"Not Gonna Die" by Skillet

I’m not a Christian. I’m not even religious. In the immortal words of Bill Maher, saying atheism is a religion is like saying abstinence is a sex position. Having gotten these items off my chest, my nonreligious status doesn’t deter me away from the beautiful and inspirational music of Skillet. If you listen carefully to the lyrics from “Collide” on, you’ll notice that rarely do they actually mention Jesus or God by name. So that means the lyrics of the songs in which they’re professing their love to someone could be directed at anybody (at least in the atheist listener’s mind). They could be directed at a girlfriend or a wife. John Cooper singing the lyrics “My heart hurts for you” strikes a romantic chord whether that was the intention or not. Before I knew that “Lucy” was a pro-life anthem, I figured it to just be a song about missing people in general, whether they’re dead or simply out of your life. Even though Skillet is considered Christian rock, the listener doesn’t necessarily have to interpret the lyrics as religious. Everybody makes their own interpretations and nobody’s going to tell them otherwise. Let me tell you what the song “Not Gonna Die” means to me. It may be a call to believe in Jesus harder than you already do, but to me, it’s simply an anthem of not throwing in the towel when life becomes too hard to handle. When you give up, you “whisper goodbye” and “flat-line”. But when you “stand and fight forever”, your hard work will bear fruit. It makes me wish this song came out between 2007 and 2009 instead of smack-dab in the middle of 2013. I could have listened to this song forever when I was feeling lonely in college and missing my family. So instead of wishing in one hand and shitting in the other, I used “Not Gonna Die” as inspiration for a short story of the same title. Mario Gustafson, the lead character, finds himself in a similar situation as I was back in my college days. Mario was alone in his dorm room with no one to talk to and his family so many miles away. The difference between me and Mario is that the latter finds his “American family” (he’s a Swedish exchange student) in the form of an unhappy girlfriend of his roommate. Mario takes advantage of Tammy (the girlfriend’s) fragile situation and the two of them form a semi-romantic friendship that is sure to last them at least until the end of college. I’ve never been more jealous of a fictional character in my life. I had a few female friends in college, but we didn’t talk a lot then and we don’t talk a lot now that we have this wonderful invention called Face Book. Do you have a piece of music that speaks to you this way? If so, don’t hesitate to make art out of the inspiration you feel. You might have an idea one day and then it’ll fade away with a quickness if you don’t write it down fast enough. Even for those of you who aren’t “musical people”, if not a beautiful song, then a beautiful movie, TV show, book, or videogame. Find inspiration in something, goddamn it! Heh, I said “goddamn it” in a blog about Christian music. Hehe!

　

***DEPRESSING JOKE OF THE DAY***

Q: What do romance and All That Remains have in common?

A: A War You Cannot Win.