We Got Former Alt Press and Revolver Writers to Review Good Charlotte Albums

· Vice

Music journalism has not exactly been thriving these last few years. Long gone are the days of fully staffed teams dedicated to covering new music, interviewing people in person, or publishing in-depth profiles containing foreign concepts such as “observational detail” and “cultural context.” Now is the era of short-form video content in which the greatest artistic minds of our generation get to eat chicken or deliver a solitary opinion agreed upon with a PR team in advance. The digital-media boom that defined the first two decades of the 21st century lost the war to social-media platforms, which killed the ecosystem by suppressing outgoing links, consolidating ad revenue, and other awful phrases that aren’t in the Bible.

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Basically: the lines that were never designed to go up stopped going up, and investors pulled the plug. Kind of like the housing market in 2007, but for people with opinions on whether the demo of “REALiTi” by Grimes is better than the finished album version (it is). Still, there were a few publications trying to hold it down in the wake of the bubble bursting.

Unfortunately, most of them were demolished in one fell swoop last week. 

On August 5, it was announced that BrooklynVegan, Alternative Press, Revolver, and Goldmine were all gutted by their parent company Veeps, which was founded by Good Charlotte’s Benji and Joel Madden and is now majority owned by Live Nation. Nearly all staff at each publication were laid off. All the sites remain active for now, but it’s unclear what will happen to them once the backlog of material written by people runs out. 

As a reminder of what’s been lost, general rock mag Revolver swam against the tide by running in-depth cover stories on oddball artists (instead of, you know, writing about Linkin Park every week); record collectors’ bible Goldmine just celebrated its 50th anniversary; and Alternative Press, a bastion of underground music coverage since the 1980s, had arguably one of the heaviest hands in solidifying Good Charlotte’s reputation in the first place.

Meanwhile, BrooklynVegan has stood as an indispensable authority on DIY punk, hardcore, emo, and grassroots indie music since it was founded as a food blog in 2004, weathering the tides of trend-based reporting and barely disguised sponcon with good, considered writing and a genuine care for the artists it was covering. It had a tangible relationship to music beyond the corporate market that translated into getting new ears on artists and bodies in the room for shows and whatever else. The fact that it was able to retain that spirit for as long as it lasted is a testament to the staff. Do you know how hard it is to get Patrick Kindlon of Drug Church to say something complimentary about a media platform? 

Anyway, out of sheer curiosity, we got in touch with ex-staff and freelancers for some of the above publications, and asked them to reappraise Good Charlotte’s discography.

Good Charlotte (2000)

Stick to the hits (all one of them), and Good Charlotte provides a passable portrait of pop punk’s awkward tween years. Move beyond that and you get the answer to an age-old question: What if we got drunk and shoddily satirized early Weezer?

No surprise, the result is tedious. “Little Things”, thanks to its radio time, gives the album an upfront boost of nostalgia. It’s an easy handhold for anyone born before 1995, but it falls out quickly and leaves only a splattering of generic, repetitive riffs. As usual, I was ready to move on by the first chorus. That feeling followed me through most of the ensuing tracks.

“An edgy kid’s diary soaked in groundwater”

This record, despite its general cohesion, suffers from lack of intention. As a writer, I’m trained to look for rising action and subsequent payoff. It delivers neither—not in tempo, tone, or stylistic deviations. Hell, even a jarring transition might have helped to spice it up. The only flicker of intrigue I found came by way of the funky twang in “Waldorfworldwide”. Inexplicably, it goes dormant afterward, save for the faintest glimpse in “Complicated”. Not exactly a harrowing loss, but I could’ve used something other than YouTube ads to break up the monotony.

Giving credit where it’s due, Good Charlotte certainly made their debut with an identity in mind. It’s at home in a 2000s skatepark, riddled with teenage angst and hooky harmonies that find some solid ground in “East Coast Anthem” and “I Heard You”. Problem is, that identity’s forever tethered to high school by “beginner-friendly” chord progressions and heavy-handed lyrics. The older I get, the cringier it registers.

Looking back, I suspect early accolades were more reflective of short-lived trends than quality of craft. More recent praise seems to mistake posturing for true punk ethos, embracing the mediocrity as raw, unrestrained. You don’t have to look beyond last week’s headlines to suss out the pretense. All in all, it’s a bummer of a time capsule—little more than an edgy kid’s diary soaked in groundwater.

