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There’s a certain notoriety that comes with writing a song that immediately gets beginners kicked out of guitar stores upon strumming its opening tunes — Led Zeppelin managed it with “Stairway to Heaven,” Guns N’ Roses with “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” and Oasis, perhaps gathering even more enmity over the years than those two, smashed the guitar-store-banned genre with “Wonderwall.”

But you can’t blame new players for flocking to the song; apart from its simplicity, there’s something so ubiquitous, so confident behind its four chords. A sense that the song — and by extension the band — knows it’s about to take over the world. And take over the world they did.

30 years and one month ago, Oasis, led by the now-notorious Gallagher brothers, released “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory,” an album that would inevitably crown them as the kings of Britpop and etch them in the public consciousness for decades to come.

It’s not easy to quantify the effect this has had on the music scene. After all, Oasis themselves were constantly clowned for being a ’90s carbon copy of The Beatles — haircuts and all — something that “Morning Glory” certainly passed down, perhaps spawning more haphazardly hopeful garage band rock acts than any group since The Rolling Stones.

Instead, the most effective way to look at the album is to zoom in, not out. So this is the story of “Morning Glory,” that era-defining album, in two songs, starting with my personal favorite, “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”

There are a lot of things one can say about “Don’t Look Back in Anger.” Many of them aren’t good. The song opens with a practically one-to-one copy of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” and in fact borrows even more from him, with the lyrics “So I start a revolution from my bed / ’Cause you said the brains I had went to my head” being lifted by writer Noel Gallagher from an unheard self-recorded tape of a budding Lennon memoir. In all, it’s quite a presumptuous set of circumstances for a song to exist in, openly drawing comparisons to one of the deities of British music.

And yet, somehow, the track lives up to these expectations.

After the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017, “Don’t Look Back in Anger” became the unofficial anthem of Oasis’ home city’s recovery; even as a 21-year old song, it was deeply connected to the heart of Manchester. When Coldplay sang it with Ariana Grande at her resulting One Love Manchester show, it felt as real and as raw as anything.

Inexplicably, a hard-to-follow story about some “Sally” we don’t know swimming in lyrics that make little sense became the beating heart of a city for two weeks.

And that’s the real kicker with Oasis, and with “Morning Glory.” Not all of it makes sense, and not much of it is even particularly unique. Though the lyrics are filled with platitudes, it is such an effective combination of various decades of British pop that listening is almost like checking the pulse of the whole music scene.

Take “Champagne Supernova.” Not to be confused with Chappell Roan’s more recent red wine supersmash, “Champagne Supernova” inhabits a space unique in its ubiquity. For any given 30 seconds of the track, you could slap on a different artist name, and it would completely check out. The anthemic, screaming guitar solo could be Led Zeppelin, The Who could easily have recorded that quasi-psychedelic intro, and The Cure would have smashed the huge chorus.

But that’s the beauty of it — that it isn’t 15 different bands, it’s just one. One that managed to capture the essence of so many others in such an effective manner so as to catapult themselves into being the most culturally relevant act of their time.

Being a central part of the cultural zeitgeist endows more than just an assurance that your music is heard. It gives you a responsibility to the broader culture as a whole: to represent the spectrum of emotions of the people, and to channel the various influences of the time period. It’s not a conscious task, but that doesn’t make it any easier. And Oasis, for all their faults, for all their loud and obnoxious breakups, their tumbling in and out of the public consciousness, did this well.

They entered the mainstream with their debut album “Definitely Maybe,” but they became the mainstream with “(What’s the Story) Morning Glory.” And, as evidenced by the guitar store bans, Manchester performances, and worldwide reunion tour, they’ve never really left. All thanks to an album recorded over 15 days — an album that everyone involved knew would become the defining musical moment of a generation.

—Staff Writer Alessandro M. M. Drake can be reached at alessandro.drake@thecrimson.com.