October 1st, 2024 | Grant Johnson

Why Haven't Oasis Been Cancelled? 

Noel and Liam don't care.

Oasis are reuniting after a 16 year absence from the rock music scene. Noel and Liam Gallagher have put aside the differences that broke them apart during a concert in Paris back in 2009, and have decided to give Oasis the victory lap many fans have been pining for. Next year they’ll be releasing a new album and then embarking on a “stadiums only” world tour.

Now this is PostCanadian, a site for the right, so I’m not about to write a deep dive into the musical history or future of Oasis. The angle I’m going to look at as far as we’re concerned is cultural, especially in our Woke modern world.

Oasis was the most arrogant and obnoxious rock band to arrive on the mainstream music scene of the post-Grunge era of the mid-1990s. Their bravado and raw candor was matched by the chaos of their tours and the wild abandon of their opinions. They were controversial in a way that mainstream music hadn’t seen since the days of punk rock in the late 1970s. They burned bridges with glee and offended anyone and everyone they came up against. This brutal honesty and shamelessness endeared them to millions, but created enough opposition that they never quite reached the heights they always promised.

In the 1990s, people accepted a lot more controversy from their celebrities. It was salacious, but not catastrophic. Cancel culture as we know it today didn’t exist yet and people got away with a lot more than they do today. You might’ve tarnished your brand, but you weren’t completely ruined by expressing a weird or unpopular opinion.

The closest Oasis got to crossing the line in the 90s was when Noel Gallagher said he wished that Damon Albarn and Alex James from Blur would "catch Aids and die" because he hated them. This is one of the only times in Oasis history that they backtracked and apologized. (The entire event was during the infamous Blur Versus Oasis battle in which a “rivalry” was torqued up in order to sell more records by both bands.)

While the Gallagher brothers save their biggest insults for their musical contemporaries, they do occasionally delve into politics and current events, and their opinions are often based and typically incendiary.

Here’s a taste for the uninitiated.

Liam Gallagher on politics: “I take it with a pinch of salt though, because you don’t know who to trust. I just can’t come to a conclusion without thinking they’re all cunts and I wouldn’t fuckin’ trust any of them as far as I could throw them. I find them all lying bastards.”

Noel Gallagher on Brexit: "Do I think we should leave [the EU]? I don't think we should be given a vote. I see politicians on TV every night telling us that this is a fucking momentous decision that could fucking change Britain forever and blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, why don't you fucking do what we pay you to do which is run the fucking country and make your fucking mind up. What are you asking the people for? 99 percent of the people are thick as pig shit. They didn't fucking ask us for a referendum when they were going off to war, did they? No, fucking assholes."

Noel Gallagher on mask wearing during Covid hysteria: “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. “I choose not to wear one and if I get the virus it’s on me, it’s not on anyone else. If every other cunt is wearing a mask I’m not gonna catch it off them, and If I’ve got it then they’re not gonna catch it off me. I think it’s a piss take. I was going up to Manchester the other week and some guy’s going ‘can you put your mask on, because the transport police will get on and fine you a thousand pounds. But you don’t have to put it on if you’re eating’,” he said. “So I was saying ‘Oh right, this killer virus that’s sweeping through the train is gonna come and attack me but see me having a sandwich and go leave him, he’s having his lunch?’”

Liam Gallagher on government (Rishi Sunak) telling musicians to retrain for different jobs because Covid restrictions meant they could not play music live anymore: "So the dopes in gov telling musicians and people in arts to retrain and get another job what and become massive cunts like you nah yer alright. This country would be beyond wank if it wasn't for the arts and the music and football show a bit of respect you little TURD. If anyone needs to retrain it's them shower of CUNTS."

Noel Gallagher on former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn: “Fuck Jeremy Corbyn. He’s a Communist.”

Noel Gallagher on his former support for Tony Blair: “I don’t have a crystal ball. I didn’t see he was going to turn into a cunt.”

Noel Gallagher on climate protestors: “Middle-class, white fucking idiots who need a kick in the bollocks repeatedly and then thrown in the fucking Thames. The police are pussies and big fannies that are fucking hamstrung by social media now and they can’t give anybody a clip around the fucking ear who deserves it. It’s yet another fucking load of shite driven by social media which is the playground of cocksuckers.” 

