This guy didn't know when to stop the writing!

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The Tris McCall Report
Lyrics Check: "D'You Know What I Mean"

In defense of Noel Gallagher: while he can be impressively concise, there's nothing epigrammatic about what he does, and that occasionally gets him called out as absurdly sincere, or artless. But he's just employing different strategies. Some pop records (Randy Newman's Good Old Boys, Nebraska by the Boss, and Tender Pervert come to mind) are resonant and successful because the writers take a Sherwood Anderson appproach: the songs are a collection of thematically or geographically interrelated stories told by different characters. This always works for me, but there's a danger in it. You could pull a track off of Good Old Boys, like "A Wedding In Cherokee County", and it'd make complete narrative sense for you -- but if you didn't hear it in the context of the album, you'd be getting a different argument than the one Newman wanted you to hear, one that could only be generated by listening to all twelve songs together and responding to their interrelations. That's the danger of making your songs cohesive little three-minute statements. Critics who hear "Rednecks" out of context felt that Newman had lost all of his subtlety, but if they had bothered to engage with the album as a whole, they would have been confronted with impressive intertextuality. But we're conditioned to listen to single tracks and understand them individually, rather than trying to imagine how they fit into an argument taking shape within an entire body of work.

Certain potent lyricists have tried to get around this problem -- Roger Waters, Posdnuos from De La Soul, Katharine Gifford from Snowpony -- by intentionally only giving you part of the picture on individual tracks. Listening to "Dogs" out of context, you might not know what's going on; but that's because waters wants you to sit down and listen to the whole Animals album from top to finish. He's got things on his mind that are tough to express in a three-minute song, and he doesn't want any three-minute piece to stand in for the whole. The problem with this approach is that critics who are too lazy, or just to uninterested, to concentrate through an entire album will turn around and call you incoherent or unfocused -- this has particularly troubled De La Soul on their last two records.

Gallagher is one of this type of good writers. To his credit, his songs have just enough stand-alone coherence that critics often think they know what he's on about from a song or two, but to really appreciate what Gallagher comes with, you have to engage with Oasis albums rather than Oasis singles. The three records trace a trajectory of development and a refinement of strategies (Definitely Maybe, while powerful in places, can definitely be called out for occasional floundering and inarticulateness, while Be Here Now, with the exception of the awful "All Around The World" stays pretty rigorously on point and on topic) that the writer uses to engage with his big theme -- escape from a troubled past. It's the sort of universal, big-tent concern that you might derisively expect a generalist to be drawn to, but Gallagher isn't exactly a generalist: he likes to employ references to other pop songs, he's fond of intertextuality between his own songs, and he makes careful use of place names, personal names, and specific objects to artfully heighten the intensity, depth, and subtlety of his more universalizing statements. Let's look at what I consider his crowning work as a writer -- "D'you Know What I Mean", the first track on Be Here Now, and the most affecting father/son lyric I've heard since Robyn Hitchcock's "The Man With The Lightbulb Head". Here, the scenario is specfic, and rife with particulars. You've got two characters: a returning son and a father who's wronged him, a setting (train station in the son's home-town, where the father, presumably, is still living), and Gallagher proceeds to give you some context, and with it a few very beautiful reasons to care about their meeting:

"Step off the train all alone at dawn/ back into the hole where i was born/ the sun in the sky never raised an eye to me"

Big, impressive sentiments in the kind of grounding, framing device that Gallagher uses in other songs ("What's The Story (Morning Glory)", "Don't Go Away", "Married With Children", "Hey Now", etc.) to clue the listener in, quickly, to what kind of day it is, what the weather's like, what the vibe is, and other particulars. Gallagher's very adept at establishing these things in the first few lines of his songs -- they pull the listener in to a tableau, and then he gets them out of the way so he can move on to his usual thematic concern: recuperation. The settings generally can be assumed to reflect the interiority of the narrator, and that's a bit of a cheat, but God gave everybody but Springsteen a limited number of lines, so some shortcuts to style indirect libre are forgivable. It's also worth noting that the "hole" in the second line has been pretty well established by now, through other Oasis songs, as a reference not to an economically impoverished childhood, but an emotionally barren one. The sun in the sky figures simultaneously, and poetically, for 1.) the father's neglect and reluctance to give guidance, 2.) misfortunes and bewilderment of the son. Moreover, the son in the sky is usually Jesus, and here, as in other Oasis songs, the narrator bemoans an estranged relationship with God. (Incidentally, am I the only one who was dismayed to find that Morrissey had printed the lyrics to "How Soon Is Now?" As a pre-teen obsessed with the ambiguity of son and heir/sun and air, I was hoping he'd leave it forever unresolved...)

