How Oasis Stayed on People’s Minds (by Fighting Online)

Oasis is back, but in some senses it never left.

The Manchester band, whose anthemic songs and sharp-tongued antics helped define the 1990s Britpop era, will return to the stage Friday in Cardiff, Wales, kicking off a global stadium tour. These will be the first Oasis shows since 2009, when the guitarist and primary songwriter Noel Gallagher quit the group, proclaiming that he could no longer stand to work with Liam Gallagher, the lead singer. The brothers, long known for their brawling, have not performed together since, yet they’ve rarely ceded the spotlight.

“They definitely successfully kept themselves in the public eye during the whole breakup period,” said Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone’s deputy music editor.

The key to their continued relevance hasn’t just been enduring songs like “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova,” but an uncanny ability to keep their famous bickering top of mind using modern tools that didn’t exist when the band’s 1994 debut arrived: social media and blogs.

In the absence of Oasis, the Gallaghers released solo music, but also a barrage of insults and barbs via Liam’s eccentric social media posts and Noel’s dryly provocative interviews, all of it breathlessly documented, aggregated and amplified by British tabloids and the online music press. For listeners who discovered the band after it broke up, this constant hum of comedy and conflict has been a glimpse of the Oasis experience — a more potent distillation of the group’s essence than musical offshoots like Beady Eye and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.

“The only little bits you could get of Oasis — it was their Twitter presence, it was their viral silliness, just their boneheaded attacks at each other online,” said Aidan O’Connell, 26, drummer for the Chicago indie-rock band Smut.