Oasis
Stop Crying Your Heart Out

'Hold on...hold on...
don’t be scared:
you’ll never change what’s been and gone.

May your smile shine on...
Don’t be scared:
your destiny may keep you warm.

‘Cause all of the stars
are fading away:
just try not to worry,
you’ll see them some day.
Take what you need
and be on your way
and stop crying your heart out'.

Summer 20 years ago:

before releasing 'Heathen Chemistry' at the end of June, after the phenomenal video of 'The Hindu Times', Oasis published their last masterpiece of a song: 'Stop Crying Your Heart Out'.

A slow and encouraging track for a friend who wasn't doing well, which Noel Gallagher, the author of the song, called in the music magazine 'Tutto' 'the new “Wonderwall”' and indeed, even if it wasn't so, we were close: the catchiness and the pleasant repetitiveness of the track that recalled in the chorus 'Slide Away' from the first album ('Definitely Maybe'); and in the summer heat and solitude, this track worked well.

And even the video wasn't bad.

In those first days of June, the single was released in Italy, and all summer long, this slow Oasis 'ballad' accompanied us to the beach: even though there was competition (I think of Pink with ‘Let’s Get the Party Started’ and ‘Don’t Let Me Get Me,’ Alizée ‘Moi… Lolita,’ Noir Désir with ‘Le vent nous portera’ and many others), this track captured the heart of many of us young Italians.

Me, recovering from a rather disappointing school year from a human point of view (in the repeated fourth year, at the hospitality school) and with a particular kind of solitude, hard to explain, who just bought 'Heathen Chemistry' did not think that 'Stop' would mark two months later the ‘romantic’ (exciting) outings with a dear cousin of the same age in Calabria and her friends.

Me, an assiduous viewer of MTV (when there was the transition from 'Rete A' to 'Tmc2' a year before), living life concurrently with everything that was on television, especially music: a real life often quite poor, with one tuned to TV shows, especially music ones, instead exciting.

'‘Cause all of the stars
are fading away...'

'Because all the stars are fading away...':

a school year, even outside school, not very exciting awakened with outings with my beautiful cousin, on the seafront of the village, dissolving in those days my sense of loneliness and 'inferiority' in front of a world where I wanted to be better (interesting...'cool').

And the stars faded away in the glittering world of TV (the veline for example), but also in the years of work and university, girls or people with whom I spent lessons and are now far away.

'Stop Crying Your Heart Out' is a track that reminds me of the aftermath of a disappointing period, but fascinating over time, and with the end of the song also the end of a surprising summer and the hope of a personally better future. Which wasn't (hadn't been).

The last Oasis song to truly be a classic 'à la “Wonderwall”' from high school times, where ‘The Importance Of Being Idle’ three years later, with all its beauty, in my opinion, cannot figure as a 'universal' track.

It has something that does not make it so.