The real magic of Oasis? They made a better kind of Britain seem briefly possible | Alex Niven

Beyond all the noise about chart battles, sibling rivalry and Cool Britannia, the Oasis narrative was such a powerful one because it pointed to how a valuable new form of “oceanic feeling” – Sigmund Freud’s term for an all-embracing mass consciousness – might emerge in Britain in the dying days of the 20th century. For all its broadness and frequent crudeness, the collective mood that Oasis inspired was at heart an inclusive one, based on the desire to advocate a more demotic, more democratic way of national being, rooted in the lived reality of working-class experience.