Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me

Who ya got?

Beatles or Stones? Biggie or Tupac? Prince or Michael Jackson? Pearl Jam or Nirvana? Who ya got and why? More important: What does your choice say about you? Enough about you—what do these endlessly argued-about pop-music rivalries say about us?

The media has long stood accused of creating conflict where it didn’t previously exist purely for the sake of manufacturing melodrama. This is undoubtedly true, and I angrily denounce any soulless moron who says otherwise. (See what I just did there?) But what about the battles that music fans create on their own? I’m talking about the arguments that take place every day in bars, at parties, and during endless road trips when the radio is broken and the opinions are turned way up.

Some of these debates never seem to die. Was Lynyrd Skynyrd right to go after Neil Young in “Sweet Home Alabama”? Was Kanye West justified in crashing Taylor Swift’s speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards? Was Jimi Hendrix a better guitar player than Eric Clapton? Is Toby Keith a better American than the Dixie Chicks? Who would’ve won a boxing match between Axl Rose and Vince Neil?

Music is not like sports—artists don’t have to “defeat” each other in order to gain supremacy. And yet over the course of the sixty or so years that constitute the modern pop era, we as audience members have consistently pitted vaguely similar (though also discernibly not similar) artists against each other in order to determine who’s best.

I’m not interested in settling these arguments—because I don’t think they can be settled and because that wouldn’t be any fun. What I am interested in is exploring why music fans are drawn to these dichotomies, how the dynamics of our most heated musical rivalries stem from larger conversations in the culture (then and now), and what we can learn about ourselves by whom we side with.

Also, I want to understand how in the hell anybody could’ve thought that Mötley Crüe was better than Guns N’ Roses. (It can’t all be blamed on the blizzard of cocaine blowing through ’80s Hollywood.)

Let’s be real: musical rivalries are never totally about music. They’re about sympathizing with a particular worldview represented by an artist over a different worldview represented by an “opposing” artist. You are what you love—and also what you choose not to love. If you pick Hendrix over Clapton, you probably believe that the “burnout” option for rock stars is ultimately more honorable than the “fade away” option. (Or maybe you prefer LSD to Michelob.) If you like Pavement more than the Smashing Pumpkins, you likely find corporate-fueled ’90s “alternative” rock to be highly ridiculous. (Or maybe you prefer California to the Midwest.) If you side with Christina (sorry: Xtina) Aguilera over Britney Spears, you may feel that young girls should emulate a seminaked woman who can sing like Etta James over a seminaked woman who can sing like an oversexed ATM. (Or maybe you’re prejudiced against cyborgs.)

This might sound like harmless stuff, but our musical shoot-outs frequently turn into full-on civil wars. (If you don’t believe me, see what happens when you play Metallica’s “Black Album” for a room full of borderline psychopaths waiting for Megadeth to come onstage.) Musical rivalries don’t matter until they matter to you personally. When that happens, it’s as vital as protecting your own sense of identity.

It’s been said that history is the study of wars and elections—the geography of human dissension, in other words. I think it’s time that this paradigm is applied to pop-music history. So pick a side, pump up the volume, and let’s dive in.

Around the time I started writing this book, I conducted a radical musical experiment: I listened to a Damon Albarn album from front to back.

I realize this won’t seem radical to most people. But trust me: in personal terms, it was nothing less than glasnost. For more than twenty years, I consciously avoided the group that Albarn is most famous for, Blur. I also abstained from another high-profile Albarn project, the so-called virtual band Gorillaz. I definitely did not give another Albarn side project—the Good, the Bad & the Queen—the time of day, and I suspected that Albarn launched a fourth group, Rocket Juice & the Moon, with Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers just to troll me. Sweet Jesus—Damon Albarn and Flea on the same record? Was Anthony Kiedis busy waxing his chest that day?

Avoiding all that music wasn’t easy. How many bands was this guy going to force me to hate? I had to admire Albarn’s eclecticism, even as I found all the extra spite it produced exhausting.

