Drunk in the Ditch, Looking Upwards
A Meditation on Belief, Craft, and the Reactor Core
I was thinking about Oasis's debut LP. It was an unapologetically extroverted rock record, a 180-degree flip from the illegible shoegaze that Creation had been known for. A slouching electric rock LP that didn't strut or groove, with zero intellectual posing, with a whiny lead singer. And it sold like hotcakes.
Definitely Maybe was glam stripped of its glamour—T. Rex and Bowie minus the makeup and platforms, plus trainers and Adidas. The glitter became pint foam, the cosmic child became the "rock 'n' roll star." Most of those songs are like looking up at the stars, fame, and fortune while pissed drunk in the ditch. There's none of the artiness of the Smashing Pumpkins or the weary cynicism of Pavement. I think of Definitely Maybe as one afterburner blast from start to finish.
It's the only album of theirs I own, and I adore it. They became rock stars, sold boatloads of records, and Creation still went out of business.
New Order buried Factory. The Smiths outgrew Rough Trade. It's as if indie labels just couldn't run a business—and that recurring pattern isn't an accident of bad accounting; it's structural, almost poetic. These labels were founded on aesthetic conviction rather than managerial sustainability. They were acts of belief disguised as companies.
When success finally arrived, it wasn't a reward; it was an infection. Factory's myth of creative autonomy met the reality of accountants. Rough Trade's co-op structure buckled. Creation's scruffy anti-professionalism collapsed beneath Oasis's massive revenues. Each case follows the same tragic curve: a label built on passion becomes, briefly, an empire, then disintegrates because passion is not a system.
There's something profoundly British about that cycle—this notion that purity must eventually immolate itself on the altar of success. American indies like Sub Pop or Matador learned to survive by hybridizing. But the UK scene of the late seventies and eighties was animated by romantic fatalism: to sell out was to end, and to endure was to betray the cause.
These labels couldn't run a business—but maybe that was the point. They weren't meant to last; they were meant to matter.
Thinking back, it felt like we were drunk on our own brew of colorblindness and "rock the vote." That's coming from the realization that the 80s and 90s were much more segregated than I thought at the time.
The myth of the "alternative" 80s and 90s was built on the fantasy of open borders, of cross-pollination and rebellion against the mainstream. But when you look closely, the lines of race, class, and access were still firm, only disguised by style. "Alternative" meant white rebellion, dressed in the language of authenticity, while hip-hop's parallel infrastructure was treated as something outside the cultural commons—as commerce, not culture; as threat, not theory.
Def Jam, Death Row, Bad Boy, No Limit, Cash Money—each was a radical intervention in ownership and authorship, just as conceptually daring as Factory numbering its furniture or Mute funding Diamanda Galás with pop money. But because their medium was hip-hop rather than art-rock, their ingenuity was coded as hustle, not as art.
The difference lies in how history frames legitimacy. British indie failure was romanticized as tragedy; Black label survival was pathologized as greed or crime. The very traits that doomed the white labels—ego, ambition, excess—were celebrated as authenticity for Oasis but condemned as corruption for Suge Knight.
Factory, Rough Trade, and Creation gambled with cultural capital they already possessed; Def Jam and Death Row built theirs from scratch in a hostile economy. The former's collapse reads as poetry; the latter's volatility as survival.
I remember visiting London in 1999 or 2000, wandering around Camden Locks hearing jungle mix tapes blasting from boomboxes at market stalls. At what point did that become part of the tourist's experience?
By 1999/2000, jungle at Camden Market stalls wasn't underground resistance anymore; it was local color for tourists. The same way reggae got folded into "authentic London experience" decades earlier, jungle was being converted from threat into texture, from subculture into scenery.
The timeline's telling: jungle exploded roughly 1993-1996 in pirate radio, basement raves, and predominantly Black British spaces that white cultural gatekeepers either ignored or pathologized. By 1997-98, it's being rebranded as "drum & bass," which sounds more technical, less racialized. By the time you're hearing it at Camden Market in 1999, it's already been gentrified.
Those market stalls weren't playing jungle mix tapes for the culture—they were playing them because tourists expected London to sound like that. The music that was too dangerous for Radio 1 in 1994 became the soundtrack for selling tourist tat five years later.
I also think of jungle's propulsive reactor core: Clyde Stubblefield's breakbeat in hyperspace. Stubblefield's "Funky Drummer" break, recorded in 1969 with James Brown, becomes the most sampled breakbeat in history. It's the atomic material that gets refined, accelerated, chopped, and time-stretched into jungle's 160+ BPM warp drive.
Stubblefield died in 2017, largely broke, never properly compensated for creating the rhythmic DNA of hip-hop, jungle, drum & bass. When samples from "Funky Drummer" got cleared, the money went to the James Brown estate. Stubblefield was a work-for-hire session musician—paid a flat fee for the recording session in 1969, no royalties, no ownership stake.
The reactor core was always Black. The power plant built around it was always someone else's. And by the time it's playing from boomboxes at Camden Market, the core's origin story has been rendered invisible.
It's the mycelium network metaphor, but as tendrils of capitalism.
