Boy howdy! Have I ever got a treat for you! For the first time in Barber College history, we have a guest blogger in the house! And not just any guest blogger, but our esteemed friend A. from Apophasis Now! While I was busy watching one of the most exciting weekends in Michigan sports history, A. took one for the team and ventured into MySpaceland to find some of the hottest hotties ever. All I have to add is this: A.: 1, Skillet: 0. I’ll let A. take it from here.

Oh, hello. We didn’t see you there.

First of all, in case any of you fuckers think I don’t have better things to do than trawl around MySpace all weekend (or ever), let me assure you that I do. I don’t have an account there nor on any other trendy meeting place for trendy young people. I am not trendy.

That being said, I found this week’s hotties — the extremely hardcore Christian metal band, Skillet — through a New York Times article about conservative Christians and their fear that they are losing teenagers to sin and debauchery. On the front lines of the battle to win them back, apparently, are Skillet. Here is what the critics are saying:

They have grown from strength to strength over the 10 years of our relationship. They renew again and again with new approaches and new presentations. Yeah!!!11 Jesus RAWKS!!!!!1!!1!!

Skillet has over the years been able to maintain an energy to their music that is there regardless of whether its source is from [sic] a keyboard, guitar, or a typical Cooper scream. A band with energy and unnecessary prepositions! It’s about time.

This record is everything but a letdown. Oh, boy.

Where to start.

Just look at them! I try not to criticize other people’s fashion choices, but I have seen mullets more dignified than that long-haired-rodent-looking thing on top of the frontman’s head. Nonetheless, they do have an impressive (?) 51,456 “friends” at the time of this writing, the first ten of which appear to be religious-themed music groups, only one of which has a goofier name: DECYFER DOWN, a name so goofy I will not even bother to speculate how many seconds that group would remain standing in a rawk-off with actual metal band, Slayer. Less than eight, though, for sure.

I will give the commentors toward the bottom of the page the benefit of the doubt and assume none is over the age of eleven (but I will suggest for their own good that they learn to read and write before puberty).

And we haven’t even started on the music yet. Oh, yes. The music. It loads without your permission and if you want to stop it, you have to scan the page frantically until you spot the “pause” button on the little music player. I am neither a musician nor a music critic, so I will not attempt to explain exactly what makes the streaming audio on Skillet’s MySpace profile sound like what would happen if you took the worst radio station I listened to in high school and then made it about 68 percent worse and then added a precious air of moral superiority. I will say only that it does.

More than that, it feels phony in a way that goes beyond the phoniness of the average crappy mainstream music act. Sin-free metal is like sugar-free cake. It simply should not be. If you say it’s as good or better than the real stuff, you are a liar.

Which brings us to the final insult: Skillet members think they are doing God’s work.

People are douchey for all kinds of reasons. Musicians doubly so. But when they claim to have the full support, endorsement, and inspiration of a higher power and the best they can do is produce a crappy imitation of already crappy mainstream metal music, well, that is just offensive. If St. Peter is playing this shit at the pearly gates, I reserve the right to hop a southbound train in search of soul choirs, old men with banjos, Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, and Tom Waits, all of whom have had fascinating things to say about God over the years and have done so with style, class, and raw songwriting talent.

In sum, Skillet will surely leave you shouting Jesus’s name to the skies, but it won’t be for the reason they think.