D'You Know What I Mean?

The song opens with helicopters. Actual helicopters, mixed in before a single note. Oasis put them there because they could, and that is the whole record in four seconds.

By 1997 there was no one left to tell them no. Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? had handed Noel Gallagher the world, and a man who can do anything tends to do too much of it. Be Here Now is the sound of too much money, too many drugs, and a band that had stopped hearing the word stop. “D’You Know What I Mean?” is where they laid out the plan.

After the helicopters comes the wall. Seven minutes of doubled, tripled, buried guitars, every track soaked in reverb and compression until the parts stop being separate parts. The production is so dense you could drown in it. Noel layered so many guitars that you cannot pull one out of the stack. Liam shouts the words across the top of it like a man calling over a stadium.

Coming in a mess, going out in style.

The lyrics don’t quite mean anything. They sound like they mean everything. That gap — between how important a line feels and how much it actually says — is the engine of the whole song, and Oasis knew it and pushed harder. Bigger, louder, longer, more. The thing should collapse under its own weight.

It doesn’t. Not quite. There is a hook buried under the bombardment, a melody that survives the noise, and when the chorus comes around it still lands. This is the band at their most bloated and somehow still the most themselves they ever were — arrogant, certain, completely sold on their own greatness.

History didn’t go easy on Be Here Now. It became the record people point to when they talk about Britpop overreaching, the moment the whole thing tipped over. The reputation is mostly fair.

The song still hits anyway. The excess is not a flaw it survives. The excess is the point. They built a thing too big to stand and then stood it up by sheer will, and you can hear the will in every overdub.

All my people right here, right now — d’you know what I mean?

They started with the sound of helicopters arriving. Seven minutes later you understand they were never going to land quietly.