Throwback Thursday
For this week something slightly different. It's still music, and still a throwback to the early 2000s, but there's an added layer to this one. The band is P.O.D., the acronym for Payable On Death, something I never knew it stood for until a few weeks ago. I found this band by way of my first boyfriend, and it wasn't until many years later that I realised they were a Christian group. The lyrics of some songs make that clearer than others, but what I like about them is how popular they were at the time (and apparently still might be though not to the level of back then).
What is especially interesting for me to think about is how the religion never mattered. The music did. Sonny could and can rap like a beast, and they rode the NuMetal wave proudly right alongside Limp Bizkit et al. That's some claim to be said for men who hold their religion highly at a time when religiosity was waning. I miss that ability to love something on different levels. That one of those levels might not necessarily be something that you believed in or agreed with, but you could still take enjoyment from the whole. The internet has a lot to answer for, good and bad, but the change between then and now is starker in some respects than others.
2001 was a turning point; the world before and the world after. P.O.D. seem to straddle that, in a strange way, for me, and the mix of mainstream with what many would see as something marginalising, highlights a lot of what changed in the following years.
Click to viewWhat is especially interesting for me to think about is how the religion never mattered. The music did. Sonny could and can rap like a beast, and they rode the NuMetal wave proudly right alongside Limp Bizkit et al. That's some claim to be said for men who hold their religion highly at a time when religiosity was waning. I miss that ability to love something on different levels. That one of those levels might not necessarily be something that you believed in or agreed with, but you could still take enjoyment from the whole. The internet has a lot to answer for, good and bad, but the change between then and now is starker in some respects than others.
2001 was a turning point; the world before and the world after. P.O.D. seem to straddle that, in a strange way, for me, and the mix of mainstream with what many would see as something marginalising, highlights a lot of what changed in the following years.