Even the term "oversampling" implies that sampling beyond Nyquist rate is excessive. I think you would agree that one is not being excessive. It is necessary to sample well beyond accepted "Nyquist rate" in order to reconstruct the signal.
Your signal contains all kinds of frequencies: Those you care about and those you don't want in your recording. You can't just sample at the Nyquist rate of the interesting frequency and expect all the other frequencies to vanish. They will mess with the frequencies you are actually interested in.
It's worth noting it's a tradeoff, even in pure processing: almost all non-linear transfer functions will create an infinite number of overtones, so it's impossible to avoid aliasing completely: you can only reduce them to some threshold which is acceptable to the application.