Live Forever

There's a defiance in this song that feels almost biological — it doesn't argue for immortality so much as insist on it through the sheer force of wanting. The production on Definitely Maybe is rawer than what came after: guitars carry a slight aggression that later Oasis records smoothed away, and Liam's vocal here is at its most unself-conscious — young, slightly nasal, full of a conviction that hadn't yet hardened into self-parody. The melody rises and the chorus lands with the satisfying certainty of something that was always going to exist. Lyrically it's simple to the point of skeletal — little more than an insistence on persisting, on finding a way — but there's a purity in that simplicity that no sophistication could improve. Noel wrote it as a deliberate counter to what he perceived as Nirvana's death-wish romanticism, a refusal of that particular strain of nineties despair. It became the opening statement of Britpop proper — optimistic, working-class, steeped in Lennon-esque melody, drenched in the energy of a band that believed it had something to say and had found exactly the right words. You put this on when belief feels possible again, when something dormant stirs back into motion.