mean it needs encouraging’
Dominic Cavendish
Enlivening spirits after a rain-lashed press night for As You Like It in Regent’s Park in 2002, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as Orlando, the venue’s boss Ian Talbot recalled another deluge-beset night when two ladies were overhead departing saying “That was the best Dream I’ve ever seen,” “A pity it had to be a wet one”. Amusing but anecdotage only provides so much compensation for drenched clothes and pneumonia.
The fickleness of the British summer this year (exacerbated by climate change or not) reminds us that al fresco theatre here is a lottery in which, more often than not, both sides are losers. We have a natural love of the outdoors. And as a nation, our theatrical passion stands second to none. But to conjoin the two often halves the pleasure in prospect. If the weather is lovely, the audience is inclined to wish it were savouring it in less sedentary conditions (promenade productions are more commendable for that reason, but even so the temptation to cut and run is high).
If the weather is inclement, the evening can turn into a masochistic trial. We love (or affect to love) a bit of that, of course, with all the attendant kerfuffle around blankets, woollies, thermos flasks and pac-a-macs – and our more illustrious open air theatres, Regent’s Park, or the beautiful Minack amphitheatre near Land’s End, or the Open Air theatre in Scarborough, date back to the hardy Thirties, when everything was still measured against the horror of the Trenches and thus qualified as a breeze. Under the roaring flight-path, the Globe seems mainly have to been reconstructed for the benefit of plane-spotters. You can cite further precedent besides the theatres of Shakespeare’s day: the Mystery pageants of the medieval age (oft resurrected); even the Roman theatre of Verulamium near St Alban’s (which presents work still).
But just because a tradition dates back donkey’s years doesn’t mean it needs encouraging, or continuing. Indoor theatres arrived in the late 16th century, and we’ve never looked back. Yes, I’ve had a few magical evenings at outdoor theatre-shows but all too often I’ve yearned to effect a one-man vanishing act.
‘After season one, Mad Men fell into existential crisis’
Ed Power
Surface charm has never been more seductive than in Mad Men, Matthew Weiner’s acclaimed meditation on masculinity, workplace politics and the existential burden of being devastatingly dapper and irresistible to women. But once the cologne fumes cleared and the lunchtime Scotch worn off, was there any genuine substance to the series, showered with Emmys between 2007 and 2015 and routinely spoken of as one of the greatest TV shows ever?
To put it another way, was Mad Men ever really that magnificent? Or were we, the audience, victims of the same confidence trick perpetrated by advertising executive anti-hero, Don Draper, on his colleagues, lovers and family?
Don schmoozed his way cynically to the top – and it is tempting to conclude that Mad Men pulled off precisely the same sleight-of-hand. It made the 1960s look giddy and glamorous. The way Mad Men told it, workplace sexism was a bit of a lark – and who could disapprove of all that boozing and smoking?
The other issue with Mad Men was that it peaked too soon and ended up repeating itself. By the end of season one, newly separated from his wife, Draper was undergoing an existential crisis. Was there more to life than the pursuit of empty thrills? Had Don – the master of the spin – been fooling himself all along?
These were fascinating questions. But having shown Draper walking on the figurative ledge, the series pulled him back inside and start all over again. It was no surprise to discover that Weiner had sketched out just one series when pitching Mad Men to networks. He never expected it to get picked up, and when it became a success, he was at a loss as to what to do next.
You could tell. Year after year, characters went around the same carousel. Don boozed and cheated and was consumed with guilt. Christina Hendricks’s Joan Holloway and Elisabeth Moss’s Peggy Olson raged quietly against the patriarchy. One season blurred into another, and for many viewers, Mad Men only really worked as an aesthetic pleasure. We tuned in for the fantastic period costumery, the retro offices, and the promise of seeing Don misbehave and get away with it once again.
To be fair, Mad Men redeemed itself in its finale episode by implying Don had found spiritual peace – and then converted that soulfulness into dollars by writing the Coca-Cola, I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing advertisement. A starchy 1960s dad selling hippiedom to the masses – what a perfect irony. The problem was that that twist could have been bolted on to the end of series one. Everything in between was glorious padding. For Mad Men to convince critics it was one of the greatest TV shows ever truly was the ad-man’s revenge.
