Locked Up Inside You: A Reflection on Skillet

Tracing the arc of one of Christian music's strangest bands

My last post here was theraputic to write, cathartic to publish, and undeniably a pretty grim read. I’m going to continue the Sex & Gender series, and it’s going to continue to be rich with bummers, but honestly, I needed a break.

So let's dip into a (somewhat) lighter topic: Christian music! Specifically, a weird, confusing, (somewhat) tragic little band called Skillet.

Tales from an Alternate Universe

It’s important that you understand something here: when I was a kid, I bought all of my CDs at Christian stores. For my 16th birthday, my friend Aaron gifted me my very first secular album: Weezer's Blue Album. Prior to that, my musical knowledge existed solely of: Christian bands, John Williams soundtracks, classical music, Golden Oldies, and Weird Al parodies (largely of songs I hadn't actually heard).

It was pretty common for the local Family Christian Bookstore to feature a display explicitly offering Christian alternatives to popular bands: instead of Limp Bizkit, you should check out P.O.D.! Intead of Pearl Jam, try Third Day! Intead of Matchbox 20, try Audio Adrenaline! Instead of Korn, try Thousand Food Krutch!

But we're here today to reflect on Skillet: a band that switched its secular reference point virtually every album. Skillet: the only band I knew of that wore pleather, but also the only band I liked that prayed a salvation prayer during their shows. Skillet: a band with one original member; a band that started as a Nirvana knockoff and now makes appearances on far-right television networks. Skillet: a musical analogue for the arc of the entire evangelical subcultural universe over the last 30 years.

Let's start where I started: their second album.

Hey You, I Love Your Soul (1998)

In 1998 I was a proud member of the Jars of Clay¹ Fan Club (this not a joke; I had the t-shirt and exclusive live double CD and everything). But as I looked for ways to channel my angst, I found myself seeking edgier and more subcultural music (Christian edition). I had just learned about ska (Five Iron Frenzy²) and punk (Slick Shoes³, Dogwood⁴) – so as I drifted away from Jars of Clay and Smalltown Poets⁵, I went out of my way to avoid music I judged to be “too polished”. Skillet, on the other hand, felt like a complete curveball:

Electronic music? Neon clothes? The literal first time I had seen a bass with more than 4 strings? Intimidating, confusing, compelling. I picked up and put down this CD probably a half-dozen times before I decided to finally purchase it. Adding Skillet to my collection felt like accepting an entirely new aspect to my musical identity.

Now, remember the scale of the Christian micro-universe. Skillet seemed uniquely hypermodern, both visually and musically. Somewhere I heard this was “Industrial Music”, and that term sounded awesome. I'd often skip ahead to the crunching synth loops of “Pour”:

No, I hadn't heard Nine Inch Nails or KMDFM or whatever. Hell, I only knew Nine Inch Nails existed thanks to the Evangelical paraphernalia about the nihilism of their lyrics (which in the late 90's typically focused on the works of Reznor, Manson, and Corgan, e.g. the “god is empty” arc of “Zero”).

Lead singer John L. Cooper didn't look like anyone else I knew of in Christian music. His look wasn't punk, but wasn't rock – he felt like an envoy from a different subculture. For a second there, Cooper was really on top of Y2K fashion.

The other two guys I wrote off as “dorky” (the guitarist left after this album, anyway, and the drummer after the next one), but something about John compelled me. His long bangs sort of accidentally presaged emo hair from 5 or so years later. I thought it was VERY cool that he played a bass with so many strings.

Skillet songs follow the broad patterns of modern praise music – a focus on raising God high and minimizing oneself – but they tend to be a little more extra than your bog-standard praise song. This segment from “Pour” is pretty standard praise music stuff, albeit a little blood-forward. (Don't forget that in Christian music, “You” means God / Jesus.)

