Good Charlotte – “Girls and Boys” / Big Brovaz – “Favourite Things”
You wait ages for top pop tunes slamming materialism and referencing that old song which goes ‘these are a few of my favourite things’ and then two come along at once. At least I think they’re slamming materialism: hard to tell with the Brovaz, but the sinister shady devil figures in the video appear to be implying something along Faustian lines. Good Charlotte are also attacking GURLS, and so reinject the war of the sexes into the supposedly gender-neutral nu-rawk-goth-metal-punk scene or whatever they’re calling it these days: ‘Girls don’t like boys they like cars and money’. Check out the video for a top Avril-diss – what appears to just be an MTV meta-joke, when a lame-looking tie-wearing skater gurl says ‘let’s crash the mall’, ends up showing up the whole ‘punk’ ethos for the cash-machine it really is. If Avril-esque rebellion is really just a reinvention of Cali-consumerism, the boys can’t escape because they’d rather play video games and skate, dude. As with ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous’, Good Charlotte end up hoist by their own petard. More disturbing is the association they make between hip-hop and bling-bling-ism. As the Brovaz show, that’s a contingent rather than a necessary link. Both alarmingly tuneful and thoroughly convincing singles.