Benj of Good Charlotte says he used to fight everyone who said he was not punk. This album is definitely not punk despite vestigial flourishes. It's been called "skate-punk." These songs are polished, as we might expect from a SONY album, not something from your local punk distributor.
"The Anthem" has received lots of airtime on rock radio stations. It can't miss with lyrics like "My high school it felt more to me/ Like a jail cell, a penitentiary." On the other hand, it's the same old "Amerikan Dream" stuff, unifying the lumpen and imperialist critique of the labor aristocracy which told Good Charlotte to "Go to college, a university/Get a real job." Here is Good Charlotte, a smash success to tell the labor aristocracy and traditional petty-bourgeoisie that a lumpen attitude can "make it" too, to which MIM says, "yeah, so what?" Yeah, imperialism here has so much looted surplus-value sloshing around it is possible to make enough money selling records to feed a Third World country.
People bragging about "making it" in the united $tates from their own creativity and hard work are a big problem in Amerikkka. As we said to an Ani DiFranco fan recently, "cultures built on stealing First Nations land and enslaving a continent are going to have some rich people! It has nothing to do with exceptional effort!
"This sort of view we call 'Anglo-Saxon individualist' cannot lead forward, because it implies the whole world's nations should kill each other off and enslave some of the remainder and then say they made it 'with their own effort.' That kind of thought cannot lead to peace and global harmony, so we do not promote it. The next time someone in Amerika says they "made it' with their 'own effort,' we call on our readers to remind them about the basic facts of history." So when Good Charlotte says in "Anthem" they don't want to be like everyone else, good if that means opposing mindless militarism the way the Good Charlotte CD cover does, but bad if it means just another way of worshipping the almighty dollar.
The positive point of this album is that it is four young guys booked on SONY, but they are not singing just pop love songs or navel-gazing grunge. Even doing that much seems to be about as much as we can expect from mainstream labels. "Riot Girl" offers a different fantasy for a girlfriend. MIM would give "Good Charlotte" credit for that and also "Emotionless" and "The Story of My Old Man" which is about men who leave their families and what happens as a result.
Perhaps too raw to be correct, "Girls & Boys" also has the benefit of not being too overly persynal. "The girls with the bodies like boys with the Ferraris." Good Charlotte is correct and what we like is the willingness to generalize in the whole song. To translate for some of our audience that does not know all the English idioms, Good Charlotte is saying that heterosexual men are interested in how a womyn looks, but supposedly heterosexual wimmin are interested in money and cars. Good Charlotte identifies good looks with power for wimmin: "boys will laugh at girls when they're not funny." Good Charlotte points to an example of something that we believe communism has to address in order to succeed: somehow we have to disentangle sex and power despite thousands of years of life and custom to the contrary.
As even some conservative talking heads on TV have noted, now everybody in the U$A is part of "political correctness," identity politics. Some have recently championed hillbilly identity politics. With Good Charlotte we have white trash identity politics. "I'd like to see them spend a week livin' life out on the street" the band says about the rich and famous. Much better are the lyrics in "Hold On" where Good Charlotte says "we all bleed the same way." People who get wrapped up in themselves and their unique identities are on a downward spiral and need to connect to the outer world--something that Good Charlotte seems to know.
At MIM we are so tired of identity politics. If an alien species arrives in a space-ship, it will be time for identity politics. We can have songs about the new creature on the block and it will be interesting. There is nothing new about white trash singing about the problems of the street--and by the way, not showing anything positive that arises from the street.
In "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" Good Charlotte calls for robbing the rich. In the same song are the only political jabs in the album--at Blacks O.J. Simpson and Marion Barry. What is good about this album is that it is not all navel-gazing or romance. It's a band in transit between pre-political and political life. We hope that Good Charlotte makes the leap; even though we won't bet on it.