The hatred between brothers is one of our founding stories. Cain killed Abel out of envy and Romulus killed Remus for not respecting the boundaries of the earth. Desire and private property. Capitalism is a language of ancient words. 15 years ago, Oasis were supposed to perform in Milan. They didn’t. Three days earlier, In Paris, they had suspended the entire tour by an argument between the two leaders of the band, the Gallagher brothers. A minor issue turned into a fight in which Liam broke Noel’s favourite guitar. Family intimacy always resembles Carver’s tales. It was not the first time. This week, Oasis announced their return. A small tour. Extendable. Boom. In March of this year, Liam released an album with the Stone Roses guitarist. It was well received, but not by a long shot. The past is more important than the present.
August 29, 2009 links up with another date. On April 25, 1926, conductor Arturo Toscanini interrupted the premiere of Turandot after the scene of Liu’s sacrifice. “Here the opera ends because here the maestro died.” Puccini had died before completing the score. Over the years, “here the opera ends” became a saying because Turandot It was the last of the popular operas. For decades, theatres had been reducing their number of premieres, preferring already established titles whose best-known arias were regularly performed in bourgeois homes. Every house had a piano and someone who knew how to play it.
The closing of the opera canon was part of the retreat of the bourgeoisie after its triumph in the revolutionary period of 1848. The push of the workers’ movements made the hegemonic social class look for new strategies to close the door because the new world was a world of masses. Everything was full. On the political level, pacts with the old forms of power that it had faced. On the cultural level, in addition to the closing of the canon, elements of distinction that served as signs of recognition: social and cultural capital to consolidate economic capital. It also developed a nostalgia for a non-existent past, the perfect world of yesterday. But the retreat did not work. Not even the hard one, that of the 1930s. The world of the masses claimed its space with new popular artistic forms transmitted by a different means of communication, the radio, which replaced live music with another format, the record.
The bourgeoisie ended up making a pact and the workers’ movements became the middle class, which developed its values and artistic criteria in cinema, literature and music. The British Isles became central. If we make a list of the most important groups in the history of pop, it is likely that most of them are from there. There are key issues such as language, the urban environment or the tradition of artistic education, but the philosopher Mark Fisher had an answer: the Welfare State. Being alive is important to create. Having eaten and having a house, too. The fact that large social groups can stop worrying about what we know as survival and can allocate income to things like buying a guitar or going to a concert also helps the development of culture. Pop had its forms of celebration and transmission. It had a lifestyle based on consumption that was facilitated by the Welfare State and a horizon marked by the social elevator. It even invented a vital period: adolescence, key to the acceleration of creativity. The new was always more important.
The middle class was in turmoil and a new music emerged (rap, trap, reggaeton, etc.) with new values, new forms of transmission and celebration.
That world has disappeared. Perhaps Brit Pop was the last great movement of that music born a century ago and Oasis its last group. The group split up a year after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, which preceded the biggest financial collapse in history. Bailouts, summits, austerity. The welfare state had been in question for decades and received a new blow. The middle class was reeling and a new music appeared (rap, trap, reggaeton, etc.) with new values, new forms of transmission and celebration. It is rhythmic, simple and listened to on a loop because that is the form that time has taken after bourgeois progress and the acceleration of the middle class. It is the music of the new social structure based on inequality. The frivolity of the pop era is beginning to disappear. The liquid world is coagulating.
Like the bourgeoisie, the middle class turned its gaze to the past. From the hope of social mobility to the retreat of property ownership. The result of a crisis born in the real estate sector was more bricks and mortar: two-thirds of the world’s wealth is there. The past is more profitable than the future. Inheritance replaces the work ethic. Having done is more important than doing. Investment funds buy the repertoires of the big names in pop music who go from festival to festival playing the same songs. We want to restore something that was lost and we do it with a classic rite: summoning the sounds that accompanied that moment. It is impossible. Two years ago, a French gallery put up for auction Noel Gallagher’s red Gibson ES-355 that his brother Liam broke that August afternoon in Paris. It sold for 300,000 euros. It is not the most beautiful epitaph, but it is ours.
Jorge Dioni He is a journalist and writer, author of ‘The Spain of swimming pools’ and ‘The malaise of cities’ (both on Harp).
You can follow Babelia in Facebook and Xor sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
