JESUS CHRIST PORNOSTAR

Type: EP

Release date:

• April 17, 2022 (digital)

• April 17, 2023 (first self-released CD edition)

• August 25, 2024 (second self-released CD edition)

Formats: CD, Digital

Lineup:

Noise Maniakk - songwriting, rhythm and lead guitars, bass, lead and backing vocals

Guests:

Sinistro - additional guitars

Er Magnotta 666 - drums

Krost von Barbarie - additional vocals (track 2)

Written in four hectic days during august 2017.

Recorded in Belpasso and Siracusa between august 2018 and november 2019.

Not produced, de-mixed and unmastered by Noise Maniakk.

Artwork by Gore Occulto.

Noise Maniakk's perspective

This EP was not supposed to exist, originally.

The "Jesus Christ pornostar" suite was at first imagined as a single track to close "Sonic degeneracy - Vol. I" and nothing more. However, when I decided to release the album in different editions (the "trimmed down" CD edition, and the extended digital edition with the complete Vol. I and II), I thought it'd be nice to give "Jesus Christ pornostar" more exposure as a standalone release - thus I decided to release it as an EP divided into chapters. The idea of releasing it right on Easter day, hyping it up with multiple ambiguous previews on social media, was a rather risky gimmick but it paid off marvelously in the end: streams on Bandcamp skyrocketed to the moon, perhaps moreso than any previous release, and many new possibilities for Rotgod started presenting right around that time.

The idea for "Jesus Christ pornostar" dates back to 2013, when I was just 15 and making music was something I could only dream of. It was around spring. I remember, back then, me and a friend of mine having long walks through the urban park of Belpasso, singing San Culamo songs aloud (for those who don't know: comedy project San Culamo is a mainstay of italian blasphemy), eagerly waiting for the release of their iconoclastic re-dubbing of "The passion of the Christ". At the time I was also getting obsessed with Type O Negative, particularly the "Slow, deep and hard" and "Bloody kisses" records - the latter featuring a well-known tune with romantic, suave, yet at the same time debauched and sacrilegious overtones, named "Christian woman". And then, of course, there was my obsession with the more violent, riff-oriented forms of thrash metal, which was already well-established by then: at the time, bands such as Sodom, Sepultura, Attomica, Dark Angel, Sadus, Destruction, Slayer, Assorted Heap, S.O.D., Deathrow, Vio-lence, Nuclear Assault, Testament, Exodus, Accuser, Carnivore, Tankard and Kreator were already my personal gospel.

I can vividly recall, on that particular day, I had listened once again to Dark Angel's superb masterpiece "Time does not heal": a dark, disturbing, hallucinated psychological trip through (sic) "9 songs, 67 minutes, 246 riffs". No wonder my brain started going some weird places on that day, birthing the "Jesus Christ pornostar" idea at first almost jokingly - but always keeping it in the back of my head since then, waiting for more favorable times to come. I still had no real musical ideas back then (the riffs I was writing at the time were weak as hell and usually ended up in the bin immediately), I only had a skeleton of the general concept: Jesus-Magdalene love story; death-resurrection story revised through trashy/pornographic lens; hyper-complex suite divided in multiple chapters, filled with tons of riffs, with broad and eclectic musical style based on the mood of each chapter. Stop. Everything else would come later.

When I officially started Rotgod in 2015, the "Jesus Christ pornostar" idea (at the time still bearing the rather childish, near-nonsensical working title "Jesus Christ blowjob") still felt exciting and relevant to me, to the point of including it in the list I drafted around early 2016 of all the songs I was still planning to write for the first Rotgod demo - a project I would abort shortly after, following the infamous "hard drive disaster" where all the songs I had already written were lost, forcing me to start from scratch. Regardless, this "Jesus-themed suite" idea always remained there in the back of my head - though I admit I also felt a certain degree of "reverential fear" towards it: I was afraid that my inspiration and my songwriting skills at the time couldn't live up to such a massive, intricate concept - which is why I kept postponing the writing to when I'd finally feel inspired, confident and with fully mature ideas. In hindsight, it was definitely the wisest thing I could do: had I forced myself to sit and write by default, I would've sure come up with something far less compelling and more formulaic compared to the roaring flood of ideas that suddenly struck my morbid psyche during summer 2017. By that point, I was nearly finished with the songwriting process for what would later become "Sonic degeneracy" (for which I was planning to start the recordings around that fall) - and that's when, almost providentially, my brain started coming up with endless ideas for the Jesus-themed suite that I knew I absolutely had to put into practice before I forgot 'em. After writing songs such as "Salomé" (which was already a mixture of styles in itself) and the "After the impact (day 5)" instrumental, I finally felt confident and mature enough in my songwriting chops to tackle such a complex track. So in early august, for just four days, I locked myself up at home, reversing my sleep schedule (nothing new really) by writing mostly at night and sleeping during the day, laying down "Jesus Christ pornostar" in its entirety - going nuts with endless riffs and lyrical ideas that were totally fucking bananas.