‘Mahler’s 8th Symphony is irredeemable guff’
Ivan Hewett
Is there any more titanic ego in music than Gustav Mahler’s? Everything about his music is outsize; the length of those nine (or nine-and-a-half) symphonies, the size of the orchestra, the sheer incessant din. True he could write exquisite songs, and for me they contain the best of Mahler. But in the symphonies a ghastly gigantism all too often takes over. “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything,” Mahler declared—to which one can only say, no it musn’t.
Most symphonies work by limitation, focusing on a handful of ideas. In any case, the ‘world’ portrayed in Mahler’s symphonies is really just his own neuroses and yearnings, inflated to a cosmic scale by the orchestra. Compare Beethoven, who could be just as mighty at a third of the length. He never resorts to Mahler’s way of ‘bigging up’ his ideas, building them up to them to a climax not one or twice but often three times. As Aaron Copland put it, “listening to Beethoven is like watching a great man walk down the street; listening to Mahler is like watching an actor playing a great man walking down the street’.
Of course there are wonderful moments in all Mahler’s symphonies, when he forgets to spread his torments over the orchestra and actually writes some music. All except one—the Eighth Symphony, which is totally irredeemable. It has a nouveau riche cultural pretentiousness, calling on the most famous medieval Latin prayer as well as the most famous play in German literature, Goethe’s Faust. But it’s no use. The massed choirs of hundreds, the soloists, the organ, the orchestra all huff and puff incessantly, but the only result is hot air. To borrow Stravinsky’s wonderful phrase, it’s a piece that should be ‘banished to whatever Purgatory punishes triumphant banality.’
‘Wagner’s vocal passages prompt you to gnaw on your own legs with boredom’
Mark Monahan
Poor, poor Wagner, a figure as tragic as classical music has ever witnessed. He is, as everyone knows, the Greatest Opera Composer The World Has Ever Known; the progenitor of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or “total work of art”); a creator of operas in which music and language and meaning are so intricately and inseparably intertwined that many distinguished academics have, over the years, learnt German purely so that they can fully appreciate him.
So what (even setting aside his nasty racial views) is the trouble? Simple: for all his brilliance as a composer of opera, he’s always at his best when no one’s singing. The overture to Tannhaüser? Marvellous! The Prelude to Act II of Lohengrin or Siegfried’s Funeral March from G?tterd?mmerung? Pure joyful/pitch-black exhilaration! The Forest Murmurs interlude from Siegfried? You can smell the conkers!
But oh God, those vocal passages. With the possible exception of the Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, not only is there not a single tune in any of them – and no, leitmotifs don’t count – they go, on, for, ever. By the final act of Parsifal, even the most devoted fans of Romantic music have been known to start gnawing at their (and each others’) legs out of sheer, panic-stricken boredom, and yet that confection – at about four-and-a-quarter hours – is of course barely a haiku next to the entire Ring cycle. That comes in at 15-odd hours, a paean to Valhalla which – archaeologists have proved using the latest carbon-dating technology – is many times longer than it took the gods to build the real thing.
So, sing his praises if you must. But praise his song? That, I’m afraid, just won’t werk.
‘Stanley Kubrick smothered the joy out of everything’
Alex Diggins
Like summiting Everest in your socks, I’m sure it’s possible to have fun in a Stanley Kubrick film. I’ve just never done so. Nor do I know anyone who has.
The problem with directors, so the cliché goes, is that they think they are God. Kubrick, though, took this assumed divinity further than most. He’s an Old Testament film-maker: vast, remote, chilly, his pictures hand down their meanings – terror, awe, wonder – like they are carved on stone tablets. He made monuments, not entertainment. Settling down to actually enjoy a Kubrick film would be as fruitless as going for a pint with the Great Pyramid of Giza.
He has his moments, of course. Ronald Lee Ermey’s drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket is inspired. The walking-on-the-ceiling bit in 2001: A Space Odyssey is neat. And the soft dance of candlelight in Barry Lyndon is delightful, especially when the turgid plotting has sent you into a soothing fugue.
But I’m with Stephen King and Anthony Burgess, who both hated what he did to their books. In King’s case, Kubrick took a pacey, rackety romp and turned it into frigid, bloodless exercise in claustrophobia. Yes, the patterns of Overlook Hotel’s carpets are encoded with secret meanings – but the same is true of Wetherspoons, and no one is accusing Tim Martin of being a deathless genius. As for A Clockwork Orange, Kubrick’s unfailing joylessness smothered the spry, spiky bounce of Burgess’s prose.
