Oasis
I was in my twenties when Oasis first appeared and detested their shallow posturing at the time, so I never seriously listened to their songs, but the Reading Festival was on this weekend and I could hear Liam Gallagher dedicate his set to ‘people who hate Oasis’, so I explored their songs and discovered that — and you’ll forgive me if this is common knowledge — they are ‘derivative’1 to say the least. Most of their songs are covers!2
The reason Oasis are both trivial and popular is because they provide the theme music to trivial and popular homosociality. Uncreative, insensitive, emotionally retarded drug-addicted men like to tell themselves that they ‘just wanna fly, wanna live, don’t wanna die’ while drenching themselves in the standard surrogate for character and culture, sold to them by Oasis, attitude. This is why the PMC,3 also salesmen of spray-on attitude, promote Oasis.
Gallagher’s 14-year old mind expresses itself most clearly in the one-dimensional tone of his music. Compare the vibe of Get it On, by T.Rex and the Oasis pastiche, Cigarettes and Alcohol. They both seem to express self-love, but there is a sweet playfulness to Marc Bolan’s music that is completely lacking in the Gallaghers’ drearily literal laddism. Bolan, unlike Gallagher, wasn’t a businessman. He adored himself, but he never would have said this…
I would play people Cigarettes and Alcohol for the first time, and they’d say ‘Sounds like T-Rex,’ and I‘m like ‘no shit, no way, I’d never noticed that…’ You know; ‘Aren’t those two chords the same as Imagine…? You can't do that!’
I can, and I have, and I will...and you’ll buy it, so fuck off.
Gallagher’s lucrative impersonating act extends to language. Compare the lyrics of his heroes’ music with his adolescent, pseudo-psychedelic poetry (Slip inside the eye of your mind / Let me be the one who shines with you), his Madonna-channelling cheese (All your dreams are made of strawberry lemonade), or his bizarre attempts at seduction (She’s got a sister / And God only knows how I've missed her / And on the palm of her hand is a blister — and of course what woman doesn’t love to be compared to a wonderful wall?4)
You might laugh, but 21 million people a month will sing along to these football chants without feeling like psychologically stunted children, so fuck off.
Transcendent and Immanent
There are two kinds of God in world religion. There are transcendent gods, which stand outside of existence; these include the old man with the beard we know from Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but also the fighting, fucking, feeding soap-opera gods of the Greeks and Romans. And there are immanent gods, which are one with existence. These include the gods of primal people, the God of Taoism and the God of Jesus of Nazareth.
The matter is complicated by the fact that transcendent gods can express immanent divinity and immanent gods are frequently co-opted by transcendentalists, but the distinction is simple. If God can actually be realised, here and now, not as a thing out there which I can pray to, or have faith in, but as my own conscious experience, then we are speaking of imminence, whereas if God requires time or space to reach, or a text or a ritual to grasp, or priests or prophets to interpret, then we are speaking of transcendence.
Priests are only interested in transcendent gods, because this is the only kind of god that can give them intercessional power; meaning the power to stand between God and the laity. Transcendent gods can also, through literacy, be rationally grasped. Much is made by transcendent priests of ‘the mystery of the godhead’ or whatever, but that which exists outside of existence is, ultimately, abstract, which is why priests are invariably intellectuals. This all explains why imminence, which is fundamentally irrational, strikes the transcendentalist as dirty, laughable, meaningless or, if it threatens their power, diabolic.
All this applies to the priesthood of secular science, which also worships a transcendent reality, which one must also reach through time, text and reason, the difference being that their transcendent fact is not a person (and therefore not given the word ‘god’), but a thing, a fact, a mechanical event in time. It provides the same kind of power as the transcendent God however, provided one submits to secular orthodoxy, and can be used in the same way to subjugate and confound ordinary people, who must still submit to the secular priesthood and the institutions they manage (education, medicine, law, security, etc.).
Transcendentalist atheists direct all their hatred ridicule at other transcendentalist religions, and vice versa. The teenage-level critiques of Messrs Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris are roughly at the same level as the corresponding response from Christian, Jewish and Muslim apologists. None of them will approach imminent accounts of the numinous for much the same reason that leftists and rightists will never seriously engage with genuine (non-leftist) anarchism, because they need a comprehensible scapegoat — religious fanaticism, godless decadence, left-wing totalitaria or right-wing fascism — for the world’s ills. It’s easier that way.