You're in my blood and You're all around
Beauty speaks without a sound
Raging flood, peace I need
Down, pour down

On occasion, though, Cooper's imagery runs amok and ends up in a pretty strange psychospiritual / psychosexual liminal space. From “Locked In A Cage”:

I wanna be locked in a cage
I wanna be strapped in a chair, hey hey
I wanna be where you are
If my insanity comes, hey hey hey
Wrapped up inside you
I want to break my legs
In case of thought to escape, hey hey
Keep the hammer out of my reach
If my pounding impulse comes, hey hey hey
Wrapped up inside Your arms
Locked up inside You

Okay, dude! (We'll return to John L. Cooper's Psyche Zone many times throughout this post.)

However, as was typical at the time, the lead single from Hey You, I Love Your Soul was a milquetoast CCM-friendly piano number called “More Faithful” that I only found compelling because John's voice sounded unpolished, like he was just taking a break between heavy industrial-rock tracks to crank out a quick ballad.

Christian music videos were an even smaller ecosystem than Christian albums, so turnover rate was incredibly slow – I saw the video for “More Faithful” dozens and dozens of times over the next few years.

For a kid who hadn't heard a note of any other secular industrial-adjacent music and only knew of Nine Inch Nails through histrionic warnings in Christian magazines, Hey You, I Love Your Soul was my sole exposure to electronic rock for a few years there. But hold on: let's walk back in time for a second.

Skillet (1996)

Nothing is older to a 14-year-old than something from when they were 12. The aesthetic contrast between Skillet's first and second albums made that gap feel even larger – looking at John L. Cooper's hair & goatee on the back of that first CD felt like staring back into another decade.

The diet-Nine-Inch-Nails industrial rock vibe is nowhere to be found here – instead, Skillet’s self-titled LP is just straightforward distortion-pedal-on-the-chorus Nirvana worship. Check out the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” vibe of the opening track “I Can”:

The rest of the album essentially follows that framework – “Paint” and “You Thought” are also extremely Nirvana, while “Saturn” is an early shot at a “More Faithful” style CCM ballad. There’s nary a synth in sight. John seems to be really into dressing like a referee.

For our unhinged-imagery lyric moment, let's examine this section from the song “Boundaries”:

I lie here clothed and naked
Dam bursts to cool ocean waves
Black water cleans the highway
Resting in the washing away
I will let me go
My walls melt away
You have no boundaries
You cross my borders

Cool cool! Nothing to see here!

While I never shook the feeling that it was tragically unhip – I hated grunge – I eventually caved and added this album to my collection.

No, reader, I had not heard Nirvana, although I had heard Weird Al's “Smells Like Nirvana”.

Invincible (1999)

For a year or two there, the only images I'd seen of John L. Cooper were the semi-obscured, neon-accented photos in the Hey You, I Love Your Soul album art, and the much less appealing 90's-grunge shots from the self-titled album. But now:

Here, instead, was John clearly posed on the cover in some kind of shiny vinyl pleather tank top thing. He's backed by 2 new members (wife Korey and guitarist-for-one-album Kevin) and soon-to-depart drummer Trey, who was probably getting tired of having to switch wardrobes each album. Everyone has different variations of the same haircut.

The lead single from Invincible is “Best Kept Secret”, an undeniably punchy anthem about how people don't already know who Jesus is. It was accompanied by a Y2K-ass black-and-neon video that does far more justice to their whole Outfit Situation than the awkwardly-posed album cover. Notice that the drummer is now a girl – Trey, member of Skillet a mere paragraph ago, is gone, replaced by Lori, who remained the drummer for as long as I cared about Skillet. (Lori is the only girl drummer I can recall from my youth, and she seemed awesome.)

I thought the video for “Best Kept Secret” was cool for longer than I thought the song was cool. Never mind that it was ripping off The Matrix (released about a year prior). Hanging guitar cables? Cool. Having the band members enter in one by one? Always cool. I even thought John L. Cooper's little dance during the bridge at 2:30 above was pretty frickin' cool.

I played this song to a non-evangelical friend recently, and he exclaimed “oh, this is just Orgy!”