Gallagher then proceeds to reference a few world-famous rock records: "blood on the tracks and they must be mine", "Fool On The Hill". This is a technique he's used before to widen the palette of associations and give his words an extra charge, but he's never done it as trenchantly as here. When I first heard "D'you Know What I Mean", I was startled by the reversal of the meaning of "Blood On The Tracks"; I'm a big Dylan fan and I've devoted thought to his albums, but I'd never considered that he might be saying something about family, and the tracks that they provide through life. Thus, Gallagher generates a double-exposed image of the father, alone on the railroad tracks awaiting his son's arrival, superimposed over one of conflict and family bloodshed in an industrial setting. What's more, he manages to bring the viciousness and paranoid directionlessness of the Blood On The Tracks album to bear on the relationship between the characters. Shoehorning even more meaning and nuance into the scenario, gallagher then suggests an analogy between the father and the fool on the hill. Now, we all know that the fool on the hill isn't a bad guy; he just can't participate in workaday, meat-and-potatoes reality. He's a watcher and a thinker, but not an actor; he's misunderstood. Here is Gallagher's first act of recuperation -- the father, who we've initially been inclined to dislike and blame for the fact that the sun never raised an eye for the narrator, has his neglect partially absolved by the comparison with the Beatles' fool. What would a post-industrial fool on the hill be like, imagined in the setting that Gallagher gives us in "D'You Know What I Mean"? He'd probably be unable to hold a job, because he's unfit for the deadening rigor of factory work. He'd probably be broken by his own unfulfilled dreams. He might get violent, but never with any teleology in mind. It's hard not to feel some sympathy for that character -- and Gallagher has managed all that in the first stanza.

I also want to credit gallagher for enhancing the meaning of both Blood On The Tracks and "The Fool On The Hill" for me; I now see dimensions in those works that I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't observed them through the prism of "D'You Know What I Mean?" It's exactly the sort of deepening that Momus did for "Ballad Of A Thin Man" (not to mention the Talking Heads track from the Naked lp) -- a song that I had always found cranky and repetitive until "Who Is Mr. Jones" broke it down for me further (although "Mr. Jones is a man who doesn't know who Howard Jones is" may be the best of all). The final line of the stanza contains a reference to Dylan's Don't Look Back; obvious in this context and not too rich, but then again no more obvious than Stuart Murdoch's own celebrated deployment of the trope.

"Coming in a mess, going out in style/ I ain't good looking but i'm someone's child/ no-one can give me the air that's mine to breathe"

Besides being a lovely, thought-provoking set of things to say -- the second line, in particular -- the second verse extends, and deepens the predicament. The narrator challenges the father to engage with him intellectually -- "look into the wall of my mind's eye" -- while acknowledging that access can't be granted. And while that might render the son somewhat arrogant and supercilious, we're given our first sense that he's been able to shake off some of the baggage of the old man. He came into the world as a mess, but he's going out of it "in style". Now, this doesn't mean that he's triumphed, because we've all heard "Champagne Supernova", "Slide Away", and "Fade In-Out", and we know that for Gallagher, escape and transcendence is a perilous, fragile force that is just as likely to catch you beneath the landslide as it is to set you free. Nevertheless, the narrator is returning home a transformed man, and he has the upper hand over the father, who, notably, cries on the son's shoulder during the pre-chorus.

Gallagher then plays his oldest and most reliable card: the inspirational verse. He's got a knack for rousing statements, and they invariably create sympathy for the narrators in his songs. The weaker Oasis lyrics ("Cigarettes And Alcohol", "Acquiesce", "Up In The Sky" -- which is a great track nonetheless) are those that rely too heavily on the inspirational verses for their emotional charge, and these leave Gallagher open to the charge that he's nothing more than an uplifting self-help huckster. But here, the two riddles that close the second stanza simultaneously generate warmth for both characters. The choice of words is telling: he's someone's child, as is everybody, and he therefore reaffirms the value of a life, even a tawdry, messy one, when seen through the eyes of the parent. But no matter how generalizing or universalizing the verse might be, the fact is that we're confronted by the actual parent here in the verse, and we're encouraged to understand that despite the violence and ugliness implied by the first stanza, the father, like the fool on the hill, sees beyond superficiality and can connect, in some valuable way, with his son. When Gallagher tethers the grandiosity of his inspirational lyrics to actual character-illuminating emotional content in his songs, the results are always formidable ("The Girl In The Dirty Shirt", "Magic Pie", "Going Nowhere").

