Theories, rants, etc.
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THERE’S A GOOD STORY IN MOJO’S FIRST
interview with Oasis, as there are in most Noel and Liam Gallagher interviews. It’s late 1994, and Noel is talking about a recent encounter with Aimee Mann in New York. Mann, he reports, is “absolutely flabbergasted” to discover Gallagher never studied music theory. He tells her, “I can’t read music. I can’t write music. I just sit there and strum, and whatever sounds good I write a melody around it. And she stood up and said, ‘I don’t believe you!’”
Over the rest of the interview, though, Noel Gallagher proves how assiduously he has studied music. He maps trajectories from 18-minute Helter Skelter bootlegs to the MC5 and on to the Sex Pistols. He nerds out on Ariel Bender, and on what The Beatles learned about feedback from The High Numbers. And he grasps how great songs exist on a continuum, and how songwriting craft can be subconsciously learned so that it manifests as instinctual. This is the genius at the heart of the 50 best Oasis songs chosen this month by MOJO, timed to prep everyone for those imminent reunion shows. You can only sound so simple, direct and classically resonant, perhaps, if you’ve absorbed the MOJO syllabus – if you’ve done all your listening homework.