The Young and the Hopeless, Joe

This is Joe K***, roving reporter for the newest addition of the K*** Family Newsletter, Vol. XXXVI, Issue 36. Reporting from the field, second story of a three-story Wildwood rental home. Like every year—in this town, in this house, with these people—I have done extensive research, under the guise of an album review for a specially selected album for this particular week, and I can now report to you, dear reader, that I have reached a conclusion. My findings conclude that: all of this will eventually wash away like the sand on the beach.

Think about how much we don't remember. It's insane. There are so many things that matter so goddamn much to me right now, and in five minutes, they won't. In five months, I won't think about it. In five years, I won't remember it. In five centuries, no one will remember anything or anyone that exists right now. Humanity might not even exist at that point. More germane to the matter at hand—no one will remember Good Charlotte.

I am here, now, and I remember. I remember a Christmas morning, 23 years ago, my middle sister unwrapping a gift, the puke-green cursive text on the cover of the album, a legitimate gift because I knew my sister like Good Charlotte, but also a joke because I knew that she knew that I personally did not like Good Charlotte. The gift being both the album and also a shared understanding of each other. I have an extremely vague memory of my youngest sister coincidentally buying our middle sister this same exact gift, but that memory is a bit more hazy and unsteady, butting up against the fact that youngest sis would've been in fourth grade at the time, perhaps a bit too young (and hopeless) to buy The Young and the Hopeless as a gift. I remember, but just not everything. (Youngest sis doesn't remember any of it.)

And so we're sitting around the shore rental house's dining room table now, back here in the present, five of us, the aforementioned three K*** siblings and two significant others, and I put on the album of the week, and tell Jenny that this one is for her. That I know that she knows it. That I bought this music for her over two decades ago. The joke this time being that I know that she doesn't remember, and the two-minute, cinematic, insane fucking outlier of "A New Beginning" stretching the mystery for two minutes longer, until "The Anthem" crashes in and all five adults at the table go: "ohhhhhhhhh."

You might have caught the craziest part of that scenario if you were reading close. Not the fact that everyone liked a Good Charlotte album—perhaps unimaginable to 2002 Joe, but that Joe is long gone. More that it was just the adults. I spend my life pretty much either holed up in a cubicle or squished onto public transportation, or: hanging out with children. And yet here I was, in a situation that didn't involve children. The grandparents took them down to some mini-playground thing. They were gone for an hour. We were just... spending time together. Talking. Playing a card game. Listening to some pop punk. Drinking some alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages. Relaxing...? I hate writing about this because it's so fucking cliché and clichés are boring but it's a cliché because it's true, how being a parent means being "on," not necessarily hands-on supervision at every moment of the day but supervision nonetheless, a tenseness of awareness that you don't really even realize is squeezing you until the tension abates and you're just playing cards with your wife and siblings and the realization hits you, right there during the song that used to bother you so much, but doesn't seem to any more. Probably not a coincidence.

Shit, I'm just realizing now that Nate did the whole "everything will disappear eventually" thing last week.

I've been wondering lately if I'm depressed.

Bad week to be thinking about it, being on vacation and whatnot. But that's where I'm at. I don't think I am. I don't hit all the criteria. But I am kinda sad recently, and I'm losing excuses as to why. I've felt that something bad happens, and it takes me a lot longer to recover from it now. Isn't there some lesser depression-type thing that only requires some of the boxes checked? It's been a while since I've paged through the DSM-5. I've been tired a lot too, and just generally downcast. Pam's been trying to give me a tough love about it, saying that I take things too personally. I guess that's mostly true, but I'm struggling to understand why that's a bad thing. Except that maybe taking things personally is lacking in humility. Like if everything is "about me," then I'm forgetting the universal truth that none of this actually matters and that I'm a speck of sand on the great cosmic beach of time and space. I understand that truth but it still doesn't make me feel very good, both that I don't ultimately matter and that pretending that I matter annoys my wife somehow.

I also think that my general thoughts on the matter are immature enough that I think that they would actually have made more sense for me to feel when I was in eighth grade. Isn't that when some people come to the sudden realization that life is random and chaotic and meaningless? You're supposed to spend your teenage years wandering aimlessly emotionally and then becoming an adult means that you now understand that you might not mean anything in grand scope of all history but that you can effect small and meaningful change in small ways in your own personal circle. So why am I 36 years old and sitting on the beach for hours at a time staring at the sea and feeling like a stupid little pissant eighth grader and wondering why it all feels so hopeless?