My resolve to block Damon Albarn out of my life occasionally weakened but never broke. When Albarn wrote the opera Dr Dee in 2011, or when he collaborated with Malian musicians in 2013 and released those sessions on the Maison des Jeunes LP, I was secretly intrigued but publicly rolled my eyes. Finally, for Everyday Robots—Albarn’s first official solo album, released in 2014—I demanded change inside my own heart. I roared self-inflicted self-righteousness into the mirror. “Tear down this imaginary Albarn-deflecting wall!” I declared.

Now, you’re probably wondering why I put so much effort into loathing an artist who is probably one of the most accomplished rock musicians of his generation. The reasoning behind my Albarn boycott is predictable and admittedly sort of dumb: Oasis was my favorite Britpop band in high school. And back then, hating Blur, Oasis’s biggest rival, was a requirement for “true” Oasis fans. This perception was due in large part to Oasis’s primary songwriter and guitarist, Noel Gallagher, who once publicly declared his wish that Albarn and his Blur bandmate Alex James catch AIDS and die. (Incredibly, I chose to hate the person who didn’t say that.) So I’ve loathed Damon Albarn for all this time because I’ve stubbornly refused to relinquish an opinion I formed when I was seventeen.

What was interesting about Oasis vs. Blur (if you were an American rock fan in the mid-’90s) is that the rivalry absolutely did not translate in the States. Oasis was way more famous in America—“Wonderwall” was a genuine stateside alterna-era hit and remains a rock radio standard. If the average American knows Blur at all, it’s for the sports-stadium anthem “Song 2,” or, as we Yankees refer to it, “the woo-hoo song.” In Britain, however, it was different. Over there, Blur was more popular, at least for a while.

The animus between the bands originally started in August of 1995 because Blur decided to bump up the release of its single “Country House” to coincide with the release of Oasis’s single “Roll with It.” This was a direct challenge by a big shot to an upstart: Blur was the biggest band in England at the time, but Oasis was on the rise. It set up a highly publicized, head-to-head war for the top of the British pop charts, which Blur won in the short term (“Country House” outsold “Roll with It” by fifty thousand units) but Oasis crushed in the long run (by the following summer, Oasis had played two consecutive nights at Knebworth for more than three hundred thousand people).

As an American, deciding to care about this was akin to suddenly getting really worked up about the minutiae of local government bureaucracy in Kingston upon Hull. Personal relevance had to be constructed. So that’s what I did: I transformed Oasis vs. Blur into a vast cathedral of made-up meaning.

Loving Oasis and hating Blur was a way for me to work out my aesthetic preferences at a formative age. In my mind, Oasis was associated with words such as rock, intoxicated, testicles, and cool, whereas Blur was pop, academic, elitist, narrow, and clever. Again, I’m not defending these reductive descriptions but rather asking how musical biases become ingrained at any early age and over time become “truth.” What mattered to me is that I perceived these bands as having a binary relationship that had great symbolic meaning to me (and likely to other people who cared about this tête-à-tête). I was using these bands to help me figure out who I was and what I stood for (and also who I wasn’t and what I didn’t stand for). To this day, whenever I hear a Blur fan talk about why Blur is great, I understand it only as a critique of Oasis and, by extension, a particular way of looking at the world. It’s like when a cat person tries to explain why cats are superior pets—in some way, it’s really about why dogs are inferior. And sorry, but I can’t hear that, because dogs are and always will be better. Yes, Blur is cleaner and doesn’t drink out of the toilet. But I’ll always have a weakness for shaggy, sloppy, and lovably aggressive creatures who craft spectacular songs about smoking cigarettes and living forever.

I tend to do this with pop rivalries. It’s just how my brain works. I have pop-rivalry OCD—every Oasis I see must be paired with a Blur or else I claw my face off.

