In September 1996, early in a misbegotten youth — though not nearly as misbegotten, I should say for the record, as Liam Gallagher‘s — my friend Gary and I attended an Oasis concert at Jones Beach, on Long Island.
We didn’t know it at the time, but the now-iconic “What’s The Story (Morning Glory)?” tour, which had just arrived in the U.S. after record-breaking crowds in the U.K., was about to come to a crashing halt when Liam would leave the band a few days later in a(nother) fit of petulance. That night we just blissfully rocked out to live renditions of the record that had been playing everywhere the previous year — everywhere we went, anyway. Years before Google — and decades before TikTok — we basked in the discovery of this strange, snarling British rock that wasn’t much on the radio but lived in every scratch of our CDs, and minds.
Gary passed away in a paddleboarding accident exactly two decades later, some 10 miles west of Jones Beach, and, while I’m hardly a woo woo reincarnation type, I found myself looking up into the Eastern Seaboard sky Sunday night as I listened to Oasis playing those songs with an almost impeccable similarity to that evening 29 years ago. I imagined Gary’s spirit was up there and that, with his trademark giant goofy grin and booming voice, he was bopping along to “Wonderwall,” “Champagne Supernova,” “Some Might Say” and, during a number that brought me a smile more faithful than ironic, “Live Forever.” In fact, I was sure of it. If the Gallagher Bros. had somehow bent every rule of nature to join hands and perform on the same stage after all their epochal fights, was it really so crazy to think that Gary and the others we lost along the way had pulled a supernatural trick of their own to tune in to the bad boys of Britpop one more time?
But it wasn’t just the thought of an afterlife that filled me — and, dare I say, the 60,000 other people who filled Met Life Stadium Sunday — with a jolt of spiritual energy. (The band gives another performance there Monday, then closes out its three-city U.S. run with a pair of gigs at the Rose Bowl next weekend.) It was the sheer messy humanity of every distorted guitar, soaring falsetto, driving drum and swaggering piece of banter — the simple idea that the Gallagher Bros. had even gotten here to do this, coupled with what they were doing and how it seemed to be making every person in that stadium feel.
If you read any music press, you’ve already seen the Oasis Live ’25 reviews, from Cardiff and Wembley and Toronto and Chicago. You don’t need one more wide-eyed entertainment journalist to give you one more rave about how tightly they performed, how timeless they sounded, how terminally weird Liam was. (But seriously, he was weird. He yelled New Jersey for no apparent reason several times between numbers and at another point mid-song tried to balance a tambourine and maraca on his head simultaneously while the rest of the band ground away. Crucially, though, he never disappeared — in fact he kept re-appearing, popping up from out of nowhere after the few seconds the lights went dark following a Noel song.)
What may not have come up as often in those reviews is what the band is doing beneath the surface — what was coming across subtextually even in lesser-known tracks like “Little By Little” and “Acquiesce” and “Whatever” — and, more important, the sense of possibility that subtext was evoking. This was a deeply human experience at a time, with its seething algorithmic outrage and a dawning AI, when we seem in danger of losing that humanity.
A handful of lyrics sung Sunday preach a kind of get-along connection “Don’t Look Back In Anger,” most prominently, but also “Because we need each other, we believe in one another” from “Acquiesce,” “All my people right here right now,” from “D’ You Know What I Mean” and “Two of a kind, we’ll find a way,” from “Slide Away.” But it wasn’t what the artists were saying as much as how they were saying it. The Gallaghers are known for what has affectionately been called the largest pub singalong in the world, and that seemed true in spades Sunday, as the whole crowd often seemed to be taking the stage with them, howling and playing along with every note. And what could be more analogue-ly human than people singing in a pub?
Even the fact that Oasis had chosen to play pretty much the exact same 23-song setlist on every tour stop so far in its five U.K. cities and now it seems five North American ones seemed like a distinctly human choice; an AI surely would have been trained to shuffle them up. (Everyone knowing what came next also helped the sing-along part.)
Oasis first arrived at a mid-’90s moment not long before tech changed everything. We were still discovering songs because human radio programmers (or just human friends) wanted us to, not a streaming algorithm served them to us. We connected with fellow music lovers by hanging out in venue parking lots or ragtag Web message boards, not because a digital hyperloop had kept sending us to people who liked the same bands. (Try explaining social media to fans at a show in 1995.) And it was actually possible for acts affiliated only with small independent labels to change the culture; Oasis, after all, was on one of them.
At least publicly, the Gallaghers have often been dormant on these issues throughout much of the past quarter-century — not out of apathy but for the same reasons as many of us, too caught in their own personal drama to take much notice how technology was redefining everything around them. But the change has been drastic. It would have been weird back in Oasis’ heyday to talk about a big stadium-rock show being uniquely “human” — what the hell else could it be? But after decades of music chosen by algorithm, of the spirit of listen-together radio fracturing into a million personalized streams, of social media and the politics that fuel it ordering acts into groups of the allowed and prohibited, of autotuning and overdubbing washing out raw instruments, of our current cultural era’s spell of phone-zombification, of the communal spaces of record stores disbanded as a mainstream notion of gathering, well, it’s not such a given anymore. Thousands of people gathering under the sky to hear a few talented fellow humans break their backs with a bunch of instruments, that oldest of entertainment constructs, now also feels like a radical one.
