You're Wrong: Noel Gallagher is a Genius
- Ashley Musante
- Jul 4
- 10 min read
What makes a great songwriter is someone whose work transcends their life and stories to become the stories of the next ten generations. Someone whose work can be hummed and enjoyed by everyone in some way shape or form, whose lines stand on their own or being sung by thousands of people with thousands of different meanings. What makes a great songwriter and Noel Gallagher have an awful lot of overlap, so why is it we are still questioning the simple fact that Noel Gallagher is one of the greatest songwriters of all time?
You see, there’s this discussion usually held by braindead people whenever the topic of Noel Gallagher being a good lyricist or writer comes up that he is supremely overrated, that his words mean nothing, that all he did was take from others. That he pretends his work is deep or important once someone else has decided it for him, because I suppose we live in a world where he needs someone to justify his ego. To be frank: This. Is. Bullshit.
Let me rip the bandaid now: I’m a teenage girl and in my God-given job upon enjoying a band is to adhere to one member when I’m 15 and never change that opinion. For Oasis, that happens to be Noel. Unflinchingly. Bias aside, I would still hold my opinion firm as I did before I really ever cared to learn the difference between anyone in the band.
So, why do people think that Noel Gallagher is the most overrated songwriter of all time? Short answer: that’s the popular consensus and people don’t like to think for themselves. The long answer: people don’t like the idea that someone’s work has to be derived and mined by them and only them with no help, because people don’t like to think for themselves.
Oasis’ debut album, Definitely Maybe was written solely by Noel between the ages 24 and 27, and its core messaging is about growing pains in the changing world. It introduced us to Noel Gallagher, as a writer and as an unlikely star, and in many ways reads as exactly what he is: an older brother bestowing wisdom in a way only a disillusioned, rock star brother could, acting like 25 is the age where he knows everything and more.
He wrote with each of his influences not dripping from his pen but drenching his page. He rips right from Marc Bolan, The Beatles, The Stones, Morrissey - and yet his words are uniquely his own in every sense of the word. To write of youth and change and stardom before ever reaching your mid-20s (or fame) isn’t easy. In fact, for anyone to write an album as complex, cohesive, and great as Definitely Maybe as a debut is insane. There’s a certain maturity and understanding that underlines each moment of perceived immaturity, take Rock and Roll Star as an iron-clad example of this. The whole song is about wanting to be a rock star and wanting to have people scream your name, yet the chorus states, ‘You’re not concerned about the way we are’. It’s a loaded sentiment, pointing this finger at all the people who will ruin this childhood dream the second it becomes a reality. It doesn’t make the song serious in any capacity, it adds this weirdly realistic spin, that annoying fact of life that will disrupt the daydream.
To write a song like Live Forever is a mark of genius that no one can dispute. To come to a fame you don’t have by dedicating time and understanding to the artists who have fallen victim to the very thing you reach towards is another case of this ornate maturity that seeps into so much of his writing. It’s an ode to rock and roll, one that never feels heavy handed nor heavy hearted. 4 months before the album came out there was the newest member of the 27 Club, yet the video for Live Forever proudly displays him with the greats he joins without making a mockery of the tragedy. I don’t really want to know how your garden grows, cause I just want to fly doesn’t sound demeaning, it’s an honesty that most would be scared to reveal. It felt like the two reactions to death in the industry was to either mock the deceased by pointing towards their inability to handle the insane level of fame they came into possession of or to ignore the phenomenon entirely. There was something simple to be admitted, everyone on the world stage was at the same risk with the same ticking time bomb. How people chose to handle this fact was up to them. It’s why Live Forever stands so high when it comes to strokes of genuine genius. Looking at the fate you know you can have and choosing the take away to be something so aggressively hopeful as Maybe you’re the same as me / We see things they’ll never see / You and I are gonna live forever - that’s what makes you stand apart from any other writer of your generation. That’s what makes you an objectively good writer.
Some may view it as childish, the idea of not wanting to understand others' trials and tribulations, but that’s a fact of life - at some point you have to protect yourself against the knowledge of your anxieties being proven right and continuing on. As the album goes on, there’s a boomerang between these moments of childishness and cocky behavior about being a rockstar, songs like Supersonic that take pride in being the misunderstood outcasts or Cigarettes and Alcohol bemoaning the current job crisis by saying theres nothing to work for anyways and no point other than to drown yourself in the vices that are bound to consume you anyways.
But as you get to the end of the album you’re greeted by Slide Away and Married with Children. Each song tackles roughly the same subject, a failing relationship, but from the two separate views points. Slide Away comes from wanting to make something work, but knowing how it can’t, the devastating lyric of I’ve tried praying but I don’t know what you’re saying to me. There’s a certain maturity that has always been a part of his writing, adding in lines and themes that you’d never expect a rock band like Oasis to be displaying. As stated, his words come like that of an older, annoying brother: Unfortunately worldly and usually right about how things happen.
While the band was masquerading as this voice of the teenagers, they were being helmed by someone who was so far divorced from that part of his life it was lending more to the textbook of how not to have teenagehood ruin your life. The album is timeless for that reason. It’s not by a teenager for teenagers, it’s by some twenty something telling you that part is only the beginning. Life sucks and life keeps going, it’s up to you to decide how you want to take the punches thrown. Could a bad writer do that? Could someone with no message, no meaning, no experience do that?
