Simply for song “I AM”
5
By Djent is a retarded term
While on here checking out their new single release “Drop” I wanted to visit other albums I own, which are all of them but I still don’t have the remastered version of W.A.A.S.D. yet. Anyway I was curious to see if anyone commented on here about “I Am” and sure enough there was a good review about it minus the Jamaican style being discredited towards Sonny. I have always loved POD’s reggae tracks BUT I do agree to an extent it didn’t seem to fit entirely on the style of songs Sonny was trying to incorporate with on here, but all good and still decent songs to me. I believe that actually is just also what the other reviewer meant also.👍 Anyway yes I was so PO’ed when that deluxe edition of this album dropped and left that song off! WHAT?!? That has got to be one of POD’s greatest songs ever written and fellow Christians that gave them crap for it was just stupid, they miss the whole point of the song and what Sonny was trying to get across. God expects us to get angry with him, he tests us, he pushes us, we may never fully understand his reasoning for things in our lives but he has his reasons, and so many of the youth actually speak this way. It’s called the real world. Besides the F-Word is blurred out anyhow which is why it upsets me even more that the song got trashed on and wasn’t included on the deluxe. It’s one thing if we actually heard the word but you don’t which just make that whole situation that much more ridiculous. Yes we know what he is saying obviously but I actually think it was cool how they still reversed it. Yes you can find a version of it out there not reversed hearing Sonny yell out the actual word which I have a copy, but I still play the blurred reversed version over it only because that was the official released version and I think it sounds cool letting the listener know what Sonny is saying without officially hearing the F-Word said. It’s almost like Sonny and crew in the end said hey we don’t need to include the actual word but let us reverse it with still being able to get our true point across behind it. You can laugh at me for this but the song actually can make tears run down my eyes at times simply for dealing with some of what Sonny is expressing in the lyrics of things I have battled in my own life, but I continue to remain keeping my faith in the Lord to help me fight off those demons. To me that song IS POD at their best. I love Marcos guitar work on this song. His haunting clean guitar tones going behind the heavy distortion, that is POD’s sound to the fullest and something I have always loved with their music. I was so stoked when I first heard this album in full and once it reached the last track. I had discovered one of my top favorite POD songs of all time! Truby is a great guitarist and pulled the bands sound off just as good as Marcos when he was out for awhile, those are some of my most favorite POD albums, but is good we still have Marcos back because it was his guitar work that first made a lot of us a fan, and man their music is just so good. Metal/Reggae/Rock/HipHop. “I Am” though is the best song off this album hands down. I would buy this entire album simply for that one song and iTunes has been good enough to allow folks to choose whatever song they want to purchase off this record. Respects POD and shame on anyone bad mouthing that song because I guarantee that song has helped so many people. Sonny and crew knocked it out of the park with that jam!
🤘🎸🤘🙏✝️
An album with importance
5
By FitForAnImpendingDoom100
There are some flaws; Sonny Sandoval uses a new vocal style (Jamaican style according to him) that doesn’t work on the songs he employs it on, and a few songs—namely the title cut and Babylon the Murderer—are subpar. Other than those setbacks the rest is great, from the hard hitting rap metal of Eyez (with some of my favorite lyrics from P.O.D.) to the laidback ghetto groove of West Coast Rock Steady, from the contemplative alt-metal of Lost in Forever to the spiritual Higher, from the grim but ultimately uplifting Beautiful to the humorously flirtatious Bad Boy.
But the one song that really takes the cake (not included on the deluxe due to the Christian community flipping out on the band, missing the message of the song completely) is the brutal statement, I Am. We Christians aren’t doing what we were commissioned to do; we have turned the Word of Christ, which was spoken to free us of religion (the ridiculous notion that we can earn our salvation apart from God by adding to His law and imposing upon ourselves things that burden us) into exactly that. And what results is that we become Pharisees, who did that to the law of Moses. We judge and condemn seculars though it is not our place to do so; we either hate on or dismiss gay people and other sinners as if we’re better than them and don’t offer them anything: no compassion, no friendship, no sympathy, no hope, no encouragement, nothing. We must stay with our kind and not associate ourselves with such scum. We treat church as a social club rather than a haven for the broken; we put on our smiles, our masks, and play perfect and hide any pain or mistakes, and certainly shut out anyone who tries to come to us with their baggage. We isolate ourselves with phony worship music that repeats the same hollowed out lyrics over and over and bad religious movies and stay safe and “clean”, oblivious to the suffering of those who need our help. We have megachurches that enhance and abet all of this and confuse God with status and wealth, maybe even “turning the house of God into a den of robbers”. And whenever any genuine, unPharisaic Christian tries to branch out, whether they are a musician or author or filmmaker, and express themselves, worshipping Jesus in their own way and being individuals, doing what the Bible tells them to, confronting and acknowledging the world and its ills, we ostracize them for getting dirty; we brutally cast them away because they don’t fit our religious mold.
I Am pulls back the curtain and lists off the people we’re failing, the ones who desperately need God’s love in their lives but stay away because of us. They need to be addressed, their problems and overall problems of the world have to be addressed, but we bury them cause that’s not safe or clean or Christlike to open our minds and hearts to such things. How untrue and unbiblical. And this song drives that point home. Granted, it does have the F word, but it’s censored enough to make it less offensive, yet it adds dark realism to the twisted mess depicted here. This is an ugly, dark and disturbing song, one that reaches out to the lost soul while simultaneously pummeling the Christian listener with harsh truth. If you are left drained, it’s done its job. Hillsong, Lauren Daigle, and Tauren Wells don't and won’t write songs like this; not even TobyMac, honest and more genuine as he is, tackles this subject. But someone had to, and I’m very glad it was P.O.D., it couldn’t have been easy to make this song. I Am stands as one of the greatest and most important songs in all of Christian music, and Murdered Love stands as an achievement in itself.