And so now the band that once represented all that was lost was coming back at exactly the moment we needed them, like a superhero responding to a Bat Signal, complete with the same dark clothing and unfussy scowls. Music now is about to change again, generated by AI, personalized by machines, owned by hedge funds and optimized for marketing power. The Gallaghers seemed to be coming just in time, to remind us of what it was like before — to issue a gentle caveat, by the power of positive suggestion, that we should think twice before plunging further into the abyss. To warn that human-made art is fragile and too easily undone — in fact in their case for 16 years it was undone — by its embodiments acting too much like petty, well, humans. And the true feat, the band was saying triumphantly Sunday, is that there exists a way to hold it together.
The show was nostalgic, but not for its own sake. We were going back to all they did in the 1990’s precisely because Oasis had always understood better than many stadium acts what we really wanted from a modern show of that British type and scale — none of the polish of Coldplay, the pro forma hit-churning of The Stones or even the calculated gloom of The Cure, just the genuine working-class rawness and plain-old unpredictability that the Gallaghers brought. Half the fun of Oasis shows have been not just not knowing what Liam would do next but realizing that he didn’t know what he was going to do next either, and does it get any more beautifully, unpredictably, messily, human than that?
A family of four from Baltimore was sitting in front of me — 40-ish parents, son and daughter, both under 12 — and the kids came to life especially during “Live Forever,” the girl’s blond ponytail bobbing to every groove as she mouthed the words to that anthemic hook of a chorus. That clinched it: the experience of this organic human connection was enough for even a kid, born not only in an era of very different music from Oasis but from a whole different way of experiencing and discovering music, to spot and seek out. Oasis didn’t invent the modern large-scale stadium show, but they sure as hell seem to have perfected it. And if it was so clear to a young girl with a minimum of parental prodding that this experience beat the hell out of sitting in a lonely room staring at a screen, why wasn’t it clearer to the conglomerate machine that keeps thrashing us with it?
Most giant stadium shows and summer festivals of course have heavy doses this — the Eras Tour, for all its social-media facilitation and Ticketmaster chaos, was at heart the same wonderfully elemental human experience — and Oasis is continuing this rich tradition while perhaps offering, given both how the band came up and how tenuous and unlikely getting to this moment was, an especially non-algorithmic example of it.
The band itself didn’t seem oblivious to what their presence meant either. Oasis has always worn their grassroots anti-system stances lightly but not entirely without consciousness. As Liam recalled from the stage Sunday night, big-label executives had kept telling the brothers, “’You gotta play the game or you’re chopped liver.’” Then Liam added, with no small amount of glee, “But we’re standing in front of you beautiful people in this magnificent stadium. So you don’t have to play the game.”
My companion for the evening, upon hearing my proposition about Oasis returning at just right the right moment, wondered if it’s just a blip — how many other bands can position themselves against the machine as well as evince such humanity, and even if they could, could they stop the tide of automation and atomization and even hologramization that I fear is about to engulf so much of our entertainment business? I said I genuinely wasn’t sure.
I’d like to think that, after a summer of people getting together in movie theaters to laugh their heads silly at The Naked Gun, dance their butts off in bars to the wry raunch of “Manchild” and grab their seatmate in shrieking delight at the latest crazy turn in “Weapons,” this was not an anomaly — that Oasis ’25 is just the largest-scale demonstration this season of what Americans have been consistently telling entertainment companies for a while now: We like feeling wildly human emotions, and we like feeling them together.
That while there’s a place for streaming shows algorithmically chosen just for us, and maybe even for the more individualized custom content made by AI that is about to sweep over us, it is not, Wall Street expectations and Big Tech machinations aside, the only driver of our entertainment interest, and perhaps not even the main one.
Sure, it was the summer of The Velvet Sundown, that ridiculous expression of (or meta-comment on) music’s automated future. But we were also, it seems to me, talking about streaming shows a little less and leaning in to communal experiences a little more, resisting the algorithms with just a tad extra vigor and opening our minds with small amounts of added gusto. With its on-the-edge moments that thrillingly always seemed in danger of going awry but miraculously never did, the Oasis show reflected these machine-agnostic impulses most explicitly — and reassuringly. As the maverick Severance actress Britt Lower told THR several weeks ago, “Whenever I think about the way I feel watching someone walk across a tightrope, I don’t feel nervous about AI.”
As Oasis ended the performance with (what else) “Champagne Supernova,” the night came to a head not just musically but ideologically. “You and I will live and die, the world still spinning around, we don’t know why,” Liam yawped, in a lyric that carries just a little extra freight amid the apocalyptic vibes of 2025 than it did among the end-of-history bliss of 1995.
Oasis didn’t have many answers; they never do. But they asked questions that only people who had lived as hard and felt as deep as they did could — asked questions that a machine that had done none of those things never would. As the band sent a bunch of fireworks upward in an old-school finish, the sky in its own supernova somewhere between July 4 and The Natural, everyone in the stadium looked at each other, re-emerging from the musical hypnosis of the previous two hours in a state of ecstasy, with motive to chase the feeling anew. The spirit of your late friend doesn’t hover over a Netflix show.