A week and a half ago — where does the time go? — I made this intriguing post to Twitter:
Funko is offering Funko POP! vinyl figures of the dueling Gallagher brothers of Oasis, Noel and Liam. Text needed writing, and I wrote it because that’s my job. And I decided, Oasis fan that I am, to have some fun with it.
Some might say that Oasis was one of the biggest British bands of the 90s, an absolute force of nature. Whatever you thought, they were one of the defining Britpop groups, with bestselling albums all around the world and classic songs, familiar to millions, that will live forever. You definitely maybe want the “wibbling rivalry” of Oasis in your Funko POP! collection with the POP! Liam Gallagher and POP! Noel Gallagher figures. They don’t look back in anger, they’re not asking where did it all go wrong. At 3 3/4″ tall, they are standing on the shoulder of giants with Funko’s fan-favorite stylings, d’you know what I mean?
To people who aren’t Oasis fans, this mass of text is sloppy, awkward, overwrought, and overwritten.
Oasis fans, on the other hand, will recognize a few album titles sprinkled in there — Definitely Maybe, Standing on the Shoulder of Giants, the live album Familiar to Millions — and a number of song titles. It started with the Definitely Maybe reference, and then it started to grow from there. Some of the biggest songs wouldn’t have made any sense; “what’s a ‘Wonderwall’ anyway,” as Travis put it, and I’ve never really understood what a “champagne supernova” is, unless it’s meant literally — a star explodes into a supernova of champagne.
Write that down; “A star explodes into a supernova of literal champagne.” In an essentially infinite universe with countless stars, what’s to say it couldn’t happen? The final stellar collapse and outward explosion of the supernova creates a champagne wavefront propagating through the shattered remnants of the solar system. Write that down!
It’s early. I haven’t had sufficient coffee yet.
A Funko POP! solicitation is fairly straightforward with a basic structure that I could have some fun with by fitting song and album titles into that structure in ways that made sense. “All Around the World” was probably the second reference I tossed in there; though Noel thinks, not incorrectly, that’s it’s a bloated, coke-fueled mess, I like the song, and the solicitation grew outward from there. “Whatever” was for another reason — Neil Innes, associate Python and the musician of The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and The Rutles, shares the songwriting credits on that song (it nicks “How Sweet to Be an Idiot”), I was at the office when I wrote this, there’s a signed note from Innes to me on the corkboard at the office, and Innes, who died in late 2019, is much missed in this world. Less than five minutes, and I was done. Written, proofed, formatted, done.
Then I let it sit, and added a couple more Oasis references — Standing on the Shoulder of Giants and Familiar to Millions entered at this point — and at this point it truly was done.
I’m not a Funko POP! collector. I have a handful. I’ve ordered some through work I’ve never received. I certainly don’t need these. But I had fun writing the solicitation and so I went ahead and ordered them. If I didn’t, Liam would call me a “potato” or something. No one wants to be called a “potato.”
As for where the time went, it was eaten by deadlines.