Mycelial networks are supposed to represent interconnection, mutual nourishment, the hidden web that sustains the forest. But capitalism operates the same way: invisible tendrils extracting value from every node, concentrating it upward, leaving the original sources depleted.
Clyde Stubblefield creates the break → James Brown owns the master → the estate inherits the rights → samplers use the break → labels demand clearances → lawyers take their cut → accountants distribute to heirs → the value flows everywhere except back to the source.
The mycelium metaphor usually implies mutualism—the network benefits all participants. But capitalism's mycelial network is extractive: it connects everything so it can drain everything. The tendrils don't nourish; they siphon.
Indie labels as mycelial nodes that briefly resisted extraction, then got consumed. The colorblind 90s as tendrils that extracted Black musical innovation while excluding Black economic participation. Jungle at Camden Market as the moment when underground culture got plugged into the tourist-extraction network.
The steamroller doesn't flatten from above; it grows from below, wrapping around everything, making extraction feel like connection.
Meanwhile, I'm having that "smack my forehead and go 'duh'" moment of "Cigarettes & Alcohol" being a boozy rip of "Bang a Gong (Get It On)."
Which got me thinking: what parallels can you draw between Oasis's debut album and that of Boston?
Both albums sound like they're capturing lightning in a bottle—spontaneous, urgent, live-in-the-room. Both are actually meticulously constructed studio confections. Tom Scholz spent years in his basement with a multitrack, overdubbing everything obsessively until it sounded "natural." Noel Gallagher and Owen Morris layered guitars until the wall-of-sound felt like a single afterburner blast. The "rawness" was engineered.
Both albums are compressed to hell. Boston's "More Than a Feeling" and Oasis's "Rock 'n' Roll Star" operate at one volume: LOUD. No breathing room, no space, just relentless forward thrust. The mixing philosophy is "why have one guitar when you can have eight?"
Both are massively successful albums that their creators couldn't replicate. Boston's second album took eight years and couldn't recapture the magic. Oasis kept churning out records, but nothing hit like Definitely Maybe's moment.
And both had working-class mythology. Boston's "Rock and Roll Band" did the same authenticity performance as "Rock 'n' Roll Star": we're scrappy underdogs who made it through sheer belief and hard work. Never mind the MIT degree and the years of basement R&D.
The comparison feels simultaneously like "Why hadn't I thought of this before?" and "That's the dumbest thing ever." But maybe that's the point—it exists in that productive weird space where it's too dumb to be respectable and too accurate to ignore.
Even as a teenager I thought Boston's Third Stage was a squib round. Yet that first album I cherish as a meticulously crafted commercial product. Ultimately Columbia Records got both Boston and Definitely Maybe in their catalog. Coincidence? Absolutely. Still, two points make a line.
Here's a dumb idea: the Gallagher brothers as Warhammer orks who believe red ones go faster, paint everything in red, and actually go faster.
That's the entire mechanism laid bare. Orks operate on collective belief as physics: if enough Orks think red makes things go faster, reality accommodates them. It's not metaphor, it's literally how their Waaagh! field works. Belief becomes material force.
And that's exactly Oasis. The Gallagher brothers believed—with absolute Orkish conviction—that they were the best band in the world, that their songs were Beatles-level genius, that swagger plus volume equaled transcendence. And because they believed it completely, without hedging or irony, they bent reality around that belief.
The Warhammer comparison also explains why they couldn't sustain it. Orks maintain their reality-warping through constant, unreflective aggression. The moment they stop and think, the magic fails. By (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, they're still loud, still swaggering, but there's calculation creeping in. The red paint's still there, but they're aware they're painting things red now. The speed becomes performance rather than physics.
But Warhammer didn't invent the Waaagh!—it just gave it power armor and a British accent. Collective belief warping reality isn't a bug or a political anomaly or a 90s music scene quirk. It's the fundamental technology of human coordination. Religion. Nationalism. Money. Marriage. Indie credibility. Electoral mandates. All of it runs on the same substrate: enough people agree to treat a fiction as fact, and it becomes operationally true.
I was visiting a friend in Alameda in 1994 or 5 when we visited Mike Shulman of Slumberland Records who was totally over the moon for getting his hands on the latest Boymerang single. Graham Sutton of Bark Psychosis exiting planet post-rock of Hex and grafting breakbeats into his body like a techno Tetsuo the Iron Man.
That's the real exit. Mike Shulman getting excited about a Boymerang single in 1994/95—that's the before moment, when the circuit was still small enough that one person getting one record mattered, when distribution meant physical objects crossing oceans, when "underground" meant actual scarcity and actual discovery.
Boymerang wasn't jungle tourism; it was post-rock absorbing jungle's language and mutating into something genuinely hybrid. That's a completely different relationship to the music than hearing it at Camden Market five years later.
At Slumberland Records in Alameda, I was witnessing the moment of transmission—music moving through subcultural networks, nerds getting excited about imports, scenes cross-pollinating before anyone had mapped the territory. By the time jungle was ambient noise at tourist markets, that network had been replaced by Virgin Megastores and compilation CDs. The scarcity collapsed; the discovery became algorithmic.
