{"id":4276,"date":"2014-04-14T08:00:46","date_gmt":"2014-04-14T13:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=4276"},"modified":"2014-04-11T09:10:24","modified_gmt":"2014-04-11T14:10:24","slug":"good-charlotte-a-retrospective","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/?p=4276","title":{"rendered":"Good Charlotte: A Retrospective?"},"content":{"rendered":"

2001 was a pretty huge year for me. It was the year that Undergrads,<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

Anyhow, the Undergrads<\/em> theme song is “The Click” by Good Charlotte. It’s a pretty good intro theme, and not a\u00a0bad 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.<\/p>\n

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

One of the GameCube launch titles was NHL Hitz 2002<\/strong>, 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<\/em> Good Charlotte song.<\/p>\n

One song is one thing, but if I’ve heard two<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But then 2002 came around and The Young & The Hopeless <\/em>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”\u00a0had the band dressed up\u00a0like\u00a0thugs. People who knew about music slandered them left and right. I called them sell-outs and renounced my fandom.<\/p>\n

I abandoned them, but never got rid of my copy of Good Charlotte<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

I can’t remember what posessed me to\u00a0listen to\u00a0it 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>. 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<\/em>, and I figured that it’d be good for a laugh. Get to rekindle my young self’s\u00a0lesser taste in music. It also made for a fun coincidence.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Good Charlotte<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

I won’t go into detail about the things I think it does wrong,\u00a0or the elements that really don’t belong in any time that is not the early 2000s, or why I think “Festival Song” stands out.\u00a0I 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\u00a0a small part of me has grown and\u00a0changed 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.<\/p>\n

That CD is still in its spot on the tower. I doubt it’ll ever leave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading Good Charlotte: A Retrospective?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4276"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4278,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276\/revisions\/4278"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/torrentialequilibrium.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}