Yeah ... so apparently it's just Orgy. Look: there was absolutely no way I would have heard any songs by a band named “Orgy” in 1999.

The lyrics of Invincible are mostly just praise music; capital-y You's abound. “Best Kept Secret” has a straightforward god-is-awesome theme, but with some evangelical callouts in there – the phrase “evidence demands our belief” is undoubtedly a throw to Evidence That Demands A Verdict, which is an evangelical apologetics book that's been continually reprinted and updated since its original publishing in 1972.

You're the hope over the centuries
You're the cosmic force that rules the galaxies
You're the evidence that demands our belief
And I can't live for myself
I can't keep this all to myself, yeah yeah
You're the best kept secret in my generation
The best kept secret of all time

(Of course, it's pretty uniquely evangelical to frame Jesus Christ, a fairly well-known dude, as a secret. This is a pretty rote example of the evangelical need to self-identify as an under-threat minority.)

Finally, in the “hey John, are you good?” corner this time around, let's sit with this consent-defying section from “You Take My Rights Away”:

You take my rights away
You take control, no stopping you
You take my rights away
I can take it
You define me
With your identity
Lose my life in you
I can take, I′ll take what it costs me

Other songs like “You're Powerful”, “The Fire Breathes” and “You're In My Brain” (Google 'em on your own time, lol) also lean into themes of self-minimization and individual brokenness; when Cooper isn't lifting God up, he's tearing himself down.

Alien Youth (2001)

By the end of the year 2000, I owned *two* entire secular albums (Weezer's Blue Album and Linkin Park's Hybrid Theory). But that didn't stop me from preordering Alien Youth and the accompanying signed promotional EP, which I still have. Receipts!

When I popped Alien Youth into my CD player for the first time, I was blown away. Skillet was bigger and heavier, the guitars chunkier, the drums lively and thick. When the main riff from “Earth Invasion” hit, I was thriving (for the length of that riff, anyway).

However, the story takes a dark turn: the promotional EP disc also contained a music video. When I dropped that disc into my PC, I was horrified. John L. Cooper & Co, now with a third guitarist (homeschooler / teenager Ben Kasica), rip into the (killer) opening riff of “Alien Youth”, tragically bluescreened onto a mid-90's-PC-game-quality background, flatly lit, statically shot, unconvincingly staged.

Suddenly, the scales fell from my eyes. I could see all of the seams, the staging, the youth-groupy corniness. (Heck, the first line of this album is “Worldwide Jesus Domination”.)

But I still treasured moments of the guitar production on this album. For a crucial season of my childhood it was the heaviest thing I'd ever heard. And no, I already told you, I hadn’t heard Nine Inch Nails. I had no idea that the Skillet band-copying-schtick was done with Nirvana and Orgy and was now squarely pointed at Trent Reznor.

Lyrically, Skillet was somehow getting even less subtle. The songs on Alien Youth aren't simply in the vein of “God awesome” and “me terrible”; there's now stuff about, well, religious domination. In “Stronger” (also loved the guitars on that one), Cooper sings in first person as Jesus (“My skin is my disguise / I am more than a man / I was sent to rule on Earth”). And here are some lyrics from “Earth Invasion” that read a lot stranger to me now than they did at the time:

Join us in the army that's arising
The truth invades your mind
Every day the Kingdom is advancing
The earth invasion has just begun
Without a sound, without fear
It attacks the heart and soul
To rule all life and display His government

As for the “John L. Cooper has once again lost control of his psychosexual imagery” file, here are are some highlights from “The Thirst Is Taking Over”:

Hold me down, hold me down
Drip it on my tongue
And my convulsions stop
Thirst for love, thirst for your love
I could swallow your beauty whole
Searching for the one who can conquer me
I'm gonna scream aloud, throw it down
Crash in the sweet obsession of you
I'm gonna swim and drown in the wake of you

“Heaven In My Veins” is also worth mentioning here, as it takes an already-tenuous do-Jesus-not-drugs angle (“Brace before the shakes // how to get another taste”) and pushes it all the way to:

Yeah I need it, in my veins
Now let me go
Fly higher and higher
All of me into you
Less of me, all of you

Phew!