Over time, I took my pro-Oasis/anti-Blur stance to its logical extreme by not even listening to the music I’d dedicated my life to despising and, paradoxically, I allowed this know-nothingness to form the basis of my opinion of that (unheard) music. When Blur’s catalog was reissued in 2012 and music critics lined up to declare the greatness of records such as The Great Escape and Parklife, I was intensely annoyed that albums I had never played in their entirety were being so grossly overrated. Not that I actually read those reviews, mind you, as this would have also violated my draconian anti-Albarn ordinance. But I could only imagine what those writers were probably saying.

Those albums must be terrible, I thought. Because Oasis’s 1994 debut, Definitely Maybe, is on my personal top five greatest albums of all time list and my love of that record requires believing that anything related to Blur unequivocally sucks. My logic makes as much sense as the lyrics to Oasis’s “Shakermaker” (“I’ve been driving in my car / With my friend Mr. Soft / Mr. Clean and Mr. Ben / Are living in my loft”), but it speaks to me with equal clarity and persuasiveness.

This is where I need to state explicitly that, intellectually speaking, I know I’m being unreasonable. I’ll go even further and acknowledge my indefensible lunacy.

Enough is enough, I decided. Even if after sampling Everyday Robots I still found that Albarn wasn’t my thing, surely informed indifference is better than benign neglect. Right?

In 1902, a sociologist named Charles Horton Cooley devised a concept called the looking-glass self, which posits that a person’s sense of identity is shaped by interaction with social groups and the ways in which the individual thinks he or she is perceived by others. Cooley believed this process involved three steps:

This might seem intuitive in the twenty-first century, but at the time it broke people’s brains. Cooley’s theory challenged the idea that the self is innate, arguing instead that we are who we think other people think we are. Cooley separated those “other people” into primary and secondary social groups. The primary group is composed of people with whom you are intimately involved, including your immediate family and close friends. This is the most important group in terms of influencing the person you are and will become. The secondary group is broader, and, unlike the primary group, it’s something you belong to on a voluntary and often transient basis. Secondary groups might include people at your school or your place of work.

Cooley’s book predates the emergence of modern pop music as a cultural phenomenon. Unless Mr. Cooley comes back from the grave to inform me otherwise, I’m going to suggest that Oasis fans and Blur fans (and punks and metalheads and Deadheads and Parrotheads and Juggalos) are examples of secondary groups.

Rivalries certainly occur among primary groups, such as the nineteenth-century blood feud between the Hatfields and McCoys and the seemingly endless battle for the White House between the Bush and Clinton dynasties. (Rivalries are also common within families, but that’s a topic for another book, or perhaps for therapy.) But more often rivalries are seen among secondary groups—the participants have chosen to identify with an institution or group, and in some way they are measuring themselves against an alternative that represents an opposing viewpoint.

In terms of national identity, this goes back at least as far as Athens (enlightened democracy) vs. Sparta (militaristic fascism), though it likely began the moment one group of prehistoric ape-men splintered off from the main group of prehistoric ape-men in order to secure superior cave lodging.

For Americans, the sexiest geopolitical rivalry was the twentieth-century battle between the United States and the USSR, which inspired a series of lousy but watchable Sylvester Stallone films in the ’80s and a few truly terrifying TV movies about nuclear apocalypse (such as 1983’s The Day After, which was viewed by more than one hundred million people—it’s still the highest-rated TV movie ever). But the most lasting rivalry between American landmasses is the one between the northern United States (really the northeastern United States) and the southern United States (really Texas, Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, all of Louisiana except New Orleans, and the whitest, most strip-mally regions of Florida). Although the North and South fought a war 150 years ago in order to determine which region’s values were going to wind up guiding this nation forward, North vs. South has subsequently played out largely in our elections and pop culture. Just as it seems that this country will never elect a president who doesn’t pay lip service to protecting the sanctity of church on Sunday and guns in every suburban home, we will likely never reach a point where media isn’t consolidated in Manhattan and Los Angeles and run by intensely myopic people who won’t stop producing programs about annoying twentysomethings trying to make it in Manhattan and Los Angeles.