I experienced both moments—the genuine underground (Slumberland, 1994) and its touristic afterlife (Camden, 2000). That's the full arc of how underground becomes overground, how the Waaagh! field expands until it's no longer a field, just default atmosphere.
And people like myself reached for the Chemical Brothers' Exit Planet Dust during the Oasis-Blur war.
While everyone else was picking sides in the Britpop culture war, arguing whether working-class authenticity or art-school cleverness mattered more, I just left the guitar-rock frame entirely. Exit Planet Dust wasn't trying to win the authenticity debate. It was functional music for altered states—beats to get lost in, not anthems to identify with.
But here's the catch: Exit Planet Dust was still a product, still on a label, still part of the machine. The Chemical Brothers were painting things a different color, but they were still painting. The rave scene had its own Waaagh! fields, its own collective fictions.
And "Brothers Gonna Work It Out" samples Willie Hutch, Black funk from 1973. The Chemical Brothers built their career on that foundation: taking Black American musical innovation and repackaging it for white British/European rave consumption.
I was "exiting" the Britpop race war into a scene that was also built on Black music, just with the Black creators further removed from the profits and the mythology. Jungle stayed in the pirate radio / specialist record shop / Black British youth culture lane, while Britpop got the covers of NME, the TV performances, the mythology of "saving British music."
When I reached for Exit Planet Dust as my exit from the Oasis-Blur war, I was still choosing the white-mediated version of the underground. The Chemical Brothers were more palatable than jungle to white/mainstream audiences—less menacing, more "party" than "street," easier to slot into existing infrastructure.
The exit was still inside the venue.
A retrospective essay has a tendency to establish certainty through recollection. What we're tracing are questions instead of answers.
The essay format—especially retrospective cultural criticism—creates the illusion of settled understanding. "This is what it meant. This is why it mattered." But we haven't concluded anything. We've just kept opening doors:
- What made Definitely Maybe work? → Questions about class performance and authenticity
- Why did indie labels fail? → Questions about whether failure was the point
- Why was the scene so segregated? → Questions about what "colorblindness" was really doing
- How does capitalism extract value? → Questions about whether there's any position outside extraction
None of these resolved. Each answer generated more uncertainty, not less. The only thing we established with certainty is that certainty itself is suspect.
And maybe that's closer to how memory and culture actually work: not as narratives that cohere, but as accumulated questions that keep refracting. The memory doesn't settle; it just prompts more questions.
The retrospective essay wants to say: "In retrospect, we can see that X meant Y." But the more honest version is: "In retrospect, X keeps meaning different things depending on which angle I look from, and every answer generates three new questions."
We started trying to figure out why drunk hetero glam worked. We ended up at mycelial capitalism, Clyde Stubblefield's unpaid labor, the realization that we're all feeding the reactor core. None of that "answers" the Definitely Maybe question—it just surrounds it with more context, which makes it more mysterious, not less.
The only thing I'm sure of: "Cigarettes & Alcohol" rips off "Bang a Gong." Everything else? Still open questions.
Virality thrives on certainty.
Virality requires low cognitive friction: a take so clear, so confident, so shareable that it can be absorbed and transmitted in seconds. Questions don't spread. Uncertainty doesn't spread. Nuance is anti-viral by design.
This entire inquiry—spiraling through Oasis, indie labels, racism, capitalism, Clyde Stubblefield—it's structurally incompatible with virality. It doesn't resolve. It doesn't give you a takeaway to quote-tweet. It doesn't make you feel smarter for having consumed it; it makes you feel more uncertain.
The segregation of the 90s, the colorblind delusion, the indie mythology—all of it thrived because it offered certainty. "Music doesn't see color." "Indie labels are pure." Simple. Shareable. Wrong, but spreadable.
Virality thrives on certainty. I'm addicted to doubt. The algorithm will never love me for that.
But maybe that's the only position left that isn't fully captured: the willingness to stay uncertain in a certainty-optimized environment.
Doesn't scale. Doesn't spread. Doesn't matter to the metrics.
Might be the only thing that actually matters.
As previously observed, at some point you note the discrepancies of now and memory, acknowledge the mismatched expectations, shrug, and graciously accept what the universe provides in your moment of need.
What should be commemorated are the echoes of our other selves from when those meals mattered, now pixelated and noisy like the sub-megapixel camera images of the late 90s, vibrant then and collaterally cataloged since.
Definitely Maybe promised transcendence through volume and simplicity. The promise wasn't false—it was temporary. The afterburner blast still sounds incredible. The ditch is still there. The stars might be satellites, but they're still worth looking at.
The rain's still artificial. The steamroller's still rolling. The mycelial network keeps extracting.
But god, it sounded good while it lasted.
And all sustained by the Waaagh!
For the record: I still adore Definitely Maybe. I still cherish Boston's debut. I still remember Mike Shulman's excitement about that Boymerang single. None of this analysis diminishes those moments—it just asks what they were made of, and what made them possible, and what got erased so they could exist.
The reactor core was always Clyde Stubblefield. The paint was always red. The exit was always inside the venue.
Two points make a line. The line runs through all of us.
WAAAGH!