In a recent interview with New Musical Express, the former Oasis songwriter responded to recent criticism from Matt Healy of The 1975 by calling Healy's band an unmentionable word. OK, the word he used started with an s and ended with a t. You get the picture.
Gallagher's criticism of The 1975 comes after Healy made a comment in December 2022 about how the Gallagher brothers, Noel and Liam, should "grow up" and get Oasis back together. Of course, that is both Healy's opinion and also none of his business. If Liam and Noel don't like one another enough to reform Oasis, they have that right.
And Noel has a right to respond to Healy. But Noel's basic argument was with rock music in general and about how the pure sound of a guitar has been set aside a bit and overproduced records have taken that space. And he isn't wrong. As Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys once proclaimed on "MTV Get Off the Air," "Tin-eared, graph-paper-brained accountants instead of music fans/Call all the shots at giant record companies now."
Noel Gallagher says The 1975 are not rock music
Sadly, Biafra made that statement in the mid-1980s and that same truth holds true for record companies in the 2020s. No offense to fans of The 1975, but they are a pop band and not a rock band. As Gallagher pointed out, per NME
""Oasis’ influence, I think, was for people to fucking start a band in the first place. I do meet loads of guys who say that and that’s great. There are a lot of them around, it’s just a pity guitar music has become marginalised. You’ve either got to be rock, or that f*****g [The] 1975. At the BRITs, The 1975 won Best Rock or some fucking s**t. I was watching it with my kids, two teenage lads, thinking, ‘Is it me being a grumpy old man, or is this s**t?’ They were both going, ‘Oh no, this is f*****g s**t’. The 1975, Best Rock Band? Someone needs to re-define that immediately, because that is… I don’t know what that is, but it’s certainly not f*****g rock. Whatever rock is, that’s not it."
And while some might view Noel Gallagher as a grumpy old man (though to be fair he likely would have expressed the same opinion as a young man in the 1990s), he is 100 percent correct. While rock isn't dead - it will never die until the up-and-coming bands get signed by big record labels who then kill their music - it gets much harder to find the primitive drive on the radio of what the genre was all about when it began. Heck, The 1975 is probably just a victim of their own success and the time they live in.
But The 1975 will never be as important as Oasis because times have changed and changed for the worse. Maybe the boys in Oasis were a bit too arrogant for some when they released their first two albums, and that would be a valid argument to make. But the bottom line is Oasis made good music and their music will be remembered long after the guys in The 1975 have stopped making their own music.