Eminem Is Right

Policy Review, Dec 2004/Jan 2005 by Eberstadt, Mary

Yet another popular group generating anthem after anthem about broken homes and their consequences is Washington, D.C.-area-based Good Charlotte, profiled on the cover of Rolling Stone in May 2003 as the "Polite Punks." Their first album went gold in 2002. Led by twins Benji and Joel Madden, whose father walked out one Christmas Eve and never returned, Good Charlotte is one band that would not even exist except for the broken homes in which three of its four members (guitarist Billy Martin being the third) grew up. The twins have repeatedly told interviewers it was that trauma that caused them to take up music in the first place, and family breakup figures repeatedly in Good Charlotte's songs and regularly shapes its stage appearances and publicity. (In a particular act of symbolic protest, the twins recently made the legal changeover to their mother's maiden name.)

For Good Charlotte, as for many other newly successful singers and groups, the commercial results of putting personal trauma to music have proved dramatic. Their first and eponymous album sailed up the charts partly on account of a teenage angst ballad ironically entitled "Little Things." The song opens with a dedication to every teenager wrestling with the issues of adolescence - all those "little things," including Mom's stint in a mental institution and Dad's abandonment of the kids ("We checked his room his things were gone we didn't see him no more"). Another song on the album is "Thank You Mom." Rather anomalously by the standards of yesterday's rock and punk, but not at all anomalously in the worlds of their descendants today, this song is devoted wholly, and without irony, to the mother who raises children after their father walks out ("You were my mom, You were my dad I The only thing I ever bad was you, It's true").

Rolling Stone groused about this band: "What the hell happened to punk?" Now that's a fair point. But whatever happened, the result has literally turned to gold; Good Charlotte's second album, called The Young and the Hopeless, sold more than a million copies. Two of its thirteen songs are apotheosized lyrics for an absent father. One is "My Old Man" ("Last I heard he was at the bar I Doing himself in"). Another song, "Emotionless," reads much like the related narrations of Everclear, Papa Roach, and many more. The narrator here reminds his missing father of his sons and little girl, wondering, "How do you sleep at night?"

Like numerous other groups, Good Charlotte weaves another prevailing theme - teenage suicide - in and out of the larger theme of parental abandonment. Perhaps the best known is the antisuicide clarion "Hold On," in which the singer implores a desperate teenager to remember that although your "mother's gone and your father hits you . . . we all bleed the same way you do. "

Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Pink, Good Charlotte: These bands are only some of the top-40 groups now supplying the teenage demand for songs about dysfunctional and adult abandoned homes. In a remarkable 2002 article published in the pop music magazine Blender (remarkable because it lays out in detail what is really happening in today's metal/grunge/punk/rock music), an award-winning music journalist named William Shaw listed several other bands, observing, "If there's a theme running through rock at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it's a pervasive sense of hurt. For the past few years, bands like Korn, Linkin Park, Slipknot, Papa Roach, and Disturbed have been thrusting forward their dark accounts of dysfunctional upbringings. ... As the clichéd elder might mutter, what's wrong with kids today?" Shaw answers his own question this way: "[T]hese songs reflect the Zeitgeist of an age group coping with the highest marital-breakdown rate ever recorded in America. If this era's music says anything, it's that this generation sees itself as uniquely fractured."