Lennon2217 and I are almost always in agreeance, but that quote is down right daft.

Although, I'd amend it and say Oasis did not create a great (masterpiece) album 2000 - 2009. I think that's fairer.

Well, what is reasonable, or good, and what is great?

The 'feud' was never about breaking the USA to be fair, it was a slick piece of PR by NME editor Steve Sutherland and the Blur camp primarily, and was designed to build on Blur's career whilst boosting the circulation figures of the NME which historically had always fared better when there was a scene with 'whose better?' style debates going on. The thought that it was going to cross over to the USA was only fleeting and based on the Beatles vs Stones comparisons that were being bandied at the time, which neglected to take into consideration the thirty years of culture since then, the fragmentation of US music stations into rock n' roll, country, R n' B, etc. and the overwhelmingly British sound in particular of Blur that was no longer a new or exciting concept to US youth.

The concept was also necessary on a wider scale to reintroduce British bands to the British public, as UK independent labels had been battered from early 1992 up until 1994/95 by the rise of Nirvana and the US bands that followed in their wake. The UK music publishing sector had a torrid year from 1992/93 with only major songwriters or fluke signings like songwriter Eugene Kelly of the Vaselines/Eugenius whose songs were covered by Nirvana (Molly's Lips, Jesus Wants Me For a Sunbeam and Son of a Gun) having any success.

The interview with Noel Gallagher for The Observer where he made those comments was IIRC conducted the prior month by Danielle Sauve in Japan, and caught Noel a) possibly under the influence of alcohol (or perhaps but less likely drugs purely as in the 90's Japan was fairly puritanical about them) and b) Making one of his flippant but this time too far for the press comments. If you read the article at Oasis Interview Blogspot (under 'The Guardian 17th Sep) the writer makes no comment after she has mentioned the sentence, and in the same paragraph quotes Noel a saying "I'm on a line of coke every 40 minutes" which tells you where his head was at that point.

The hysterical reaction was down to a number of reasons which included a UK that had been under nearly sixteen years of Conservative rule at that point with their hypocritical 'family values' type speeches, etc. along with a country that still only had four national TV channels and one real national radio station operator (BBC) so news was concentrated fairly quickly. Newspapers reported it because it a) sold copies to the public by placing a then highly successful, new and therefore relevant in culture celebrity on the cover, and b) suited the agenda of certain publishers (Daily Mail & General Trust and Rupert Murdoch's News International). It should also be noted that charities such as the Terence Higgins Trust used the furore to promote their own interests under the guise of outrage, which I do not blame them for as it is simply good PR, but it fanned the flames nonetheless in a climate in the UK & Ireland that was very much more in tune with the 1950's and before in terms of the older generations viewpoints.

The UK began to change in the later 1990's and beyond with the election of Tony Blair, the age of public emotion beginning with the death of Princess Diana and broader economic, political and social aspects including European integration, opening up the public sector to privatisation even more arguably than Margaret Thatcher did in some respects, immigration and a change in social attitudes and contact led by the rise of social media platforms and technology based infrastructure, which for better or worse each aspect has helped changed the UK beyond recognition in some areas of life since the early 1990's and before as things evolve as they always have throughout history.

Britpop like all tags was a marketing exercise in reality, same as labelling any bands or scene. The truly great bands of that era such as Blur, Oasis, Pulp, Radiohead, Supergrass, The Prodigy, The Verve, etc. had very little in common beyond actually being in a band and perhaps the instruments they used. The Britpop tag was useful in promoting both lesser bands from the second and third tiers of signings by their record companies who would have otherwise struggled to get them publicity, or in the case of a band like The Boo Radleys by changing their songwriting style they went from NME back pagers (with some good records I have to say) to being a band with a #1 album off the back of 140,000 sales and a hit single. It also helped magazine publishers increase sales of music related titles by being able to talk of a scene and it's (imaginary in many cases) participants.

The same can be applied to most scenes, taking punk as an example how similar really were The Clash, The Sex Pistols, The Buzzcocks and X Ray Spex, aside from playing guitars and inspiring a rash of lesser imitators? Ultimately the good music either breaks through at the time or is seen in retrospect for what it was by way of it's later influence (NY Dolls, Velvet Underground, etc.) whilst the chancers who jumped on the bandwagon and got lucky are usually quickly forgotten.

Maybe I need to give Amnesiac some more listens...

I thought it was absolute cack when I had it on last.

If you released Go Let It Out, Gas Panic!, Where Did It All Go Wrong?, The Hindu Times, Little By Little, Stop Crying Your Heart Out, Songbird, Lyla, The Importance Of Being Idle, Part Of The Queue, The Shock Of The Lightning, Bag It Up, The Turning, I'm Outta Time and Falling Down between 2000-2009 are you a great band imo.

Britpop was just a label that the media put on Oasis, in the same way that they tagged the Stone Roses with 'Madchester'.

The Happy Mondays in their usual helpful way brought that term to prominence with this 1989 EP, bless them 

Bless you matt for referencing one of the most criminally overlooked 1960's albums by Ray Davies

I try to convince myself that Liam sounded good after like 2000 because he's my boy but it just doesn't sound as good as it used to if I could go back in time to any time it would be 1995 to go see them live.