Album Anniversaries: Even in the 25th Anniversary of Oasis’s ‘Be Here Now,’ the ‘Here’ Matters

25 years later, a consensus is growing that Oasis’s third album, Be Here Now, was too harshly criticized on its initial release. Was Be Here Now a good album that was unfairly maligned, or was its criticism well-deserved? Could it have been both?

Written by Wonjune Lee

With the recent 25th anniversary of Oasis’s third album, Be Here Now, it’s been especially interesting to see commemorative pieces being written about it. For many Oasis fans, their junior effort is the beginning of the band’s pained, drawn out decline from the genre-setting success of its first two albums, Definitely Maybe and What’s the Story? (Morning Glory). Compared to them, it would hardly be controversial to say that there are less memorable tracks on Be Here Now.

Contemporary reviews from the time of the album’s release agree that the album was largely forgettable compared to the glorious highs of Oasis’ debut. David Fricke of Rolling Stone was especially scathing, writing that “Oasis can’t rely on this Abbey Road-meets-Never Mind the Bollocks routine forever,” and closed his review by asking, “What will they, or their records, mean in 20 years’ time?” (He still gave the album four stars. Go figure.) For David Browne of Entertainment Weekly, “the music reflects a need for escape from the Oasis-mania of the last two years.”

In some retrospective pieces, it’s even been argued that Oasis’ third album signaled the end of the Britpop era, as music tastes in Britain were moving either back towards more electronic sounds or the novel excitement of hip hop. But more recently, there has been an almost collective journalistic effort across the board to see Be Here Now in a more positive light.

NME, for instance, asked, “Can an album that includes the epic, rock ‘n’ roll rush of ‘D’You Know What I Mean’, the sing-along-y ‘Stand By Me’, the council estate pop of ‘The Girl in the Dirty Shirt’ and their most accurate Beatles pastiche, ‘All Around The World’ really be that bad?”

Rob Sheffield took a more measured stance in his Rolling Stone article, where he acknowledged that the album is not just a flop but “The Flop.” And yet its retrospective displays a certain nostalgic reverence — Be Here Now is, according to them, an album that best represents how “These boyos approached guitar rock in a totally pop way, making it nonstop fun to be a fan—what a concept.”

In some ways, it would be hard to argue that these new retrospectives are completely wrong. The music of Be Here Now is not bad, especially in isolation. The album does reflect the optimism of late 90s Britain, with no better example than “Around the World,” whose lyrics sound almost Michael Jackson-esque in its “make a better world” mantra. “It’s Gettin’ Better (Man!!),” the next track, sounds almost like a parody of the typical Britpop hit, from its extremely hopeful title to the simple melodicity of its raw guitar riffs. Looking back at the album from an era where newspaper headlines are dominated by inflation, industrial action, and fascist electoral victories, Be Here Now sounds like music from another world.

Image courtesy of Big Brother Recordings

The problem with looking at Be Here Now 25 years after its release is that a lot has been forgotten about the world that gave birth to the work — Britain in the summer of 1997. Just three months prior, Tony Blair’s Labour Party had absolutely trampled the Conservative Party in a landslide, backed by “Cool Britannia” messaging that saw the Labour Party using songs like D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better” to differentiate itself from the doom and gloom rhetoric of the Thatcherite Tories that had been in power throughout the 80s and 90s. And once he was elected into 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair hosted a party, “inviting lots of the Cool Britannia crowd, and immediately making them much less cool. Anyone who was anyone who was a massive prick was there.” Oasis was, of course, some of those “pricks,” helping to move Britpop from the anti-establishment sound of the post-industrial north to music that art students from Kensington and Chelsea listened to. “Cool Britannia” was becoming a lot less cool, and Oasis was in the middle of it all.

Even in the music world, things around Oasis were beginning to change. The year saw the release of Blur’s self-titled album, which, while didn’t see the same commercial success of Be Here Now at the time, is almost universally positively regarded to this day. The album is notable for how different it is from Blur’s previous releases, The Great Escape and Parklife. While Blur retains the melodic base of those earlier works, tracks like “Song 2” signal a departure from the sarcastic attitude that defined Blur. “Essex Dogs,” the last track of the album, with its heavily electronic, distorted motifs, sounds closer to a Gorillaz song than something from Blur, hinting at Damon Albarn’s coming transformation into the leader of Gorillaz four years later.

As this was happening, electronic music was making a speedy comeback with the likes of The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, and hip hop is slowly starting to make the trip across the Atlantic to become the biggest genre in popular music.

In contrast, Be Here Now, is an album that, even at its highs, sounds like an extension of Oasis’s previous work. “Stand by Me” sounds like the second verse of “Whatever,” while “All Around the World,” in turn sounds like the second verse of “Stand by Me.” It all feels like some incestuous string section soup boiled with a big helping of the Beatles and a sizable portion of The Stone Roses. That’s not to say that these songs are bad — far from it. Judged as what they are, songs heavily inspired by ‘60s Baroque Pop and ‘80s New Wave alternative, they are great examples of how to do that type of music right. On its own, “Stand by Me” is a great, lengthy track whose simple, easy-to-follow melody and uplifting lyrics can get people through hard times. But a third album with the exact same type of music, only three years away from the band’s debut, sounds blasé at best, unoriginal at worst. Especially when the rest of the world was moving at breakneck pace.

Ultimately, it seems like a mistake to look back at a work of art without considering the context in which it was made. Maybe Be Here Now deserves some positive revisionism purely on the merits of its contents, but in the context of August 1997, it’s not hard to imagine why it must have felt so unimaginative. In the end, Be Here Now can be multiple things at once — a decent album that was released perhaps a bit too late, preceded by music that felt just a little too close to what it was.
“Don’t Look Back in Anger,” is all well and good, but let’s also try not to look back with too much joy in our hearts.