10 reasons why Oasis was the greatest British band since Led Zeppelin

I give you their 1994 debut, "Definitely Maybe," as Exhibit A.

It's a bit hard to imagine, in the midst of mid-1990s music culture, much of which was quite dark, edgy, gloomy, confrontational, and alternative, to encounter the blistering opening track, "Rock 'n' Roll Star." Well, I guess we knew what these guys had in mind.

Declarations are one thing, execution another. And "Definitely Maybe" showed Oasis' incipient talent for crafting a track-list for maximum effect. "Live Forever," "Supersonic," and "Cigarettes & Alcohol" define the propulsive, anthemic nature of the rest of the sequence, which is rarely less than mind-boggling in its ambition.

We have to touch on this aspect of brother love, obviously.

But not that much, except to say that Oasis when it was huge was defined by conflict — endlessly entertaining conflict. True, the never-ending tabloid sniping showed that Noel and Liam were hip to an emerging celebrity-entertainment axis that fans of say, Bob Dylan, would sneer at.

But at least they were good at it, and while the whole thing at times was clearly performance art and a savvy marketing strategy, their mutual hatred has lately seemed entirely genuine and no less hilarious than it was back in the good old days.

Just check out Liam's recent diss of Noel's stature — to schoolchildren.

"Attitude" was what the former Smiths guitarist and fellow Mancunian said of Liam when he first witnessed the boy's laddish spectacle.

Marr then took Noel under his wing, giving the elder Gallagher his first really good guitar, a Les Paul, which Noel failed to return but, according to Marr, put to good use.

You could certainly say that The Smiths and Oasis occupy different universes, but you also have to give Marr — a lifelong foe of rock-stardom — to recognize the real thing when he saw it and decide not to fight it, but rather nurture it.

For what it's worth, as Liam's 2017 solo album, "As You Were," amply demonstrates, the kid can write a nice tune. But Noel is a fine, fine songwriter in the rock-pop vein, and he has the credits to prove it, both with Oasis and with his new group, the High Flying Birds.

Now, mind you, if Robert Hunter is your idea of a great songwriter, then Noel Gallagher isn't. But what Noel is great at – as he himself puts it — is writing a song that the listener can make mean something in his or her own mind.

This is actually pretty rare. Wilco's Jeff Tweedy can manage something similar, a productive ellipticality, but Noel and Oasis raised the talent to operatic heights. Take "Champagne Supernova's" chorus and the lyric, "Someday you will find me/Caught beneath a landslide/In a Champagne Supernova in the sky."

Completely meaningless, no narrative, no real characters, but ...

It kinda suggests an epic something. Landslides, Champagne, supernovas! And 50,000 fans would gladly sing it en masse while smiling and weeping.

This coming from a kid who was abused by his father and grew up with not much besides pot and a guitar to keep him going. Noel is a poet of Very Big Emotions who can spill out and bring the world together.

Just as Plant defined the golden god 1970s rock frontman, Liam re-invented the persona for a post-hard-rock audience in the 1990s.

Parkas, Beatles specs, and standing stock still in a crouch while wailing upward into a raised mic, Liam was a pillar of 'tude amid the swirl of sound that Noel was helming.

Plenty of people thought Plant was absurd. Plenty of people thought Liam was silly. Who cares? They did their thing in front of thousands and showed nary a doubt, ever.

Some dudes are just born with confidence.

In Zep, Plant would periodically whack a tambourine to stay busy while Jimmy Page soloed for 20 minutes, but Liam took the instrument and (like so many things) made it into a style statement as well as an implement of excitement.

There have been some impressive harmonica players over the years, but in rock, it's usually the guitar players and drummers, and very infrequently the bassists (the Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea leaps to mind), who have commanded the instrumental attention.

I always figured he got the idea from Ian Brown, the frontman of the seminal Manchester band The Stone Roses, who often sported a pair of jingle sticks, but I've got no evidence to back up my claims.

Liam, front and center, used the tambourine like an orchestra conductor's baton. To great effect.

"Don't Look Back in Anger" is their most beloved song and has become something of an anthem for Manchester. Interestingly, it also marks a break in the band's extremely complicated fraternal dynamic, as it was the point at which Noel starting singing, too.

The song was released in 1996 on Oasis' monumental "(What's the Story) Morning Glory" album, and over the course of several decades, it's jousted with "Wonderwall" and "Champagne Supernova" (both of which appeared on the same LP) for dominance in the group's catalog.

It's just one of THOSE songs.

With a few exceptions, the idea of being in a gigantic rock band isn't an ambition that the majority of young musicians angle for these days. That's understandable, given that the last thing most labels want to do is send five youths and all their gear on tour for a year or more.

Oasis remains the Last Big Band, and there might not ever be another one. As I learned at a recent Fender guitar panel on the future of music, we now live in the era of the streamed playlist. Oasis certainly wound up on plenty of pre-streaming playlists, but the band's impact would have been impossible without the album format and widespread radio play.

Zep's legend was bases on their gigantic records, bootlegs of their live shows, and the fact that they were the first true mega-group. Oasis upped that by being the big band of the late television age, before the internet changed everything. The sheer scale of what they hoped to achieve — and actually did achieve — makes them a source of endless fascination.

And they actually look cooler as f--k now that they've aged and taken on some chic elderly edge. To both Noel and Liam's credit, they're also stuck with their style over the decades.

It wasn't just the Gallagher Bros. Bonehead and Guigsy also looked cool, in their way, and the band's late-career art direction was typically superb.

And yes, you could argue that the lineup changes and intra-band feuds mean that Oasis can't match Zep and its unchanging decade-long lineup. You could also argue that the Zep-Oasis succession is pointless, because Zep was always huge in the US while Oasis was huge in the UK.

But then again, Zep also tended to look pretty cool — Who can forget Jimmy Page's black dragon suit? Where Oasis really nails this one is in looking cool ALL THE TIME. Even now at age 45, Liam is never spotted out of character.