The basic plotline for the porno-necrophiliac love story between Jesus and Magdalene I had come up with back in 2013 was kept the way it was originally, without changes - but aside from that, I introduced some more ideas that were just as sick, twisted and in stark defiance of any good taste. I filled the suite with easter eggs (both musical and lyrical) taken from the world of "trash media", drawing especially from the endless stream of vintage stuff you usually see getting reuploaded on the web by fanatics, preserving it from oblivion. Some of these references are fairly obvious, while others are really hermetic and difficult to pinpoint - and I'm not gonna spoil the mystique of the song by listing them all here, but just to mention a few rather obscure examples: "she has never tried Hooray", a verse used as an innuendo referring to Mary Magdalene, is actually a reference to a rather tasteless italian TV spot from the late 80s for Saiwa wafers "Urrà" (italian for "hooray" - and if you listen closely at that precise point, you'll even hear a voice from the original spot, saying "try it!" in italian); the chant "ehhhhh Maddalena!" at the beginning of the "Outro" track is a homage to the "Macarena" parody made by Mister Max, a sicilian parodist singer I'm a die-hard fan of since I was little, to whom I wanted to dedicate that small section, followed by the phrase "attenti al matto!" ("beware the mad one!") which instead references Pippo Franco's well-known hit "Chi chi chi co co co"; the vocal reader sentence "non mi ha fatto ridere" ("didn't find it funny") at the end of the song is a reference to the Elio e le Storie Tese album "Eat the phykis" (over the course of which you can hear the same phrase being repeated at different points, only pronounced by a male vocal reader instead of the "Google assistant" female one I used); finally, the "happy-sounding" heavy/speed section at the end of "Mourning (necrophiliac kleptonymphomania)" is a mashup of italian and international "trash music", including Charlie's "Faccia da pirla" (the sped-up remix version from the 1994 album "Fottiti!", which was perfect for a speed metal adaptation), Mo-Do's "Ein zwei polizei" (well, that was obvious...), which at some point is even interspersed with a lead that recalls the legendary "We are number one" from the Lazy Town cartoon, which for some reason had become a viral meme around the time I wrote the suite (and now after saying this, I'm waiting for the fucking Meme Police accusing me of the severe, unforgivable crime of using dead memes in my songs... come in guys, I ain't gonna hurt ya, I swear). Oh, and just to drop one more huge clue on y'all - another really obscure easter egg from the suite can also be found hidden somewhere in the cover art for "Polemics and obscenity"... and that's a pretty hard one to find. Hmm-hmm.

What about the "Jesus Christ pornostar" title, instead? Well, now I can finally say it: I lifted it from Chemlab, a 90's industrial band I was listening to at the time (go listen their hit song "Codeine glue and you", you'll be hooked instantly). I'm also aware that australian hardcore/grind legends Rupture once made a song with the same title, but at the time I didn't listen to Rupture yet, so they're not the band I lifted the idea from - sorry to disappoint the grindheadz among you.

However, you might be wondering: why all this big game of trashy references and easter eggs? What was the need, on such an already bloated track? Even I can't give you a straight answer - I simply felt like doing it. Perhaps I could just tell you that, during that particular summer, I was feeling quite a bit nostalgic and melancholic, and was on some weird kind of bad Internet trip through forgotten trashy/"national-popular" media, most notably rediscovering vintage italian gems I casually knew thanks to my parents - and this suite featured many lyrical ideas that were trashy enough to be connected to specific references coming from that world. Or you'd rather believe the "divine red muscle of love" was placed there for no reason? What about the "necrophiliac kleptonymphomania"?

Much more serious were the various jabs thrown at the Israel government (not the palestinian one, as a blatantly absent-minded reviewer wrote in his hasty five-lines "review"), calling them out for their expansionist, colonial actions. Back then, this looked like a much less relevant topic than it is today - however, I was already old enough to possess the bare minimum of social conscience that's needed to look with utter disgust at the embargo Gaza citizens had been enduring for years already, starving and thirsting in the name of a conflict that's been going on for almost a century, with the zionist movement blatantly acting in bad faith since the beginning (and speaking of religious fundamentalism: I had already called out zionism even in a small line from "Terrorists", despite the seemingly anti-islamic sentiments of that one track). With said assumptions, and with the story of "Jesus Christ pornostar" obviously taking place in the notorious Holy Land, I couldn't resist from including some more-or-less evident references to the Israel-Palestine conflict, with a final plot twist about the "true origins" of the conflict which is pretty much just gallows humor in the face of all such grotesque horror.

At the time "Jesus Christ pornostar" was written, dear Israel president Benjamin Netanyahu was building settlements over occupied West Bank territory, facing no consequences for that, despite said settlements having been judged illegal by the UN. Today, the Israel-Hamas conflict has escalated to levels we could never expect back then; this led me, in recent years, to do my own part for all that it's worth (as a privileged western man sitting on his warm butt, as someone would not-too-unfairly say in this particular case) by re-releasing the EP on physical and connecting it to a fundraising for non-profit organization MAP (Medical Aid for Palestinians). Many copies are still available on Bandcamp - so you know what to do, if you wanna contribute.

