GENERATION Rx Tracklist
Generation Rx is Good Charlotte’s seventh studio album. Rx is a common American abbreviation for medical prescriptions and derives from the old Latin abbreivation for ‘recipe’.
The album title is a reference to the recreational drug use Good Charlotte see in the youth of today. Lead single “Actual Pain” was released as the band’s response to the death of Lil Peep in November 2017.
They explained the album as a return to their own youthful ideals to Rolling Stone:
Good Charlotte was at our best when we were unconscious and naive kids, who didn’t know it wasn’t cool to try hard or make new friends. There was an honesty and vulnerability we were able to share with the world back then, that makes us extremely proud of the young guys that we were. The wisdom that time gives you also comes with baggage and we’ve been searching for the door back in to that vulnerability, honesty and hopeful outlook that seems to only exist in innocence for a good 15 years. Generation Rx feels to us like we finally found our way back to that place.
Incidentally, Generation Rx is also the name of a public health initiative to prevent abuse of prescription medication. The term is also commonly used to describe the widespread, destructive influence of opiod addiction.
“GENERATION Rx” Q&A
-
Where did the title come from?
Vocalist Joel Madden and guitarist Benji Madden spoke to Rock Sound about the choice of changing the working title for the album, Cold Song, to Generation Rx in an interview featured in issue 243:
Joel: I’ve lost so many people to overdoses in the last twenty years, it’s hard to count. It was the last straw to look at something [Lil Peep’s sudden death] and go ‘'how many more people am I going to watch go down?’‘ This record, when we started it out wasn’t like ’‘we’re going to wave the flag for the opioid crisis!’‘ It is symbolic of the time we’re in and what we’ve lived through and if we could go back and talk about every single story of every person we’ve lost, every life we’ve watched destroyed… we could write a fucking book on how much we’ve seen.
Benji: I’m almost 40, but it hit me really hard. I haven’t been 21 in 18 years. To think about a kid who’s not going to experience the next eighteen years… I don’t know if it’s because I’m older or because I really felt a kinship to his music, [but] I saw us when we were younger, it hit me really hard. Every human is all dealing with the same shit and we’re all kind of self-medicating somehow.
