FIRE GODDESS
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"Despair Marks Good Charlotte" One of the great philosophers of our time (I don't have to tell you it was Bart Simpson) once declared: "Making teenagers depressed is like shooting fish in a barrel." You don't have to tell emotional sharpshooters Good Charlotte, the power-pop heroes responsible for the ambitious concept album The Chronicles of Life and Death, whose decidedly dark songs offer little hope for this beleaguered world of ours. Death, despair and loss mark virtually every song on the band's third album: Even a song that begins hopefully enough by exclaiming, "I've realized my dreams," concludes that, "All my life's been wasted/ Chasing shallow dreams." Heady stuff. Particularly from a band that features a pair of former MTV VJs. But then, this is also a band that made its name via a 2002 release called The Young and the Hopeless. And brothers Joel and Benji Madden never claimed to be optimists. Even the band's website offers two options: Life or Death.... A bitter anti-Bush song like Life and Death's powerful closing track In This World (Murder), then, is merely a reiteration of the band's mission statement, which is something along the lines of 'Everything sucks.' Joel Madden only hopes kids are listening. "Maybe not everyone hears that song," he says of In This World, "but the people who do and that listen, even if it's a handful of people, they get it. And if it's just one person at a time that's all you can really do." Okay, so he's not referring to spreading despair. On the contrary, Madden is confident that a vigilant audience is an activist audience. Hence, the band's participation in Live 8, an event that came in the midst of Good Charlotte's first tour of Asia and therefore placed the band onstage in Japan. "Live 8 was really great," the born lyricist enthuses. "We were so excited to be a part of it; it was a really great thing and I think it worked. "Could it have made more of a difference? Well, it always could; we just have to be happy with small progress. And even if it was just for awareness, so many more people are aware now of the situation. That's a great thing." So he's not completely morose, then. And as the band approaches its tenth anniversary, the Maddens, guitarist Billy Martin, bassist Paul Thomas and new drummer Dean Butterworth (Chris Wilson left earlier this year due to mysterious "personal health problems") are finding a few other things in life to be great as well. Overcoming the inevitable backlash that greets MTV VJs who play mighty rock, for instance. "I think we were confident enough to know that if that's what our career was hinged on, it wasn't worth it anyway," Madden observes. "We bet on ourselves: We were like, 'If we don't deserve the credibility then people aren't going to give it to us.' You have to be confident enough to know that you're doing something that's real and that's connecting with enough people. Anything that you do, if you're confident and you bet on yourselves and you work hard it'll come in time." It did take time. Moreover, by the time Good Charlotte found its audience, the airwaves were already flooded with sound-alike newcomers like Sum 41, Blink-182 and Third Eye Blind. Frustrating, no? "We feel like we probably owe that same debt to other bands," Madden suggests. "We can't be so self-righteous as to think we started a genre or anything. We have to just try to do what we do best. And we have songs on our albums that no other band could play. That's definitely taking risks and doing things differently." Arguably, Madden has further distinguished himself and his band by recently becoming tabloid fodder thanks to a rumoured romance with non-depressed teen Hilary Duff. One more frustration, no? "You've gotta just keep doing what you believe in," Madden counters. "All that stuff is so different from what I wanted. I wanted to play music and be in a rock 'n' roll band and play onstage every night to big crowds. "And yeah, it's all part of it. Having an album that sells well or going on tour and having sold-out shows, that's all part of the dream. That stuff is great. "But at the end of the day, we just wanted to get signed and put out records and play shows. And then you get into this world somehow where there's like tabloid stuff or people misquoting you and making a bigger deal out of something. "You can't ignore it. You recognize that it's there. But it's not a part of the dream, so you can't buy into it. You can't acknowledge it more than just that it's there. "It bothers you every once in a while, but the big dream is to keep making records and playing shows and to be the biggest band in the world. "And as long as you're always moving forward and going up, that's the dream. All that other stuff doesn't matter." Only the dream. One that presumably Madden views as anything but shallow.
