Former Oasis lead guitarist, Britpop icon and habitual sibling attacker Noel Gallagher has offered an opinion on the ongoing London riots. An opinion you may be angry about.
“I can’t understand where their energy for these riots is coming from. We live in this age of violence – and I don’t care what other people say: Brutal TV and brutal videogames are a reason for this pointless violence as well. The people are immune to violence, they are used to it,” Gallagher recently told Yahoo News.
“It’s crazy! It’s just violence for the sake of violence. The people who are at these riots aren’t poor. These are kids with f***ing mobile phones and all sorts of shit. The police and government have to take drastic measures,” Gallagher continued.
Keep in mind that this is a man who attacked his brother Liam with a cricket bat during the recording of (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?
Before you all jump to the comments to widely criticize Gallagher, likely with childish insults about his music and hair, it should also be pointed out that these are the words of a man who is watching his home devour itself in real-time. A shop owned by his brother Liam was hit by looters, and Gallagher’s words sound more like the impassioned, helpless cries of a man who just wants the violence to end.
It’s easy to say that Gallagher is some old, out of touch rocker, but that would be both cruel and an inaccurate portrait of the situation we see here.
“These idiots destroy their own communities. In six weeks, when everything is forgotten, they will look stupid and realise that the houses are still destroyed, burned down or whatever. These people aren’t demanding anything, they have no goals. They just destroy their own s**t. How stupid can you be?” Gallagaher said, more accurately reflecting the frustrated message he’s attempting to get across.
Given that the gaming media has already attached itself to this like a pageview-hungry lamprey, I fully expect the result of this news cycle to be “Noel Gallagher: Silly Git,” but I’ve got my fingers crossed that you Escapist readers will know better. I’m not asking you to side with the man, but put yourself in his shoes, and think of the idiotic, baffling statements you’d toss out while fearing that your home might be torched or your window smashed in with a brick.
Then again, this isn’t the first time Gallagher has come out against games. In 2008 he linked our collective pastime to the rise in British youth stabbing one another. I really don’t have an explanation for that one.