His worst crime, though? Casting Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise in a film about secretive New York sex cults – and making it dull. If you like plodding through the thin air of the Kubrick death zone, then bully for you. But I’ll be safe and warm back at base camp. After all, no one needs to get frostbite.
‘The West Wing is nothing more than a jingoistic fantasy’
Chris Bennion
For years I thought I wasn’t smart enough for The West Wing. It was a show beloved by politicos and nerds and people who read the business section. People - British people - who swore blind that It’s Garry Shandling’s Show is the greatest comedy ever. People who chuckled at Dilbert - the thinking man’s Garfield.
I now realise that it’s not because I’m not smart enough to enjoy The West Wing - it’s because I just don’t have the stomach for the sheer levels of adulation directed at the office of US President. To appreciate The West Wing, you have to believe in your marrow in the sheer righteousness and virtue of America; to believe that they really are the world’s policeman, judge, jury and moral compass.
President Jed Bartlet isn’t without his flaws, but he is always, completely, incontrovertibly, Papally right. He isn’t just Abe Lincoln, Jimmy Carter and JFK rolled into one, he’s Captain America, Superman and Jesus Christ - especially Jesus Christ. He is Mount Rushmore made flesh. He’s called Josiah. Surrounding him are his Avengers Assemble of morally pure, business section-reading politico-data nerds, who each episode do battle against the four horsemen of apocalypse America - war, famine, pestilence and the Republicans. We’re supposed to believe they are fully-rounded characters because they eat Chinese takeaway late at night and sometimes look really tired. Of course they’re tired - they’re doing God’s work, dammit!
Worst of all, Bartlet is a jingoistic fantasy of American politics, a great big cream cake of liberal back-patting, and no amount of walking down corridors having wordy conversations with advisers can change that. It is Johnny Cash’s Ragged Old Flag, it’s Walt Whitman’s I Hear America Singing, it’s Team America: World Police without the irony. It is propagandist nonsense.
‘The Bloomsbury Group were just wafty people cooking asparagus’
Cal Revely-Calder
The Bloomsbury Group were always inert. Pick a name, any name. Vanessa Bell’s portraits seem limp, cramped and structureless. EM Forster’s novels struggle with interiorities that weren’t his own. Virginia Woolf, their spiritual queen, wrote prose devoid of rhythm or sense. (I don’t know why anyone reads Woolf and not, say, Djuna Barnes, a more lively writer in everything but anti-Semitic jokes.)
People, in truth, come not for the art, but for the Bloomsbury mythology: wafty people cooking asparagus and drifting between each other’s beds. This stuff, too, should be laid to rest. They seemed to think that polyamory was interesting, which was doubtful, and that it was revolutionary, which was wrong. When they attempted an argument, it rarely stuck (excepting JM Keynes). In several cases, their output dwindled, as they gave up creative work in favour, alas, of being themselves.
Even Woolf’s call for a “room of one’s own” was monkey say, not monkey do. Yes, female writers were relatively impoverished, and the point still has force today, when most writers are atrociously paid, and a housing crisis stamps on their backs. But while Woolf may have cared in the abstract, her compassion had practical gaps. As the essayist Elaine Blair once noted, at the point when Virginia and Leonard earned ￡4,000 a year, they gave their live-in servants ￡40.
Never mind: Charleston is gorgeous, as is Monk’s House, as is Garsington – all those lovely rural idylls. And nothing can stop the non-fiction books, vaunting the group who, as Dorothy Parker said, loved in triangles and lived in squares. At least that may explain why they were so two-dimensional.
‘The British Museum’s curation is lazy and self-indulgent’
Jack Rear
With eight million objects, a vast and ornate 18th-century building to display them in, nearly six million visitors per year, and an annual budget of over ￡100m, few others could hold a candle to the British Museum. It’s a shame that it’s a bloated, incoherent mess.
Though debates over the proposed repatriation of the Parthenon Marbles, Benin Bronzes, Moai statues et al suck up oxygen, the truth is that the museum is fundamentally incapable of caring for its collection. In 2023, we learned a senior curator had pilfered 1,500 Greek and Roman gemstones and jewellery, among a further 500 which had been lost or damaged.
In smaller museums, this would have been picked up immediately, but with those millions of objects (only one percent of them on display) there were plenty of backrooms for this crook to hide away.
As for educating and entertaining the public? You’ll get nothing you didn’t already know.
