My Little Oasis: Britpop Is Magic

It seemed like a clear and breezy morning in Ponyville, with pegasii flying far above the chattering earth ponies and unicorns that happily started going about their day’s events. Of course, that fact was completely meaningless to the ponies hundreds of miles away over in New Manechester, who woke up to another grimy and overcast morning that pitter-pattered thick rain upon their backs mixed in with the omnipresent smell, not anywhere near as bad as the wet leaves by comparison, of magically-laced lollipops and portable salt licks. While Manechester proper was over in Equestria, not too far from Ponyville, under the peaceful and wise rule of Princesses Celestia and Luna, New Manechester was a haphazardly constructed city complex around the edge of the Land of the Griffons for a motley mix of ponies, buffalo, dragons, and other non-griffon citizens.

Noel Cloudburst sauntered down an alleyway, eyes hopping from broken candy package to broken candy package littered besides his lightly-worn hooves. He pulled his trademark black jacket, covered in pockets crammed with various knickknacks from batches of twine to half-empty boxes of strawberry mints to the occasional loosey and more, close to his dark grey body and even darker mane as he looked straight up at immense gothic spires and columns. He stepped a bit to the left as his eyes slid to the ‘New Manechester School for Young Colts’ carving in the thick granite. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out. How many blasted days is it going to rain?

The only ponies that would have heard him, the throng of skinny mares with well-worn faces and neatly trimmed manes over to his right, would hardly have cared. They marched around in a big oval with the same emotionless regularity as hands on a clock, raising their black and blue printed signs every half-minute or so while crying out for their cause. As Noel leaned up against the building for a second, pushing his small, round black eyeglasses back against his handsome face, and he took in the protest chants.

“No cuts,” commented a tall, nearly bald earth pony with a thick, round nose like a light-bulb. “Justice for the city workers! Justice for the foals!” He held up his sign reading ‘Fund the Foals – Fund our Future’ a bit higher as he eyed a group of unfamiliar looking ponies coming up the street. “Ponies living in griffon lands also paid for their royal wedding between Dusk Wind and Summer Blast, bit after bit going to the griffon royalty with our taxes, yet we don’t have enough for inner city textbooks? Outrageous!”

“Listen to us Princess Dusk Wind!” hollered out a short, stubby unicorn with a very masculine face but the shapely body of a young female prostitute, or so Noel thought. The protester rubbed his sign, almost twice as big as his own body, against his scruffy brown moptop. “We are the change— we believe in ourselves! We believe in our students!”

"No austerity," a tiny looking unicorn with a bright white body piped up every moment or so. "No cuts! No austerity!"

A steady stream of ponies crossed by the protest, heading up the Main Street that graced the school for disadvantaged colts, and around half of them seemed to view the whole thing as yet another piece of scenery— much like the shrubberies around the Boardwalk Club. A good fifth of them or so, though, gave some kind of high-sign expressing support before making their way to the various shops up ahead. The teachers smiled or at least nodded at every one of them.

Noel felt pretty sure that the protesters wouldn’t accomplish much of anything, thinking that the griffon's new Princess Wind could hardly be more than a figurehead. Still, he had some hope, or at least hope kept his motor running. He kept his brains turned on, though, so he thanked goodness that the protesting teachers at least kept the fancy-language sounding left-wing jargon— ‘proletariat’, ‘assimilation’, ‘establishmentarianism’, etc— and anti-royal rhetoric off their signs. The teachers had some sense to Noel, at least in comparison to the lollipop company workers just down the street who had acted as if they’d burn both Griffon Palace (for the government austerity against non-griffons) and Canterlot Castle (for Equestrians failing to care enough about ponies outside the country) to the ground if they could, having gotten too addicted to the magically-laced versions of sickly-sweet candies

At any rate, the whole thing rustled Noel’s subconscious, and it made him magically lift up a loosey from his higher-most pocket to get back to his bearings. He fumbled about his pockets to find another lollipop to complement the lemon flavor, resolving to get a whole white package—  complete with the small black Griffon Surgeon General's addictiveness warning—  one of these days. I still have another thirty minutes until I’m due at the Boardwalk, don’t I? It seemed like the easiest job in the whole world— listening to music while doing some simple A/V work from clicking some amp on or sliding some fader up or something else— and kept him off the government dole (social weflare benefits that hardly paid for much anyways), which lessened his younger brother’s ribbing somewhat.

“Noel?” said a familiar voice over behind Noel’s shoulder.

“Spoony? Oh, my— bloody— it’s— wow! It’s really you!” Noel took his glasses off and swung his eyes up and down the tall, skinny white unicorn in front of him. The other unicorn shook his shaggy green male and smiled from cheek to cheek.

“It’s been too bloody long, Noel,” he said, and the unicorns hugged without shame. Spoony leaned back, glancing about Noel’s dark grey body and all of the various spots of muddy rain over him. “And you should get the hay inside.”

