Album Review: Oasis, "Standing on the Shoulders of Giants"

There they are, melded together like the New York skyscrapers in the distance, the giants of Rock – Sir Paul McCartney, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Led Zep, etc. – all Colossi whose massive guitar-toting forms twine together making a craggy yet not unsightly mass.

Near the top, next to the composite head of the conglomerated monster, there is a little flat zone, perhaps the plateau of a hunch. It is here, on this singular shoulder of the giants of the title of this album that Oasis stand.

It doesn't look like the enormous excrescence supporting this shoulder will ever get any higher. In fact there is the constant fear that it will totter and swing, crashing down on the hundreds of cozy little record companies below. In the meantime, Noel and Liam and their hired help go about plugging their derivative but evocative songs singing lines like "Your thoughts and words won't last forever more," and keeping the 'eternal flame' of Rock burning long after the Revolution has sold out.

Rock music, once the aural form of social revolution, almost druidic and shamanistic in its scope, is now no more than the pleasant strumming of minstrels who sometimes feel compelled to act as if they were sweeping away a social order, but are only propping it up.

Maybe they don't realize it but in the title of this album, Oasis have summed themselves up perfectly. This is good music, but I doubt if anyone in the future will ever be standing on Oasis's shoulders.

Colin Liddell
Amazon.com.review
30th July, 2000

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!