—MALA MORTENSA
AP

The Young and the Hopeless (2002)

Good Charlotte’s The Young and the Hopeless is remembered as the album that made them rich and famous, but the story behind their sophomore success has always been bigger than the Madden brothers. They almost never got the chance to make it, with frontman Joel Madden sharing in Rock Sound, “We came this close to being dropped after the first album didn’t sell like the label expected,” crediting their fans with convincing Sony to give them another shot.

Sonically, it’s a polished, bubblegum interpretation of the pop-punk and emo boom of the early 2000s, rarely reaching beyond the scene it borrowed from, even as its defining singles—“Lifestyles Of The Rich & The Famous” and “The Anthem”—leaned on veteran collaborators John Feldmann (Goldfinger) and Tim Armstrong (Rancid). Producer Eric Valentine heard something “a little deeper” in their songwriting than their pop-punk peers were creating, but 24 years later, you need science’s most powerful microscope to find it. Even “Hold On,” the album’s emotional attempt at reaching kids struggling with hopelessness, packages adolescent despair into the same easily digestible formula that made Good Charlotte so commercially viable. 

The real magic connected to this album happened outside of the studio. It wasn’t their breakout singles or rockstar co-writers alone that made this album, and consequently, twins Benji and Joel Madden, rich and famous. It was the independent journalists who listened to and reviewed the album, the fanzines spotlighting their earworm singles despite little distinguishing them sonically from much of the album, college and alternative radio stations putting their tracks into rotation, MTV broadcasting their videos, and a thriving grassroots scene hungry for the next breakout band during a period of oversaturation. Good Charlotte didn’t become a household name on their own; an entire independent ecosystem turned them into one.

“Been-there-done-that clichés and nauseating vocals”

The irony, though, was hiding in plain sight: “Lifestyles of the rich and the famous / We’ll take the clothes, cash, cars, and homes, just stop complainin’.” Beneath the been-there-done-that clichés and nauseating vocals, the Maddens were unwittingly forecasting the alternative world that they aimed to conquer.

More than two decades later, the independent ethos and scene that helped build Good Charlotte is nearly extinct. The brothers resemble businessmen more than rockstars, gobbling up and monopolizing independent music websites and magazines and consolidating them into a promotional engine for the artists they manage and the tours they headline across the same covers and pages that once helped them.

Perhaps nothing ages more ironically than their sneer toward Rolling Stone: “All they do is piss and moan / Inside the Rolling Stone / Talkin’ about how hard life can be,” just before landing on their cover in 2003.

For better or for worse, The Young and the Hopeless has outlived the scene that made it. “The Anthem” and “Lifestyles Of The Rich & The Famous” remain alternative radio staples, anthems of Emo Nites across the country, surviving alongside the bands and songs that built the community Good Charlotte seem so hell-bent on controlling. Twenty-four years later, nostalgia has proven far more enduring than the album itself ever deserved to be. 

—PAIGE OWENS
AP

Good Morning Revival (2007)

To stamp a word like “revival” on the cover of an album as sonically strait-laced as Good Charlotte’s fourth LP could amount to false advertising. A revival was something they craved, but not something they achieved. Good Morning Revival hit shelves in 2007, at a time where pop-punk’s stocks were falling, half a decade had passed since their peak with The Young and the Hopeless, and evolution felt mandatory as a means of staying relevant.

Ironically, Good Morning Revival is not particularly evolved. Firmly untangling themselves from pop-punk, Good Charlotte instead slipped into rock’s middle lane with the odd flurry of synth or piano, but their new elements are rarely pushed far enough to leave a mark. The treacly piano trills only serve to make the gushy romantic balladry of “Where Would We Be Now” even more sickly, for example, and closer “March On” is little more than the wateriest kind of damp squib. 

Equally unevolved are Joel Madden’s lyrics, which often feel more like adolescent scribblings than the considered contemplations of a man in his late twenties. “Misery” mashes together hollow verses about “All these shallow people / Telling their lies” with a detached yet equally whiny chorus—“Misery’s my company / Misery is looking for me.” While nobody was looking to them, nor peers like Blink-182 or Sum 41 for a deep intellectual experience, at least their peers were sincere.

“Sickly”

Other times, Madden conveys only sketches of the deeper feelings he is trying to transmute. There’s a meaningful sentiment to “Victims of Love” about the repeated misfortunes of searching for love in the wrong places, but it turns to cliché-ridden pulp in his hands (“You play with fire / It’s going to burn you.”) 

