Filmmakers documenting Oasis’s Cardiff reunion discovered something remarkable: grown adults crying harder over two brothers playing 30-year-old songs than they do about, say, the collapse of major ice sheets or the prospect of uninhabitable coastlines. The emotional intensity caught even Noel Gallagher off guard, which is the equivalent of surprising a man who has spent three decades being surprised by nothing.
The gig was, by all accounts, “hugely emotional.” People wept. They screamed. They held their partners. This is the appropriate response to hearing “Wonderwall” live, apparently, in a way that scrolling through climate reports is not.
Why do two men arguing about who wrote better songs in 1995 generate more genuine human feeling than the literal end of the world? Because the reunion is temporary, finite, and requires only that you show up and remember being young. Climate change, by contrast, is permanent, infinite, and requires you to change your entire life and vote for people you don’t trust. One offers catharsis. The other offers only dread and a recycling bin.
The filmmakers seemed genuinely bewildered by this discovery, as if they’d expected the reunion to be a pleasant nostalgia hit rather than a emotional event that would rival actual human stakes. They were wrong. Oasis is back. The planet is still on fire. The filmmakers got their footage. Everyone wins except reality.