Morning Glory continues this barrage of weirdly realistic advice wrapped in these fantastical and shmaltzy worlds and beats. Most of the album was written before Definitely Maybe took over most of Europe, making its themes of grappling with success and isolation just foreign as fame was when that was the muse. The life I knew came to say hello is quickly undercut with It’s good to be back - masking intent under a double entendre.
Wonderwall is also on the album, a song someone could argue is overplayed or dare I say overrated - but nonetheless a bulletproof, bonafide classic song everyone on earth knows. A love song that is unspecified in every way - down to its name being a word of no meaning - aids in the perfection of its writing. There are many things that I would like to say to you but I don’t know how - words that don’t take you to a specific place in his life nor in yours. Written for memories and ideas to be attributed to it, a living, breathing scrapbook of life that is the same yet different for every listener. You’re going to tell me that isn’t the making of a good writer? Someone whose work is so malleable that it transcends any specificity while remaining a perfectly content piece of work on its own legs? Most people could only dream to write a song like that, let alone make a career of it.
Hey Now is a devastating piece about losing yourself the second you gain everything you’ve ever wanted, starting off with the line I took a walk with my fame down memory lane and never did find my way back. As many hard to swallow ideas there are, the album doesn’t feel like a downer, and it’s not. While the narrator on Cast No Shadow questions if he’s truly free of his past once in death, there’s Don’t Look Back in Anger, with someone gleefully looking forward with the knowledge you can never change what came before. Even the closer, largely abstract in meaning, finds a way to not leave you completely barren in woe: Someday you will find me - caught beneath the landslide. For every moment you leave yourself, you come into the person you were always meant to be. Granted, the success of the album had to do with it's catchiness - the thing is practically a musical flu - but it's staying power comes from how mature and understanding the lyrics are beyond how catchy they are. It's not something that ruminates on the tipping point, acknowldging that and the fact that time passes in the same 50 minutes.
The thing about the writing that he does and the way he engages with it in public may be what alienates so many. It’s not that he’s a bad writer - I think we’ve covered that he’s actually quite great - it’s the fact it’s so easy to enjoy and connect with it seems like there should be a catch. That Live Forever is good but it’s too good for a second single, EVER. When it felt like the mono-culture was breaking, there was an acoustic guitar strum that suddenly anyone would recognize in seconds. There should be no new bands writing a song that immediately enters the public consciousness like it did. Songs that are so good they
immediately enter the canon of classics and the writer won’t shut up about how prolific he is. He had reason to brag in my honest opinion, but that’s not what people want to see. They want the humble genius, someone who sits in the corner quietly saying they don’t know how the song they wrote got so big and constantly letting everyone know they really did work on this. They don’t want someone high on coke going on and on to cameras shoved in his face that he knows he’s a great performer and he writes great songs and that everyone loves him. It doesn’t fit what we want to view as one of the greatest musical minds of our time.
His work relies a lot on the audience. Not just in the fact they are infectiously anthemic and often written to people down on their luck with a hopeful meaning, but that the audience is almost required to fill in the meanings as Noel Gallagher isn’t going to tell you what he’s on about. He’s dodgy about the songs when asked, always hiding behind the same excuses everyone uses when saying he isn't good. Over time he’s started to talk about the meanings behind things, but in the heyday of these comments and public narrative he was a bad writer? Silence. On Champagne Supernova, he said in 2009: “I don’t know [what it means], but you’re telling me, when you’ve got 60,000 people singing it that they don’t know what it means? It means something different to every one of them.” I think it becomes clear in those interviews where the guard goes down a bit and he starts genuinely speaking about his work and what it means to him that this line of thinking starts to make a lot more sense.
In 1994, months after the release of Definitely Maybe he said “I could say [I laboured over songs and they’re the Mona Lisa] but I don’t need to say that because the people who’ve bought it have made it The Mona Lisa. And I’m happy with that.” At some point it’s less about what makes his songs good on a technical scale and what makes his songs so good everyone loves them. I could sit here and give you multiple examples from each album of perfect lyrics and meanings they hold in greater themes across his work, but that’s not why he’s a good writer. To write to the universal is not easy, especially not when everybody seems to lose the ability to feel empathy and understanding for things they don’t experience. His songs are an outlet for people to feel what they have to feel, and empathize with the person next to them for feeling something similar. Not the same, but similar. There’s performances of his songs where an artist can just stand on stage and the whole audience sings the words back, words that to each person are the same yet vastly different in meaning. Is that not the marking of a great songwriter?
I could easily go on and on forever about this but why waste my breath? The fact of the matter lies with the fact that whether you like it or not Noel Gallagher is a genius in the realm of modern music - if not thee genius of modern music.
One of my personal favorite songs is The Masterplan, a sprawling epic about letting life take its course. It hits this stride towards the middle, starting as a slow ballad that swings around ideas with no real aim. Talking of fear and hope, understanding in the face of personal confusion and adversity. When the chorus sets in, it starts to illuminate - it becomes an anthemic declaration with the delivery of Dance if you wanna dance / Please, brother, take a chance / You know they’re gonna go which way they want to go before the second half sets in: All we know is that we don’t know how it’s gonna be / Please, brother, let it be / Life, on the other hand, won’t make us understand that we’re all part of a master plan. Endlessly optimistic, even when telling you the future isn't easy - essential Noel Gallagher.
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