Good Charlotte: A Retrospective?

2001 was a pretty huge year for me. It was the year that Undergrads, one of my favourite TV shows, debuted and it was the year that the GameCube was released. Technically I also got my Game Boy Advance that year, but that’s not really relevant to the story.

Anyhow, the Undergrads theme song is “The Click” by Good Charlotte. It’s a pretty good intro theme, and not a bad song in its own right. I can’t verify the veracity of this assumption, but I’m pretty sure that I wasted no time in searching it out over LimeWire or BearShare or whatever spyware-infested P2P program I was getting my music from at that time.

I want to be a bit anal here though, and note that the word “click” is spelled wrong in this context.

One of the GameCube launch titles was NHL Hitz 2002, which I rented multiple times, because it’s frankly the only modern hockey game that I can enjoy. Among the myriad songs on the game’s soundtrack (none other that I can remember) was Good Charlotte’s “Festival Song.” I’m going to go on record right now and say that it might be the only actual good Good Charlotte song.

One song is one thing, but if I’ve heard two songs from the same band in my consumed media, then I know it’s time to dig a little deeper. Or something like that. Whatever. The point is that I got into Good Charlotte and those are the sources that I credit for introducing me to the band. I went out and bought their self-titled debut CD and listened to it obsessively for like a month or two.

They were good times. I had found yet another band that nobody new a damn thing about and that I could just enjoy for myself. Good Charlottle was never a great band, but I was young, and I thought that they were what punk was all about. Though in retrospect, I should have known better, as I was already listening to more “legitimate” entry-level punk stuff like The Ataris and The Vandals at that point. But for a while there, I had my bliss.

But then 2002 came around and The Young & The Hopeless happened. Good Charlotte hit the mainstream. Everybody knew who they were. My little brother bought that album. “Lifestyles of the Rich & the Famous” was played everywere. The video for “The Anthem” had the band dressed up like thugs. People who knew about music slandered them left and right. I called them sell-outs and renounced my fandom.

I abandoned them, but never got rid of my copy of Good Charlotte.

Years later -2008, to be specific- I decided to give the disc a spin again to see what it was all about. In the many years between, I’d expanded my musical tastes greatly, and learned so much about music and what I did and didn’t like. I remember distinctly being utterly disgusted that I had ever liked this band in the first place. It was almost physically painful for me to sit through the entirety of the album.

I can’t remember what posessed me to listen to it in the first place, but when it was over, I gingerly set the disc back into its jewel case and slid it back into its spot in the CD tower. Under G, as it was arranged alphabetically by band.

Not a month ago, I was sitting at home alone on a Saturday afternoon, the wife out at work, and mulled over what to listen to while I was playing Lightning Returns. Nothing loaded onto my iPhone struck me, so I went over to the CD towers and started browsing them. Eventually my sight landed on Good Charlotte, and I figured that it’d be good for a laugh. Get to rekindle my young self’s lesser taste in music. It also made for a fun coincidence.

I’ll admit, that after six more years, I didn’t hate the album nearly as much as I did back in 2008. No, I don’t think it’s good at all, but the things that really got under my skin back then didn’t phase me. They’re products of the time, of a group of kids trying to put together some music that meant something to them but was also marketable.

Good Charlotte is not a good CD. Now that I’ve come to terms with it, I’ll probably never listen to it again (but check back in 2020). And really, aside from having yourself a blast from the past, I don’t think it’s really a thing that anyone should be listening to. It’s just so fiercely 2001 that I can’t imagine that anyone but an awkward teenager in that that time could forge a connection to it.

I won’t go into detail about the things I think it does wrong, or the elements that really don’t belong in any time that is not the early 2000s, or why I think “Festival Song” stands out. I just wanted to tell a story, not write a review. It’s not a compelling (or even interesting) story, but it’s a story about how a small part of me has grown and changed over time. It’s a sequence of events that’s burned into my soul like so many others, even though they aren’t necessarily treasured memories. I felt like I’d share it.

That CD is still in its spot on the tower. I doubt it’ll ever leave.

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