#this...what it is between us....never changes

i know that's a lot easier said than done! while it is very useful to deconstruct the concept of gender and come to the conclusion that there is no set of rules to follow in any direction - that's not a very good compass for your own identity. it's maddening, i know, it would be so easy if traits X, Y and Z = The Gender, but that way of thinking is a trap that'll only cause you even more grief in the long run. trying to define gender is like trying to define art. you can certainly try, but it's either gonna be vague or it's gonna be inaccurate.

another trap that's extremely easy to fall into is the idea that you are some kind of important representation in a story narrative, and it would be Bad Representation if you were a different gender, or worse yet, chose to be a different gender. but you are not a character in a tv show! you are a real person that's alive! you are not failing feminism if you'd rather be a man than a woman, or if you'd rather be a conventionally feminine woman rather than a subversive feminine man, or if you'd rather drop having a gender entirely instead of being gender-nonconforming cis/binary person, et cetera. there are so many people in this world, it doesn't rely on You Specifically being the hero of feminism that carries all of womanhood or gender subversion on your shoulders. there's plenty of gender diverse people to go around. there's not a shortage!!

And the world around them was changing: turn of the century, the music industry was changing. Their lives were changing. Partners come and gone (or going, mid-divorce as it seems 2000 caught them). Kids to consider now: the press wasn't just about a picture of Noel or Liam, it was now about protecting their kids from this mad cesspit of showbiz. Who else knew how to deal with it all? It really did seem like the only constant either brother had, the only other person going through it like that was each other. And you can hear that loneliness in a lot of the songs that made it onto that album.

It's not just the comedown from the high of life together. It also felt like the door softly closing. Everyone withdrawing into their own little bubbles. Maybe a sign of the times to come: MySpace would become the defacto music community in about 6 years' time, and then Facebook and YouTube stars, and all the same time, our physical spaces getting smaller, harder to maintain, disappearing. Where did it all go wrong indeed.

So I don't know. There's just a kind of loneliness I hear on that album, that put in the context of Y2K, the disintegration of the old music industry (Melody Maker ran its final issue in December 2000, Pitchfork blogged their first Oasis review in Nov 2000, uh...) magnified this sense of these two brothers being out of place, out of time in 2000: survivors of a sudden shift, an asteroid to the music industry that left few survivors. It's crazy to think that it came out of Noel rushing away to a studio in secret to lay down tracks all by himself, until Liam found out and came to join him, when they got on perfectly, all the studio staff found him to be very pleasant and agreeable and the album was properly in motion. This was all before Gem and Andy joined permanently and helped Oasis feel like a full band again rather than a Gallaghers partnership (+ Alan).

Even still. There's a sense of loneliness and a poignance on this album to me at least. A sense of urgency I hear in the music that sort of betrays just how much Noel and Liam needed each other at that moment in time.

Decided to go through my more recent fanart and post some of the ones I like even after they’ve sat for so long! They go from newest to oldest which I think the way I draw Tenna shows lol.