The British Museum tends to think the public’s ability to engage with the past should begin and end with “oh, that’s cool.” There’s no narrative, no structure, no thought-provoking themes which unify its collection or help guide visitors through the story of these objects. They must be interesting if they’re on display, but don’t expect anyone to explain why. It amounts to “here’s a bunch of stuff, marvel at it because we tell you to.” This is lazy and self-satisfied curation which neither illuminates nor educates.
Unlike countless other national museums, there is no ‘second site’ for the BM. There could be. In fact, you could fill 159 equivalently-sized British Museums with what the current one has in storage. That would give 159 curators the ability to direct their focus, to hone their expertise, and to explain the real importance of each object. Imagine a whole museum of Roman Britain, rather than the grab bag on permanent display or the insipid and incoherent recent Legion exhibition.
Instead we have a mountain of gold propping up the old dragon sleeping on top.
‘Britten’s art became a purely intellectual exercise’
Simon Heffer
Does Benjamin Britten really merit the adulation he still receives, nearly half a century after his death? He was certainly a genius. The works of his early years are fresh, innovative and have great appeal. But by the late 1950s his music became more exclusive – that is, aimed more at winning the admiration of his fellow musicians than of a wider public. In the last phase of his career he had around him a clique of sycophants, in Aldeburgh and in the musical world, who provided uncritical reverence. Britten’s pre-eminence in British music was unchallenged once his rivals had either died (such as Vaughan Williams) or become chronically indolent (such as Walton).
Yet his own later music often betrays a lack of inspiration and suggests his art had become an intellectual exercise rather than fruits of creativity. One should not confuse the man with his art, but Britten imposed his personality so forcibly on what he created, and on the Suffolk in which he was rooted, that it is hard to do otherwise. The Aldeburgh Festival is an immensely valuable legacy – though it has been fortunate to be run by a succession of first-rate people who developed it beyond the somewhat introverted, clique-ridden enterprise it was in the lifetime of Britten and his partner, Peter Pears.
But Britten was poor at taking criticism, remarkably humourless and touchy (especially about his strange interest in small boys), laden with amour propre and hindered rather than helped by slavishly devout music critics who put any degree of quality control largely on hold. Some of his works from the 1960s are tedious, reeking with self-indulgence; and some with a degree of merit – such as the War Requiem (a requiem for a just war against Nazism that Britten fled abroad rather than help fight) – were praised beyond their real worth. Some moderation in the fawning is long overdue.
‘Bleak House is overworked, patronising and glutinous’
Tim Robey
I’d been saving Bleak House for a luxurious winter reading marathon – feet up by the fire, mince pies to hand. The book’s aura, reputation and length (900-odd pages) certainly invite this: there’s a lavish chill to the main conceit of a probate case (“Jarndyce v Jarndyce”) so unending that people waste their whole lives waiting for the hammer to fall. The first third brims with potential.
From then on, I found the book such a slog it took me till March. Awareness of Dickens being paid by instalment – there are 67 chapters – has never marred my enjoyment of his writing more. Instead of the scorching indictment of the English legal system I was hoping to gain steam, the book vanished down blind alley after blind alley, clearly milking its premise to spin wheels and wear the reader down, while using ever-more-minor characters (clerks, merchants, lawyers, soldiers) as stubbornly obscure cogs in its plotting.
There are famous figures in it, justifiably – Lady Dedlock, John Jarndyce, Tulkinghorn. Dickens assassinates the horrid sponge Skimpole and the charity nutcase Mrs Jellyby effectively, if not subtly. But the ambition of his social panorama was undone, for me, by the two lenses he insists on alternating between. The third-person approach kept losing me in overworked, often patronising vernacular, while the first-person narration of Esther Summerson is glutinous from the word go.
With her “what, little me?” professions of modesty, it’s pretty easy to see why Esther drove Charlotte Bront? up the wall. (I had flashbacks to mainlining Jane Eyre in a week, years ago – as stories of poor governesses, they’re often put side by side.)
We get a murder to solve that becomes strangely dull to figure out, a random death by spontaneous combustion (I’d have preferred several of these) and a drawn-out denouement where each chapter seemed to be solemnly handing out more tissues. Whatever I was meant to be feeling, I was nowhere near feeling it, and my appetite for ploughing into (say) Dombey and Son has taken quite a hit. For the record, I’ll never tire of Great Expectations, but I’m never reading Bleak House again.
