A brilliant study of Oasis' debut album, highlighting the band's massive cultural impact and the raw, positive power of those early songs.Oasis's incendiary 1994 debut albumDefinitely Maybemanaged 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. OnDefinitely 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.ForewordIntro: A speck of dust in a football stadium 1. Earth 2. Water 3. Fire 4. Air Postscript: QuintessenceReading and WatchingNotesAlex Nivenis a writer from the north-east of England. He writes regularly for theGuardian,TribuneandNew Statesman, and has also contributed to publications including theNew York Times, theIndependent,Pitchfork, The FaceandVICE. As well asFolk Opposition(Zero, 2011), he is the author of an instalment in Bloomsbury's 33 1/3 series (onDefinitely Maybeby Oasis, 2014) andNew Model Island(Repeater, 2019), a critically acclaimed memoir of Englishness and regional identity. Currently Lecturer in English Literature at Newcastle University, he helped to start the radical publisher Repeater Books in 2014.