Elsewhere, Good Morning Revival lurches towards near parody. The chorus of “All Black” is ridiculous enough to be spun into an SNL skit mocking emo culture—“Take a look at my life, all black / Take a look at my clothes, all black… like the seats in my Cadillac.” Speaking of name checking, the robotic “Keep Your Hands Off My Girl” spews designer brand after designer brand to wince-worthy effect, including an insertion of DCMA, the Maddens’ own clothing brand. It’s tempting to wonder if it’s satire. It is not. 

Still, there are some bangers. “The River” is bright and uplifting enough to retain a solid place in most fans’ memories, while the infectious “Dance Floor Anthem (I Don’t Wanna Be In Love)” deploys a glittery electro-rock edge far more successfully than anywhere else on the record. Its split-perspective narrative of two disaffected parties in a break-up is not just more interesting, but actually possesses some substance. 

It’s also a source of irritation: if they could create something appealing there, why does that not extend to the rest of the record? It leaves Good Morning Revival as an album to be cherry-picked through at best. The rest can be left in 2007. 

—EMMA WILKES
AP / REVOLVER

Generation RX (2018)

We all remember the day when American rock band Good Charlotte released their seventh album Generation Rx. Barack Obama flew down on angel wings, Kurt Cobain hollered down from heaven “hey man, nice tunes,” and Jesus finally returned after 2000 years of ghosting us. “This was the call I’d been waiting for,” they said (it turned out Jesus was nonbinary). Just kidding. No one’s fucking heard this album. The album didn’t receive much press because this was before the Madden brothers had bought out much of the alternative music media, turning it into a self-congratulatory ecosystem that routinely put them on the covers.

Generation Rx is so powerful, you could use it in a correctional facility to go A Clockwork Orange-style on the last holdouts of mall-punk millennials who never stopped wearing their WWE shirts. 

This is AI music before AI. I know that’s a trite complaint now, but it really is: the sum total of every worst trait of emo and pop-punk, distilled down to its barest shitness—on-the-nose and in-the-nose (just listen to that nasal whine), assembled entirely from clichés. The very first line is literally, “Where did all this pain come from?”

“There is no soul, feeling, intuition, experience, or any indication of a human being here”

Other than the drums and guitars being a hair off every beat, you can predict every single move like playing someone who opens a game of chess by immediately exposing their king. At every level, the album strains for profundity. It is an attempt at real feeling that is, in fact, just trapped wind. It’s also often nonsensical: “Now I’m working on my insides / ‘cause outside there’s no reasoning” Madden sings on “Self-Help” (???)

This is a bold claim, but out of Good Charlotte’s entire oeuvre, Generation Rx is the most pitiful: the musical equivalent of a kid telling you he’s going to run away, making it to the end of the block, then turning around five minutes later. There is no soul, feeling, intuition, experience, or any indication of a human being here. Cut a venture capitalist open and he bleeds corn syrup.

—POO MADDEN (NO RELATION)
REVOLVER

Motel Du Cap (2025)

Good Charlotte’s latest album, 2025’s Motel Du Cap, celebrates a new stage of life for the Madden Bros. It’s the first record they wrote after purchasing the storied music publications Revolver, Alternative Press, and BrooklynVegan, which is an impressive accomplishment for two people with the reading comprehension of a third-grader. In a glowing review published in the magazine they own, Alternative Press, an unnamed writer mused that Motel Du Cap “seems to honor where they came [sic] while reminding us that today, they are steadfastly where that path has led them.” A sentence so poorly constructed that we have to wonder whether they wrote the unbylined article themselves. 

Musically, Motel Du Cap is constructed with the same approach the Maddens bring to running their media properties: a hodge-podge of nepotism, tastelessness, and blatant disregard for the integrity of the form. Guest features on the album include Luke Borchelt, Petti Hendrix, and Zeph—three artists nobody would know about unless they perused the client roster of Joel and Benji’s artist management company, MDDN. Wiz Khalifa, a musician who, like the Maddens, will put his washed name on anything for a check, pops up on “Life Is Great”, a jaunty track where Joel sings the profound hook, “Life / It’s fuckin’ great.” 

“A hodge-podge of nepotism and tastelessness”

It’s a compelling flash of honesty from the pop-punk profiteers, whose “fuckin’ great” lives will fortunately not be impacted by the savage round of layoffs they’ve just foisted upon their editorial workforce. While a stable of talented music writers who dedicated years of their lives to the publications the Maddens just villainously ruined are reckoning with the collapse of their industry, Good Charlotte are currently livin’ it up on the road with Avenged Sevenfold and prancing around with Hilary Duff at Madison Square Garden literally hours after the layoffs were reported.

—MORT CRANBERRY
REVOLVER

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