Good Charlotte Obsession

Home

Benji
Billy
Joel
Paul
Concert Review
Pics Page
Pics Page 2
NewsRing
GC audios
GC videos
DISCOGRAPHY
Biography
Articles
Tour Dates
Links
The Banner Page
Lyrics
My Review 4 da CD
GC on TRL
GC fan life
Cashdogg
Behind the Scenes
GC uses
GC contests
GCs FAVS
All about me!!!!
Thanks!
Contact Me!
Your Comments
My buds views
Why I love GC
Quiz
Guestbook!
Articles

Ok its going to take a while to type up all these articles...but it will be done!!! Submit all articles you find to goodcharlotterox0@lycos.com thanx!

Good Charlotte Find Where There Is Love, There Is Hate
Band doesn't worry about its credibility
By Jon Wiederhorn, with additional reporting by Dave Leclaire
 
The past two years have been a turbo-charged merry-go-round for Maryland punk-pop group Good Charlotte.
 
The band's debut single, "Little Things," from is eponymous 2000 album, drove the group to the top of the "TRL" heap, and a Warped tour and outing with Blink-182 helped spread the Good vibes far and wide. The group's new single, "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous," is currently heating up airwaves, and a video for the song, which features cameos by 'NSYNC's Chris Kirkpatrick, Tenacious D sideman Kyle Gass and former Minutemen and Firehose member Mike Watt, is getting lots of love as well.
 
But as Good Charlotte have discovered, where there is love, there is also hate.
 
"There are all these people that hate us and don't get what we're doing," singer and guitarist Benji said. "They think that we're only going to be here for this one record. And the could be right. I can't tell the future."
 
The way Good Charlotte have been critically assailed and venomously insulted inspired them to call their new album The Young and the Hopeless.
 
"We've been a band for eight years," Vocalist Joel explained. "But since we've gotten popular, we feel like we've been carefully watched and scrutinized for things that we don't really think about because we just do what we want to do. We make our own rules and live the way we want to live."
 
Added Benji: "The way we live, there's gonna be things people really love about us. Like we're really into charities. But there's also gonna be things people hate and make them go, 'Well man, I thought they were good guys.' We're just people and we think about our actions and consequences, but at the same time, I don't think you should over-analyze things. We don't think about credibility." The new album should give everyone less to hate. Unlike Good Charlotte, which swam with glossy melodies and pristine production, The Young and the Hopeless is more raw and immediate. It's not hardcore, but it's punchy and propulsive, capturing the band's good time, hard rockin' onstage vibe more accurately than before.
 
Good Charlotte credit producer Eric Valentine (Queens of the Stone Age, Smash Mouth, Third Eye Blind) for the more dynamic sound on The Young and the Hopeless. To pinpoint their aesthetic, Valentine didn't just meet with them, he entered their world.
 
"He came down to D.C. and went around to all the pubs that we hang out at," Benji said. "He went to the tattoo shop that we're always at. Basically, he wanted to see where we grew up, what we do when we're home, who we hang out with and just get our vibe. We owe him a lot because he really understood what we wanted to do so we were definitely on the same page."
 
Of all the songs on the record, "My Bloody Valentine" is the one that most accurately captures the band's current mind frame, Benji said. In addition to aggressively melding melody and volume, the lyrics take Good Charlotte a step beyond their usual wordplay.
 
"The song is more of a poem" Benji said. "It's a story about a love triangle, but it's got a real Edgar Allan Poe vibe to it. Basically there's a guy that knows a girl and wants to be with her so he kills her boyfriend. It's definitely different than anything we've ever done and that's one reason we like it so much. It's something we couldn't have written four years ago."
 
 
This report is from MTV News
 
Girls laughed.Dudes threw snowballs. Now it's their turn.
For Joel and Benji, twin brothers who, along with longtime friends Billy and Paul, formed Good Charlotte when they were seventeen, high school was hell -- "more like a jail cell, or a penitentiary," as they put it in one song. "There was this one girl I really liked," says Joel. "One day these guys were pelting me with snowballs. It was terrible because she was really encouraging them." Most of the band's lyrics are inspired by tales of adolescent anguish like these -- like the time when some kids called their house pretending to be record executives offering a lucrative deal, or when they were made fun of for wearing ratty hand-me-downs, or when their father suddenly walked out, leaving the family in the lurch and prompting the twins to stop using his last name.

For a band whose lyrics are sometimes so downhearted, Good Charlotte make music that is surprisingly pop-friendly, chock-full of punky grooves and singalong choruses. The high school horror story "Little Things" scored them a modern-rock hit two years ago, and the video for the equally catchy "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous," the first single from the forthcoming album The Young and the Hopeless, features 'NSync's Chris Kirkpatrick and Kyle Gass of Tenacious D. And while the band traveled with the Warped Tour this summer, Joel and Benji hosted their MTV series, All Things Rock, from the road. "It's like a summer of hanging out with the bands you grew up listening to -- like NOFX, Rancid, MxPx," says Joel. "Now I'm friends with [NOFX singer] Fat Mike!"

Despite their youth, Good Charlotte weren't exactly an overnight success. "There were so many shitty shows," says Benji. "There was this one show we played, and the bar owner actually tried to make us pay him." But Benji and Joel are grateful for their struggles -- both as a band and as a family -- and they haven't forgotten the impact they can have on kids going through the same kind of stuff. "One kid come up to me and told me that her mom died," says Benji. "She played the hidden track on our last record, 'Thank You Mom,' at her funeral. I was like, whoa."

CHRISTIAN HOARD
(September 27, 2002)

Identical punk twins from Maryland try a little too hard "we got nothin' to prove," good Charlotte declare on the finale of The Young and the Hopeless, the Maryland punk-pop quartet's second album. But Benji and Joel, the identical twins who co-founded Good Charlotte as teenagers, sometimes sound too desperate to establish their punker-than-thou credentials. The us-against-them bravado of "The Anthem," "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and "The Young and the Hopeless" (which ridicules "critics and trust-fund kids") is strained. Good Charlotte are much more persuasive when they let their vulnerability crack through the surface of these slightly overbaked songs, in which elaborate production touches (strings, timpani-like drum flourishes) mask the band's three-chord limitations. "My Old Man" and "Emotionaless" wrestle with complex feelings in the wake of a father's departure, but relief arrives as hormones pogo in "Riot Girl." When Joel yelps, "Christina, wouldn't wanna meet her," it's way more punk rock than sniping at rich kids. *THAT BUTT HOLE!!!!*


 
 
 

Please submit more articles!!