Collide (2003) And On Down To The Present

Skillet's next album, Collide, hit shelves in November 2003, but I to this day have never even held a copy in my hands. You see, in the mere months prior, I'd been exposed to some of the bands that'd change my conception of music forever. Norma Jean, Refused, meWithoutYou, Underoath, Every Time I Die, the Dillinger Escape Plan ... Skillet, and modern rock in general, seemed quaint against the onslaught of “Face:Face” or “Ebolarama”.

Plus, hey, John's Y2K Era was conclusively over – the hair & pleather were gone, traded in for a cringey fauxhawk and a fresh trip to Buckle. John’s even wearing short sleeves.

But Collide apparently sold quite well, and from then on Skillet to set their cruise control to “mid-tempo modern hard rock”. They've released seven albums since then, small portions of which I listened to to write this piece.

Skillet has settled into a pretty straightforward final form. They have a new drummer (still a girl, yay!) and guitarist (number 5, according to Wikipedia). John has shaved his fauxhawk into an extra-tall high-and-tight, added a beard, dyed everything black, and has essentially become borderline-comically ultramasculine. There's no trace of his original form(s) here:

He apparently wrote a book entitled Wimpy, Weak and Woke: How Truth Can Save America From Utopian Destruction, which I will absolutely read & review if people start paying for subscriptions to this dumb blog, and he absolutely looks like a guy who would have done that. Lol:

Image via Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

He's also made various appearances on right-wing news programs and such, warning about the dangers of wokeness and such. Modern-day Skillet has (maybe not surprisingly) grafted completely onto conservative ideology. Their lyrics still bend Christian, but many tracks, e.g. the title track from Unleashed (2016), have lyrics that are equally portable to hard rock radio or a get-amped weightlifting mix. The pronoun “You” is once more doing a lot of heavy lifting here:

You make me feel invincible
Earthquake, powerful
Just like a tidal wave
You make me brave
You're my titanium

Other tracks lean pretty hard into Christian nationalism, especially knowing the ideological stance of Cooper these days. From the title track off of Dominion (2022):

I'll never bow down
To the power state
Death will not dominate
The fighters finally rise
They refuse to believe the lies

When they're not calling for war or revolution in not-specifically-religious terms, latter-day Skillet locks into a sort of chromed-out boot-up-your-ass indignance-country, best showcased by the impossibly awkward “Unpopular” (“Call me outclassed, outcast, simple man, true facts // Got my family, sanity, everything I need”):

The video for country-fried “All That Matters” features Cooper in a literal cowboy hat and military-adjacent buttondown, beard extra-long, singing “my faith, family, and freedom / that's what's backin' me”:

We've come so, so far since “Nirvana but Christian”. Skillet once represented boundary-pushing music to teenage me – introducing me to electronic music, challenging stereotypes of masculinity.

Skillet genre-switched in a way that felt revolutionary and novel at the time, but feels gutless and cynical in retrospect. John L. Cooper's many eras are either costumes or identities; his lyrics either standard edgy Christian fare or a glimpse into someone at war with himself. Or both.

Let's close out this reflection on the long, strange arc of Skillet with one last trip into John L. Cooper's psyche. From “Psycho In My Head” off of 2022’s Dominion:

Maybe I'm just paranoid
Or maybe I'm just livin' a lie
Can't stop this screamin' voice
Or maybe I'm just sick inside
This is the face
I hate the other side of me
Out of his cage
He breaks to take the life from me

I wonder what John L. Cooper's inner voice is like these days.

1. Jars of Clay is Christian Toad The Wet Sprocket

2. Five Iron Frenzy is Christian Less Than Jake

3. Slick Shoes is Christian Blink 182

4. Dogwood is Christian NOFX

5. Smalltown Poets is Christian Matchbox 20