Thursday, February 20, 2003

Music News

As I was checking my regular news sites this morning, it came to my attention that Marcos of POD is no longer in the band. I came across the update at theprp.com and decided to look into it further, and as I did it looks like this is one sticky situation. Marcos had been doing a lot of side projects with many secular artists and apparently Sonny and the other members of the band were not happy with this. Being unhappy, the sent out an email stating that Marcos had left the band when, in fact, they were firing him. After finding out that he was no longer a part of the band, and seeing that he had been replaced by the former guitarist of Living Sacrifice, he told MTV a lot about the band that most people don’t know.

What he said didn’t really surprise me, but it was nice to actually hear it said by a member of the band. To most POD has a very goody-two-shoes image, and rightly so because of their heavy Christian beliefs, but they aren’t perfect—they’re human beings like you and I. Being humans, Marcos told of the extreme partying by the band back stage and the leading of a regular rock star lifestyle. He also alluded to POD putting up the spiritual façade merely to set themselves apart from the crowd and grab the Christian metal market. Hearing about all the turmoil and drama in the band has left me feeling a little distraught since POD has been one of my favorite bands of the last few years (I’ve been listening to them since their indie/hardcore days of “Snuff the Punk” and “Brown”). I will still probably listen to them in the future and support them, but it’s too bad to see such a great talent in Marcos just thrown from the band. If anything, I have gained respect for Marcos for being honest and true and doing what his heart is telling him to do by starting up a band with some fellow friends from Sprung Monkey. I wonder how having a former death metal guitarist onboard is going to affect POD’s new music.

Since I’m on the topic of music, I’m going to keep going. Yesterday Jared found the new Limp Bizkit single online and sent it my way to give a listen. When Wes Borland left Bizkit, I thought for sure they would not ever be the same, and they obviously aren’t. When I heard that Fred Durst would be playing some of the guitar on the new album I was really skeptical and I thought Bizkit would be done and down the crapper. After listening to “Drop Dead” I am still going to say that they will never be the band they were on “3 Dollar Bill, Y’All”, but it is a lot better than I thought it would be. The song has a nice crunch to it with some decent rapping by Fred, but it’s still way to commercial for me. If the rest of the album is like this, I might just give it a spin or two, but my money is on them screwing up the rest of the tracks by trying to recapture the nu-metal market. Let’s wait and see if they fall on their face or not. Personally, I’d love to see Durst take a fall, a big one, but that’s just me.

Something else interesting happened yesterday that almost made up for the whole waste of my time at the job fair. I got a call from Pat at Kingland about a job for the rest of the school year and about interning again with them in the summer. I’m going to be doing upkeep on their website from here at school during the rest of the year. The only trouble with this is that I’m going to have to really brush up my html and learn asp and flash. I have never touched either of those things so I’m going in without any experience. I might just have to go pick up a book or two on them to try and learn how to use them. The other thing is that to be able to test the pages I’m going to have to have a webserver running on my computer and I don’t think I have it set up right to do it so I’ll have to try and figure that out as well. Windows 2000 had a webserver built in to the OS, but I’m running XP and I don’t know if they kept a webserver built in or not. I’ll probably go digging around later today between classes and see if I can’t figure it out. I’m really starting to find computers as more and more of a nuisance than a blessing. So anyone out there who has worked with flash or asp or knows how to set up a webserver that will run asp pages, please email me or contact me because I’d love the help.

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