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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 hits 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.

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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 convening 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 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 is a way to hold it together.

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