“How on Earth did this thing get so big, anyway? What were they feeding it?”

Hooks are overrated. Choruses are overrated. Oasis was overrated — in England at least. Tom Ewing on their 1998 number one “All Around the World,” destined to be most effective as a commercial jingle:

Back on “D’You Know What I Mean”, I said that Noel Gallagher seemed in love with the idea of long songs, but with no clear ideas of how to make them. That might go double here, except he does have one clear idea: do something like “Hey Jude”. “Hey Jude” still isn’t my favourite Beatles song, but it’s past time I publically admitted that I got that review wrong. I accused “Hey Jude” of exactly the same thing I saw in “All Around The World” – a bludgeoning, manipulative, Bigness for its own sake. But “Hey Jude” is, more than anything, a generous song – the Beatles invent the monster coda not just to make something epic but because it fits with the song’s story: OK Jude, we’ve tried telling you it’s alright, now we’re just going to have to show you.

Ewing’s referring to Noel Gallagher’s words as a “hug rock lyric” to which English bands are inexorably drawn. I thought of another song, but of recent vintage, also using a massed chorus for punctuation — a question mark in this case, not an exclamation point, and that has made all the difference.

PS: “All Around the World” is one of the few videos indebted to Tears For Fears’ “Sowing the Seeds of Love.”