The pre-chorus contains the brutal, blunt punchline which probably inspired the song: "i met my maker and i made him cry". after you get your breath back, the line can function for you, as so much of the song can, on a number of levels -- a guilty confession, a cold-eyed statement of fact, a sacreligious middle finger to the big guy in the sky, simple autobiographical detail, or a combination of any of these. Gallagher then allows the teary-eyed father to speak to the son, and he poetically asks his progeny why his people (the family) won't fly through the storm -- without a doubt meaning the incessant emotional cloud cover which prevents the sun in the sky from raising an eye on the narrator. They're both lost; there's too much blood on the tracks, they've spent too much time dreaming to carve a path of their own through life. But this isn't an accurate characterization of the son; he knows enough to reply to the father that he's pressed on without a guide. The sun may never shine, but he (the narrator) is going out in style, possibly caught beneath the landslide, slowly, faster than a cannonball.

Like "don't go away/ say what you'll say/ but say that you'll stay", the chorus itself only sounds simpleminded until you stop to think about it:

"All my people, right here, right now/ d'you know what i mean?"

The narrator is channeling his whole lineage down to that moment on the railroad tracks -- father crying, son confronted by a possible future that he finds distasteful and another possible future of flying blindly through the storm without any metanarratives to guide him. But Gallagher is nothing if not generous, and all his people have confronted that choice. Here, in order to understand the depth of the narrator's freeze-frame observance of the moment, we need to turn to the other songs on Be Here Now. Gallagher fleshes out the injunction to understand the meaning and importance of where you are why on the rest of the set; it's a variation on carpe diem that doesn't work on me philosophically, but which I can't deny artistically.

Now, I rarely like father/son stories; i find them beholden to a family values and genetic determinist logic that runs against my usual interests. "D'You Know What I Mean" is no exception to this, but the skill of its manufacture and the depth of its concern -- not to mention the canny ways it manages to pack so much meaning into three stanzas -- makes it undeniable. Gallagher extends to his characters his own strength of insight, and if that tends to flatten them out a bit, the pure oxygen of passages like "I don't really care for what you believe/ but open up your fist and you will receive" would make only a terminal pluralist critic call for more internal lyrical variation. Like most of the lines in "D'you Know What I Mean", these come loaded with all the implications that charge the track: affection between the two conflicted characters (note the brilliant use of "I don't really care", most professional lyricists would have opted for something that hit with more cruelty, and had less of the parent-child ring of truth), renunciation of violence, religious symbolism in a world without a guiding deity, and, most importantly, redemption and reclamation.

I am writing this from America, where we don't (thank God!) have books in dimestores about Oasis. I have no idea whether "D'You Know What I Mean" is supposed to be autobiographical; for obvious reasons, I hope it isn't. If I knew too much about the Gallaghers, I might come to a song like this with an entirely different relationship to its content; I might be unconsciously looking for it to corroborate or dispel something I had read in the tabloids. Thankfully, the only thing I know about Noel Gallagher is that he recently married the woman for whom he wrote "The Girl In The Dirty Shirt". It's to his credit that there's nothing in the text of the song screams autobiography -- no place names, no references to genetic predispositions for heavy eyebrows, etc. Even the love songs never provide detail that give away their, um, initial target audiences.

So, to recap. In Noel Gallagher, we have a songwriter with a broad range of lyrical skills. They include:

1. an ability to write concise exposition -- plot, scene, weather, vibe -- quickly, and with immediacy, and get it out of the way in the first verse,
2. a sure hand at penning catchy, memorable turns of phrase ("I met my maker and I made him cry") with good, open, singable vowels on the top of each beat,
3. a talent for inspirational verse -- which he has developed and incorporated into his narratives and characters,
4. a good knowledge of pop history, a nice instinct for when and where to use a reference, and an enviable ability to flatter and enrich the works to which he refers,
5. strong skill at writing relationships, and enough insight to give them depth, and
6. a decent sense of humor ("Digsy's Dinner", "She's Electric", "Into my big mouth/ you could fly a plane", etc.)