I'm trying to work my way back around to the title of this album, which may have seemed histrionic at certain times in my life, but somehow this week becomes poignant. Look, it's ridiculous to say, that this is a good album. I know it and you know it. But I also know that I listened to this album a bunch of times over the past week and it grew strong and planted roots and felt like it was giving life meaning, somehow, in small ways. I felt young and hopeless. In their own, sometimes cloyingly stupid ways, Good Charlotte pretty much fucking nailed the aesthetic of feeling both young and hopeless. So the album felt true to my emotional state, which bodes well for the score at the bottom of this review, if not for my well-being.

Alright... clearly I'm writing this album review over the course of like four different days, and I already regret the depression stuff. My understanding would be that those feelings would be consistent. I think I just had a bad day. A few too many bad days stacked together. You know what I did yesterday to break out of it? I got out of the beach chair and I dug a hole. Took the T-shirt off, got sweaty. Dug that hole probably four feet deep, and struck water. It was silly, and I almost immediately filled it in because I was afraid that my less-than-four-feet-tall daughter was going to fall into it. I just wanted to complete a task. Then it was my turn to cook dinner, so that was another task to complete, and it felt good. I think we can probably view Record Club in the same way, how even on the worst weeks, the task completed is a good boost to one's emotional health. I listened to Good Charlotte. I felt good listening to it.

I'll probably still seek therapy at some point, but for now, I again sit down at my keyboard and type my feelings away. The truth about The Young and the Hopeless is probably somewhere in between "shitty early-aughts pop punk" and "so good it cured my depression." Shockingly closer to the latter than the former, is the thing. I think what we need to remember is that this isn't new or revelatory music. It's not original. It's a pastiche of anything that came before it. History often does not look kind upon those artists who play by the rules. The other thing to remember is that this is often okay, at least in the moment. Music doesn't need to be revelatory for it to sound good. Some artists are playing by the rules because the rules have worked so far, and there's no need to break through boundaries or take risks.

And then the final thing to remember is that not all listeners have a sense of history and or care or need it to enjoy an album. Note the five adults (still no kids, who knows where they are at this point in the writing exercise, probably watching YouTube in a bedroom down the hall) nodding their heads along to "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." I actively built a wall between myself and this music and purposefully withheld the building of a history between me and this song. My middle sister built no such wall and has actively enjoyed this song for two decades, but, like, wouldn't know that Tim Armstrong of Rancid cowrote it and wouldn't know who Rancid was and wouldn't give a shit about the progressive anti-capitalistic themes of the song and either didn't vote in 2024 or voted for trump and just really did not care one bit for my joke about Good Charlotte coming out with a sequel song called "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous (Luigi's Version)" in which the chorus now goes: "Well they got mansions / Think we should kill them," but, ya know, it doesn't really matter, because we're each getting what we need from this song, her a nostalgic exercise for the ballads of spiky-haired faux-goth boys of her youth, me a new surprise reevaluation of some previously unfairly maligned pop punk in a lifetime full of them.

But it's more than that for me too. I don't know. I'm writing all over the place here. But I really do think that it's a good album. "Say Anything" is the best song that I've heard in a while. It's a song I'd never heard before this week, so I'm hearing it fresh. The way Madden says "Say anything! Say anything!" in the chorus scans as honest and candid and heartfelt to me. The final song "Movin' On" made an impression too, with its chorus of "Life! Hope! Truth! Trust!" and so on. Maybe I'm vulnerable and being duped, but I don't think so—these are sincere expressions of the human condition. Don't let the framework of "just another pop punk band" fool you either. Good Charlotte is using the template to say something true. And it's catchy, so there's that.

I don't know, should I keep going? I should probably end this dispatch here. You get what I'm trying to say. What I'm trying to say: none of this matters, I don't matter, I pretend that it matters because I'm selfish, when I pretend that it matters then I listen to this music and it confirms my false belief that it matters, it feels important because it's a stark change from what I previously believed, it feels important because it builds a bridge between one of, and possibly the least important of, the various divides between me and a sibling, it feels important because it speaks to feeling shitty, I'm feeling shitty because I'm immature or possibly suffering mental illness, it feels important to talk about that because that is how I deal with my emotions, through writing about music, because music is important to me, maybe more important than feeling happy, or maybe I feel happy because of music, and it's notable that I'm happy when I listen to Good Charlotte, which is just fucking wild, man, because I'm supposed to be old and hopeful and past all this shit about youth and hopelessness and yet but here I am, convincing myself that this is important art, maybe not in the way it says something important in the history of music because it doesn't, but maybe in the way it says something important to me, right here, right now, something I needed to here, some confirmation that I'm not alone in this universe, or in this shore house.

What else is there to say? Say anything, say anything.

GRADE: 3.5 pukes out of 5