By Noorie Hussain
‘Two great European narcotics: alcohol and Christianity’ – Never Went to Church, by the Streets.
Mike Skinner opens his emotional ballad with a nod to Nietzsche – the notorious German philosopher who claimed that there have been ‘two great narcotics in European civilisation: Christianity and alcohol’. An immediate tone-setter of how these lyrics will unfold into a raw acknowledgement of humanity’s reliance on religion as an emotional crutch.
Never Went to Church stands as the powerfully moving centrepiece of the Streets’ 2006 album We Never Made a Living. Written as a vulnerable tribute to his late father, Mike Skinner communicates his own experience with grief, and his struggle to move on with life without him (But it’s hit me since you left us, /And it’s so hard not to search. /If you were still about, /I’d ask what I’m supposed to do now).
The lyrics force upon the listener to feel as if they are intruding on a private conversation, with Skinner addressing his father directly throughout with ‘you’. It’s gut-wrenching to listen in on this emotionally distraught dialogue, and only exacerbated by the simplicity of the piano line underpinning these lyrics. The chord progression and rhythm are reminiscent of the Beatles’ Let It Be – Paul McCartney’s own tribute to his late mother, Mary, who appeared to him in a dream and told him ‘Let it be’ as an offer of comfort during the stress of the band’s impending break up.
Yet, it is in laying his emotions bare that Mike Skinner’s lyrics touch the likes of you and me, in his suggestion that religion only remains in secular societies to comfort us, as and when we need it. In revealing that ‘I never cared about God when life was sailin’ in the calm’, Skinner allows us to connect his lyrics with further Nietzschean ideas about the death of God in post-enlightenment culture. Skinner’s use of nautical imagery connects with Nietzsche’s madman, who frantically questioned ‘How could we drink up the sea?’ in a plea for people to understand that God is dead, and humanity killed Him.
The very premise of Nietzsche’s death of God rests on the idea that humanity dismantled the entire framework of meaning and morality provided by religion – a similar experience communicated by Skinner in Never Went to Church. Nietzsche’s use of nautical metaphors highlights the vastness of what has been lost – the religious foundation that once gave purpose to human life and explained the mechanics of the universe. For Skinner, his dad was the ‘sea’ that has been ‘drank up’. The death of his father was the abandonment of all his traditional beliefs, leaving him with a void that is a chaotic and terrifying new reality, much like that which Nietzsche describes through the death of God in modernity.
In acknowledging that ‘We never went to Church’, Skinner points to the fact that this terrifying new reality has left him clueless with the fragments of religion scattered in secular society. He goes so far as to end the song by making a joke with his dad about this, ‘I got a good one for you dad/ I’m gonna see a priest, a Rabbi, and a Protestant clergyman/ You always said I should hedge my bets’. Yet is this joke just a clothed coping mechanism?
At surface level, Skinner’s lyrics act as a prayer to his father, to help him seek comfort in his grief. Yet, upon further reflection, Skinner’s experience is one reflective of Nietzschean philosophy and thought. He becomes Nietzsche’s ‘madman’ who is faced with the reality of accepting the loss of his ‘religion’. In today’s secular society, our ‘religions’ are everything we believe and stand for, and so much of that comes from our parents. This emotional ballad masks a deeper understanding of the place and value of religion within contemporary life – how, although we may never go to church, we still need the church to function as a comfort blanket when we find ourselves abandoned by that which we depend on. The death of Skinner’s father was the death of his ‘religion’, and Never Went to Church is a beautifully touching capture of this experience.
Featured Image: Noorie Hussain