The conversation around sports routinely (some might say excessively) involves investing rivalries between athletes and teams with a cultural significance that goes beyond wins and losses. Sometimes this significance is indisputable. Jesse Owens traveling to Berlin in 1936 and winning four gold medals as Adolf Hitler looked on was not only the ultimate “in your face” moment against the most detestable opponent imaginable, it also resoundingly disproved the myth of white supremacy. A matchup between Loyola University Chicago and Mississippi State in the second round of the 1963 NCAA college basketball tournament was later dubbed the Game of Change because Loyola won with a lineup that included four black starters, which was instrumental in desegregating the sport. In the early ’70s, the historic first boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier was widely viewed as a battle between liberal and conservative ideologies. The antiwar side cheered for Ali, and supporters of US involvement in Vietnam backed Frazier. It didn’t matter that Frazier was apolitical—Ali’s detractors turned Frazier into a right-wing hero because he was the guy who was supposed to dismantle Ali’s face on their behalf.

Most sports rivalries are regional and therefore don’t bear that kind of political weight, but in their own way they matter just as much because they fester for decades and get passed down from generation to generation. When I first started caring about sports, in the ’80s, the preeminent rivalry was Lakers vs. Celtics, which was practically a national rivalry because the teams are separated by a whole country. I loved the Lakers—I was in grade school, and grade-schoolers like bright, shiny things that move very fast.

Growing up in Wisconsin, I also cared about the Green Bay Packers vs. the Chicago Bears, the NFL’s oldest rivalry. As I write this, the Bears somehow hold a narrow edge in victories over the Packers, despite the Packers’ general dominance over the Bears for the past few decades. The matchup has been so lopsided during my lifetime that I barely dislike the Bears now—they are rarely good at the same time that the Packers are good. (The Minnesota Vikings have generally been the strongest, most hateable foe in the NFC North, especially during the Dennis Green era, in the ’90s.)

But Packers vs. Bears will always be the most significant rivalry for Wisconsinites because no matter how ineffectual the Bears are, our loathing of Chicagoans will remain undiluted. In Wisconsin we call them FIBs—short for “fucking Illinois bastards”—and they are distinguished by their pushiness on our roadways and overall unpleasantness in our stores and gas stations as they venture up north to wash off their Chicago grime in our beautiful lakes. The only way to get revenge on these rude visitors is by proxy. We can’t physically assault the FIBs, because we’ve been bred to be passive middle-American folk. But the Packers can demolish the Bears at Lambeau Field every year.

Please note that I’m not talking about any actual, real-life citizens of Chicago here. I know numerous residents of the Windy City, and they’re all kind, lovely people. I would be disturbed and outraged if any of them suffered a beatdown, and I don’t know any of them to be grimy. I am referring to Chicagoans strictly in terms of an archetype that exists in tandem with my regional identity as a native upper midwesterner. Hating the Bears keeps me from becoming spiritually unmoored. It forms the very fabric of who I am.

The subtext of the Packers vs. Bears rivalry is that one of this country’s great metropolitan areas is frequently humiliated on national television by a community that has one twenty-sixth of its population. It’s the same dynamic as North vs. South—it’s city vs. country, powerful vs. marginalized, “normal” fat people vs. the morbidly obese. I ride with the morbidly obese until the end of time.

The difference between rivalries in sports and rivalries in music is that there are no winners in music. Not that people haven’t tried to determine winners—sales charts and awards shows and rock-critic polls exist to “prove” such things. In hip-hop, the battle has long been a vital tradition distinguishing the true MC from a field of suckers. But even the most hard-core MC battle is essentially a figure-skating competition—it’s never decided primarily by the players themselves. An outside judge or the audience must decide who is best.

When Loyola beat Mississippi State with a mostly black lineup, even the most ardent redneck could see the fallacy of suggesting that black players shouldn’t be allowed on the same court as white players. But there is no arena in which Oasis definitively “defeated” Blur or vice versa. Music rivalries are almost all projection, and what’s being projected are our own desires, hopes, ideologies, and shortcomings. Sports have guided our society toward answers to questions we couldn’t or wouldn’t address elsewhere; music and art put us on a more personal journey, allowing us to work through issues that can only be resolved in our own hearts.