“You still playing with that sniveling little brat?” Noel asked, following Spoony’s lead away from the school along the plain concrete road over to the dilapidated brick shops.

Spoony laughed, slapping his hooves against his plain light blue t-shirt. “That’s exactly why I was looking for you.”

“Oh, oh, oh!” Noel called out, trying not to burst out laughing himself. He stepped ahead of Spoony, comically posing himself below the huge neon sign marked ‘The Boardwalk – New Manechester’s Finest Bar – Live Music All Day / Every Day’ with his legs swung up and his head turned over, same positioning as Fleur De Lis in the last issue of Celebrity Cutie Marks. “Does my little brother really think I’ll have anything to do with his crap indie rock band?”

Spoony opened the door as Noel leaned back, brushing up against the huge green shrubberies decorating the otherwise grimy looking red and brown brick exterior, and they both stepped inside. “Actually,” Spoony said, leading Noel along a side corridor to the bar’s equipment room, “he wants you as a songwriter.”

“Songwriter,” Noel said, freezing in his tracks. He glanced about the deeply familiar black seats and bright blue and white lights across the bar, a filly in a loose green striped dress leaning up against a cannery worker nursing a shot. “Yeah, like he’d really bloody say that…” The memory of Liam smacking a box of cereal upside Noel’s head when he had shown off one of his song ideas on the kitchen table flashed through Noel’s mind. What a pissy, violent wanker...

“Noel,” Spoony said, placing his body right in front of Noel’s and locking eyes with him. “Liam wants you in the band.”

Noel said nothing, just slipping out of Spoony’s hooves and going into middle of the bar. He leaned up against the counter and coughed. The filly over to his far left kept on with her game. Noel looked over, and he saw that she had those ‘three slurps of a salt lick, thirty minutes sweet-talking, and thirteen minutes upstairs’ eyes that Noel had seen so many times before.

Noel’s ears perked as DJ Pon-3’s latest hit, the electroclash sensation “I Hate Myself And I Want To Die (Pass the Drugs As We Dance)” that went straight to number one and lead The Canterlot Times to run a story on the so-called "death of rock n' roll", surged through the nightclub in which he sat. Noel hated her. He also sort of loved her. Noel closed his eyes completely for a second and let his body slide slightly to the beat as Spoony walked up behind him. Noel hated DJ Pon-3 (and other pony musicians that griffon's liked for whatever reason) for using her musical powers for the service of just nihilism, or so he thought of it.

“Noel?” Spoony asked.

Noel heard a glass sliding up in front of him. Since he had to work, of course, his friend Spring Step had merely given him some club sodar rather than a delicious, malicious, and not so nutritious salt lick container. That didn’t bother him.

The nasty electronic beats that surrounded his body bothered him. The teenage aged mare from another, upper class city and the older, working-class stallion that she milked for attention and bits bothered him. The cheap quality of the lollipop loosies that filled up his veins with too-short bursts of energy so that he had the energy to get through the day bothered him. The fact that he seemed to be living in a new age with a new Princess, a new royal wedding, a new Prime Minister yet the music sounded like endlessly-recycled garbage bothered him the most. The griffons seemed to pollute non-griffon radio stations with the most inane cultural material.

“It all feels… wrong,” Noel murmured. He kicked against the worn plastic underside of his seat. “So wrong.”

“Noel, what is it?”

I’ve reached that point. I’ve ran right past it. I should have found some mare, some beacon of kindness that could just be like… I don’t know. Some kind of ‘wonder-wall’ that could just… wrap around me… some girl that could take my depression away. Noel opened his eyes. It feels wrong. It feels incomplete. I’m wrong. Liam’s wrong. The whole bloody country is bloody going wrong. Somepony should turn it around. Somepony should stand up to the stuck up Griffon Members of Parliament and rally the non-griffons around something to advance for economic and social equality, especially some song.

“Noel!” Spoony hollered, and he smacked the other unicorn’s back, brushing up Noel’s jacket against his broad shoulders.

“Yeah?” Noel said, turning around to face his friend with a very blank expression on his face.

“Quit the existential horseapples, Noel! Get in the bloody door right bloody now and play some rock and roll with us, ya plothole!” Spoony clutched Noel’s sides and pointed him over to the already open door where various tuning-up noises filtered out.

“Aw, hell yeah,” Noel replied, and he marched in right behind Spoony. Before anyone even had time to breathe or look around, Noel had pulled out a neatly folded piece of lined paper— left over from his schoolfoal days at the Manechester place for colts— marked "Final Draft of 'Live Forever' & 'Wonderwall’". And he held it up like a golden tablet from the gods.

Liam, holding an incredibly cheap bass with silly, leopard-like stripes painted along the side, merely grinned back. Spoony shut the door behind them, his hooves brushing up against a dusty stack of amplifiers. Noel reached for a nearby acoustic guitar atop a rag covered corner of XLR cables, prepared to sing through the first tune, and he could hardly recall the moment feeling so... right.

To Be Continued...