Don’t Think About Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ Too Hard
Classic rock lyrics can be great, meaningless, or greatly meaningless. For example, Oasis’ “Don’t Look Back in Anger” doesn’t make a lot of sense when you listen to it with both ears. Regardless, the track will live on as a classic of Britpop until the end of time.
Oasis’ ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ can’t tell if it’s uplifting or depressing
While “Wonderwall” is pretty easy to understand once you pick it apart (although the title is still a doozy), “Don’t Look Back in Anger” is a pretty pile of gibberish. In the verses, Liam Gallagher sings a bunch of inspirational slogans before he bares his soul in a chorus about a girl named Sally who is losing her soul. He doesn’t seem too torn up about it, as he reassures himself that he doesn’t need to get upset about all this. The track’s music is surprisingly upbeat, considering it kind of sounds like it’s about a woman who is about to go to hell.
Do the lyrics of “Don’t Look Back in Anger” add up to anything? No. They seem like a bunch of lines that sound good in isolation but are entirely disconnected. They don’t display a cohesive emotion, much less tell a coherent story. Not every song has to be simple, but it’s usually preferable for lyricists to convey some kind of mood. The Gallaghers don’t want us to get angry but they should want us to feel some sort of emotion.
Oasis could be as oblique as The Beatles
Does any of this really matter? No! When people listen to music, they are generally interested in chords, melodies, instrumentation, vocal performances, and beats per minute, not in lyrics. If people wanted lyrics alone, they would just read poems.
Of course, a set of lyrics can be so immoral or awful that they ruin an otherwise lovely song. There’s nothing ethically objectionable about “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” In fact, its title encourages listeners to go through life with a positive, unburdened point of view. Someone could come to the conclusion that the nonsensical nature of the song ruins it. However, much like their biggest inspiration, The Beatles, Oasis usually garner acclaim for writing songs that are ambiguous and psychedelic.
Noel Gallagher barely explained ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’
During a 2009 interview in the book The Art of Noise: Conversations With Great Songwriters, Noel Gallagher explained the origin of “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” “Liam came up with the word ‘Sally,'” he recalled. “I was doing it at a soundcheck. I was singing so … didn’t have that word, I was saying something but I don’t know what. He came up and said, ‘Who’s Sally?’ and I went, ‘What do you mean?’ and he said, ‘Who’s so Sally can wait?’ and I went, ‘F****** genius.’ ‘You’re not having any money for that, by the way.’
“Somebody gave me really early on when I went to the States a cassette of John Lennon speaking into a tape recorder about his memoir,” he added. “He was going to write a book before he was shot, apparently, and one of his lines was ‘the brains I had went to my head.’ I’ll have that, thank you very much. The opening was a bit like ‘Imagine.’ It sounds like it’s about a girl who’s lost something, she’s leaving home.”
Whatever it’s about, everyone seems to like it.