If I had to pinpoint the moment when I went from being an Oasis fan to absorbing the band into my psyche, it was probably when I saw the cover of 1994’s “Cigarettes and Alcohol” single. My favorite part of following Oasis in high school was tracking down imports, which would arrive at my local store every couple of months. I had to be patient and occasionally pay exorbitant prices, but my loyalty was always rewarded. Between 1994 and ’96, Oasis turned out a steady stream of nonalbum tracks that were often better than what ended up on the records. If you liked Oasis as much as I did, you probably spent a similar amount of time ranking your personal favorites. (The number one Oasis B side has to be “Acquiesce,” though if I wrote this on a different day I might say “Fade Away.”)

People who only knew the Oasis songs that were played on MTV were missing something important. Not only was the music on those singles phenomenal, but the iconography was indelible. With the possible exception of the image of Marc Bolan blasting out a glammed-up Chuck Berry riff on the cover of T. Rex’s Electric Warrior, nothing comes close to personifying what I love about music better than the sleeve of “Cigarettes and Alcohol.” We see Noel and Liam Gallagher slugging Champagne and smoking cigarettes on a bed flanked by two beautiful women in a resplendent London hotel room. Are they about to have sex? Are they already too wasted to have sex? As a kid who had never been wasted or had sex, I had no idea. But I stared at that cover endlessly and fantasized about the possibilities.

Oasis came into my life just a few months after my heart was broken by Kurt Cobain’s suicide. I was being raised on bands that looked upon rock stardom as a burden and pleasure as an empty alternative to the reality of pain. Oasis had a different idea. They were reveling in the glory of rock-and-roll stupidity. They were making a persuasive case for life. I wanted that, and Oasis made me think it could be mine. What Oasis promised was self-actualization. When Liam Gallagher sang, “Tonight I’m a rock-and-roll star,” he subsequently became an actual rock-and-roll star. How could I not hang on Oasis’s every word after that?

I didn’t have to listen to Blur or read Blur’s record reviews, because any defense of Blur was already countered perfectly by Noel Gallagher, one of the best interview subjects in rock history. Two hundred years from now, high school students will study Noel Gallagher interviews for their rhetorical brilliance the way kids today look at the Lincoln-Douglas debates from the 1850s. Noel is, was, and always will be my guy, and I’ve trusted in him to show me the way.

Based on the Noel Gallagher interviews I’ve read or watched on video, people who prefer Blur to Oasis feel that way for two reasons:

(1) Blur Made More Good Albums Than Oasis Did

Again, I’m in no position to judge the quality of Blur’s discography, but I suspect this is correct. Blur seems like the more consistent band. I just don’t think it matters.

Whenever Noel Gallagher talks about Oasis albums, he always sets the first two LPs, Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory, apart from the other records as obvious highlights. (Oasis famously went off the rails with its coke- and hubris-fueled third album, Be Here Now, which is remembered as “the Aristocrats” joke of ’90s rock—it’s really long, it’s really tedious, and the payoff is underwhelming.) Gallagher never pretends that whatever he’s currently promoting will ever touch “Live Forever” or “Champagne Supernova.” And he seems perfectly comfortable in his own skin when he does this. Gallagher knows Oasis had its moment, and nobody can take it away from him.

Damon Albarn, on the other hand, seems like a guy who’s deeply invested in his own continued relevance. He is constantly seeking out new collaborators and attempting new music styles. Albarn probably believes that whatever record he’s presently making will be his best. Gallagher, meanwhile, reminds me of an observation that rock critic Greil Marcus once made about Rod Stewart: “If it was necessary to become a great artist in order to get the money to spend and the star to fuck, well, Rod was willing.” Noel was willing, too. Once he achieved success, he didn’t seem especially motivated to keep on achieving it. He was content to lounge comfortably on his laurels.