Not every artist aspires to timelessness. Every novel written so far about the internet, for example, has dated horribly. The time it takes to write a book is incompatible with the speed of online progress: the author will always be outstripped by the pace of technological development, and the work will in turn look archaic before it has even had a chance to percolate.
I am thinking of Honor Levy’s debut novella My First Book – immediately identifiable as “published in 2024” or Lauren Oyler’s 2021 attempt Fake Accounts. No one has written a great book about the internet or social media. Perhaps they never will.
Meanwhile, the first leg of Oasis’s reunion tour on Friday night in Cardiff proved that artistic timelessness is possible. Definitely Maybe was released in 1994, and 31 years later – so I am reliably told, I was not there – lands on stage just as well now as it did then. And that is after a fraternal dispute so serious that most lost hope the band could ever get back together. Something, something ... the power of music. Whatever.
Oasis lyrics don’t often survive a close reading: they are rarely profound, they are imprecise, stacked full of bad analogy and lazy rhyme (“Slowly walkin’ down the hall / Faster than a cannonball” – to which I say: ‘Huh?’). Some are so mawkish they are hard to swallow: “Cause all of the stars are fading away, Just try not to worry, you’ll see them someday.” (Blech.)
But the shoddy lyrics are incidental to the band’s cross-generational, cross-millennium, appeal. The pair are masters of melody; Liam’s voice is as good as ever; “big guitar music” is hard to argue with. There is an ineffable quality to Oasis that all good music shares – a “this is great and I don’t exactly know why” kind of thing. (I think the French have a term for that.) All this contributes to the shelf-life of one of the world’s favourite bands.
There is one thing I am certain of, however, that has hardened the Oasis legacy. The Gallaghers may be petulant, squabbling brothers. But both in studio and out, the pair are functionally apolitical – Noel has said he thinks Glastonbury is a bit “woke” these days, and that he prefers Tony Blair to Keir Starmer.
Both argue that the Irishness of their roots has contributed to the band’s success. There was a flag on stage on Friday night that read “Éireann go brách”. But for modern artists, that’s nothing. And, beyond that, Oasis do not pronounce on politics at all. The music is shorn of contemporary political reference. This affords them the mode of timelessness so many are after, that so many fail to achieve.
The trend cycle of politics – just like the pace of change on the internet – is too fast-moving for art to contend with. Take the Glastonbury Festival. In 2016, Brexit was the great affront to the Glastonbury class, and European Union flags were legion that summer. In 2025, I did not spot a single one. I saw a Ukraine flag amid a sea of Palestine ones. It looked strange and out of date in context.
In 2017, Jeremy Corbyn was the main character of the festival with his vaunted “We are the many not the few” speech, but since his electoral coalition fell apart, no one is singing “Oh, Jeremy Corbyn” any more. Politics is far more ephemeral than anyone caught up in the moment is willing to admit.
Which takes me to the other big music story of the year: Kneecap. I do not think Kneecap are aspiring for the Oasis effect. Their pro-Palestine and anti-British state cause seems more important to them than the pursuit of an enduring artistic legacy. By anchoring themselves so firmly in the politique du jour (honourably so, plenty will say) they will be exalted as temporary and fleeting activists. The world needs those. But they should not be surprised when that fate reaches them.
It is not just confined to music. The ambient anti-capitalism of Sally Rooney’s novels demarcates them as belonging to the past decade. Virgil’s Aeneid is full of universal truths and insights, but it is ultimately less interesting to the 2025 reader than, say, Homer’s Iliad, solely because the former is a political work hyper-specific to early imperial Rome.
Picasso’s Guernica is still pretty good, but I prefer paintings without such explicit arguments. And in more general terms, there is nothing I would like to read less right now than one of the so-called “pandemic novels”.
Novels and music that seek to campaign are useful in a limited and specific way. But protest songs are just protest songs, either shackled to a specific time or so bland and abstract that they fail to say anything interesting at all.
Meanwhile, there is no great moral case for artists who want timeless appeal. But the aesthetic route to achieving it is easy to identify: the politics will age you faster than even the most rock’n’roll lifestyle could.