Quotes like this go on and on and on. Which leads me to ask: why aren’t these guys canceled? They just announced a comeback and they’re booking stadiums around the world and signing deals to launch their next album. Oh sure, there’s been some attempts, like this scathing article in the Guardian recently, but nothing sticks. Nothing affects them. Nothing stops them. 

In a country where people get arrested for Facebook posts and a man was fined £800 for teaching his dog to do a Nazi salute, not to mention Tommy Robinson, how do Oasis keep getting away with it all? More importantly, what can we learn from it?

1. Be Successful

A couple of other “uncancellable” UK celebrities come to mind. The first is J.K. Rowling. She has been battling the Trans-cult online for years now and the Woke onslaught hasn’t had any impact on her. Another one is Ricky Gervais, his comedy is brutal and he’s as successful as ever. 

Ricky Gervais, J.K. Rowling and Oasis, the one thing they all have in common is that they’re ultra-successful and nothing succeeds like success. Controversy or not, they all have fan bases that love them and there is money on the table. 

When money talks, Woke can walk. 

If you want to avoid being canceled you need to build your own ability to make money without being beholden to the Woke mob. The people getting canceled and ruined aren’t the superstars…it’s the mid-level folks with careers tied to industries that make canceling a real threat. Teachers, low-level comedians, high-profile corporations…if you aren’t a millionaire and/or self-sufficient in some kind of business, then I’m sorry to break it to you, but you need to practice the fine art of being careful.

Jordan Peterson wants people to fly their flag and just rise up against the culture we are living in…just like he did, but what he fails to realize is that most of us are not going to land with a million-dollar book deal and a successful podcast as a result.

Superstars saying what they think is admirable and they should garner our respect, but don’t follow in their footsteps unless you’re prepared for a very different outcome.

2. Be Unsuccessful

In the early days, Oasis were working-class guys, who had nothing going for them. They were on welfare or working low-end jobs while they rehearsed in a basement for months on end. They were young, uneducated and working-class. They were rough around the edges and did what they thought and believed with a total “devil may care” attitude, because THEY HAD NOTHING TO LOSE. 

They toiled in obscurity from 1991 to 1994, while being ignored and unsuccessful. Keeping at it for years without success requires enormous confidence and resilience. They could live and exist with basically nothing, (and nothing to lose), so when opportunity began to fall in place for them, they kept it all in perspective. Success arrived faster than it had the ability to change them.  

In short, they weren’t canceled in the early years, because they had nothing to cancel.

This isn’t really a great plan for any of us reading this, but there’s something to be said for flying under the radar if you want to be your true self. Have less to lose and don’t be afraid of nothingness.

3. Be less precious

Too many people who get canceled are in precarious situations to begin with. They are too “all in” on a particular job or situation. If they get that one thing taken away from them, then they’re ruined. 

Oasis were never precious about anything. You never saw them approach something with a “Don’t screw this up! It’s our big break!” trepidation. In fact, in contrast to a lot of bands, they were spectacularly destructive and screwed up opportunities left and right. Whether it was their disastrous first tour of the United States or their aborted first European tour, or their litany of burned bridges and canceled shows and offensive interviews... Oasis went out of their way to fail, but they just kept going. When one door closed, they would kick open another.

Being canceled requires someone having power over you and the ability to use it negatively against you. If you give someone this power, it’s nobody’s fault but your own. The whiners of cancel culture need to buck up and blaze forward and not put all their eggs in one lazy basket.

One of the biggest lessons to learn from the return of Oasis is that cancel culture itself is beginning to end. In 2016, Liam Gallagher used some gay slurs on Twitter and promptly apologized with a dismissive tweet. Backtracking on anything was rare for these guys, but in 2016 cancel culture was rising fast. Wokeness and the protected class were attaining massive power. 

Not anymore. 

Wokeness and the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion infrastructure is weakening. Cancel culture has undergone a massive backlash. The young kids coming up are wildly moving in the opposite direction. The culture is changing for the better.

This isn’t, of course, to say that we need a caustic and confrontational culture of rudeness and vitriol, but the days of policing everyone’s thoughts and words for ideological progressive purity are over. Something new is happening. Something raw. Something honest. I’m not sure where we’re heading, but it sure as hell isn’t Woke. 

The return of Oasis is just the tip of the iceberg.