Jesea Lee sits down with Sonny of P.O.D. to talk music, faith and cancel culture.

P.O.D. was on the forefront of nu-metal, dropping their first album even before KORN (who are often credited with being the inventors of nu-metal). In a recent interview on The Jesea Lee Show,  frontman Sonny Sandoval makes the tough choice of picking the ultimate nu-metal song and what ultimately killed it the genre.

 

 

P.O.D. was on the forefront of nu-metal, dropping their first album even before KORN (who are often credited with being the inventors of nu-metal). In a recent interview on The Jesea Lee Show,  frontman Sonny Sandoval makes the tough choice of picking the ultimate nu-metal song and what ultimately killed it the genre.

When I think of like the TRL hype, and then I think of  the visual and the crazy side of it, I still remember, and again, I didn’t know what nu-metal was, we didn’t call it that. But I remember seeing the Limp Bizkit “Nookie” video for the first time. And it didn’t matter whether I was a Limp Bizkit fan or not. When I saw that, I said, this is freaking huge. It encompasses everything. It encompassed rock and roll, rebellion, sex. It had everything. It was just visually stunning. I’m not saying that defines Nu-Metal or classifies it, but I remember thinking that whatever this is going on, it’s going to crossover to the pop world and all that stuff. Cause even though Korn was popular at the time, I never saw them as pop. They were still dark and mysterious. Limp Bizkit wasn’t mysterious. They threw everything out there and said, I don’t care what you think. And if you like me or not, and that’s what rock and roll was supposed to be anyway. I don’t care what you think. And that is probably what sparked most of those bands that came out after that just were horrible and decided to go from whatever music they were into at the time to now, oh, I wanna be in a nu metal band.

Sandoval also says as great as some of those bands were, the genre was ruined once it became oversaturated with copycats that didn’t really represent the culture.

Once bands came in and kind of started to mimic it I think that’s when it got oversaturated with guys that it wasn’t their lifestyle you know I mean they it was it wasn’t their culture you know when you get bands from like whatever you know Timbuktu and all of a sudden they’re acting like they’re from the streets. They’re looking like they’re from the streets and they’re trying to rap, it’s not quite there, but it was, it became a genre. What happens when it becomes popular? People start to get it. And I think, you know, people got over it after a while. I think it kind of came and gone and people threw it away because of the artists that were doing it or trying to copy it instead of looking to the authenticity of it.

Elsewhere in the interview, Sonny discusses how their faith affected their career and how it helped launch other christian rock bands (18:45), details on their upcoming album (1:29), what it was like working with Katy Perry (36:15),Sonny Sondoval Day in San Diego (40:35) and more.

 

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