Stars Aligning for Skillet: The Christian Hard Rock Band Seems to Be Selling Beyond Its Music Market.By Tad Dickens, The Roanoke Times, Va.Oct. 5--NFL Sunday Night Football promo spots. WWE Wrestlemania. MTV's "Bully Beatdown." It's hard to change your television channels without hearing one of two recent cuts from Christian hard rock band Skillet.The tunes in question, "Hero" and "Monster," helped Skillet's latest release, "Awake," hit No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart for two consecutive weeks last month. It's all pretty amazing to lead singer/songwriter/bassist John Cooper.
"At the moment, there is a lot going on, and it just really feels like, well, all the stars are aligning," said Cooper, whose band comes to the Salem Civic Center on Tuesday, with Hawk Nelson and Decyfer Down. "It's pretty cool."
Those television spots and the big initial sales of "Awake" seem to show that Skillet's music is selling well beyond the contemporary Christian music market. Or it is that its Christian fan base is so strong that it pushed the band near the top of the pops?
"Truthfully, I don't know the answer," Cooper said. "But I will definitely say the lines between Christian music fans and mainstream music fans are very blurred these days, much more blurred than they were 10 years ago, or even five years ago. Gratefully, we can thank P.O.D. and Switchfoot and Jars of Clay and bands like that, for ... helping blur those lines -- even Stryper, yeah!"
He added: "I do think that young people don't really care about the Christian music thing. If they like the band, they like it. ... it doesn't make them not want to buy a record, the way it did 10-15 years ago. So I think it's mostly word-of-mouth. I think it's predominantly Christian [buyers], but I do think there's something else going on."
Musically, what's going on is thumping, contemporary hard rock that often sits just on the edge of metal. Keyboards and backing vocals from Cooper's wife, multi-instrumentalist Korey Cooper, sweeten the mix.
Songs like "Hero" and "Monster" can be taken lots of different ways, John Cooper said.
"I think most everybody in our world today would hear a song like that and say, 'Yeah, me too. I need a hero. This is crazy. I feel like I'm losing my faith sometimes,' " he said. "And it doesn't have to necessarily mean faith in God. It could mean faith in life, faith in the world, whatever."
Such lyrics are part of a conscious effort, Cooper said, citing a movie he saw recently that was so overtly political that he couldn't enjoy the story.
"Maybe that's why Jesus talked in parables," he said. "I don't really know. Maybe he did it because it's a juicier way to say what you're trying to say ... sometimes people turn off ... click off at the beginning of what you're saying.
"I did put quite a lot of thought into how I want my music to come across, and I absolutely do not want my music to be exclusively for Christian people. I want all people to be able to relate to what I'm singing about, and then I think I have a Christian worldview that comes through in my music that I hope can be a positive influence."
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