Recordings for "Jesus Christ pornostar" were some of the most hectic, grotesque episodes out of all "Sonic degeneracy" sessions.

Guitars were tracked in september 2018 not in Belpasso as usual, but in a rehearsal room in Siracusa, with Sinistro of Trinakria and Skeletal Gore (who weren't even a thing yet) helping me out on rhythm guitars for this and other tracks including "Cult of fornication" and "How to be deep (pt. 1)" (which is why, if you listen closely to all these tracks, you'll notice a slightly different guitar tone compared to the other tracks from "Sonic degeneracy", due to the different acoustics of that particular room). Things were utterly chaotic: I knew we had to record all guitars for the whole suite within the span of a single afternoon, otherwise the sound would've never been the same again when coming to record the day after, and the abrupt change in tone right in the middle of the track would have been apparent and annoying as hell (that's always due to the - shall we say - "rudimentary" equipment I used for the recordings, back then). It was a frantic race against the clock to nail down every single riff and lead at least once, whilst Sinistro's friends had come over there without warning, suggesting (with great context awareness and respect of other people's work, I must say) to "do something together", "going some place" et cetera. No comment needed. When we finished recording it was night already, so we just went to dinner, with the general mood being already ruined (after all a gigantic, 26-minutes long suite is something you can expect to easily nail down within a couple of hours, right?). Those recordings were so hastily thrown together that to this day I'm honestly amazed at how good the final track sounds - far above early expectations.

Drum recordings were just as much of a race against time, with my drummer friend (the legendary Er Magnotta 666) blasting his way through the entire song over the course of a weekend, back in september 2019. Always due to poor equipment, we still had that same old issue with drum mics often sounding nothing alike from one session to another in a totally unpredictable fashion, and this posed some problems in recording such a long ass piece within a single day - a work schedule that was not compatible with my friend's personal schedule. We decided to split the recordings in two afternoons in a row - saturday and sunday - praying for mixer and mics to be benevolent and keep a more-or-less cohesive sound between the two days, and using the long drum-less interlude of "Mourning" as the drawing line between the two sessions. Thankfully, in that case, the recording equipment behaved well enough (certainly better than how the guitar equipment would have behaved in a similar situation), and those recordings ended up being amazing. I love every detail about them - every fill, the groove, the touch - everything's spot on. By the way, those were also the final drum recordings done for "Sonic degeneracy", which by that time was close to pretty much being finished.

The "Jesus Christ pornostar" mix, despite requiring tons of work due to the huge amount of different tracks (and the RAM of my older Mac being unfit for such a heavy project, thus lagging to no end), has turned out to be the absolute best out of all the "Sonic degeneracy" mixes, I think. Guitars for some reason are way ahead any other song off that record, sounding much fuller and clearer, with a lot less background noise, and being spaced out much better with the drums (which in hindsight could have just been a tad higher in the mix, but I still dig the sound quite a lot - definitely cleaner and clearer than most other songs).

No wonder "Jesus Christ pornostar" was used as a reference, back when I started doing some much-needed upgrades to the Rotgod sound equipment for the forthcomings recordings of "Polemics and obscenity" and "Raw is the law". The production on those EPs is basically the enhancement and further improvement of everything that worked particularly well on "Jesus Christ pornostar" compared to other songs of mine. It's pretty much the only mix from the "Sonic degeneracy" album I can positively state I'm fully proud of (despite the suboptimal starting conditions, same as with all the other songs) - and I'm sure this superior audio quality has played a role in the warmer reception of this EP by the general audience, compared to other Rotgod releases from the same time period.

There are quite a lot of people who think "Jesus Christ pornostar" is indeed my best work - including people who generally can't stand my music. Truth is - this, as a matter of fact, is the only Rotgod release to be somewhat "approachable" by a wider metal audience, with less of a purely "underground" sound (which only comes back during the suite's most extreme peaks) and a greater emphasis placed on my love for Iron Maiden melodicisms, which I knew would fit the faux-epic, self-important mood of this particular song (plus, I would further explore this type of sound later on, with my melodic black metal side-project The Ineffable). As a matter of fact - the core idea for this suite was, as early as 2013, to create a playful medley of styles with an almost parodic meta-humor undertone (pretty much in the vein of italian band Elio e le Storie Tese, already one of my favorite bands at the time), and on the basis of this core idea I would later build all the easter eggs, the obscure references and so on.

Over time, Rotgod has often been deemed to be a "meme band" or even a straight out parody/comedy project in the Nanowar of Steel fashion. Listening to my entire discography should be enough to better put things into perspective - but it still remains a common misconception among some fairly inattentive audiences with little knowledge of 80's underground metal/punk. In reality, "Jesus Christ pornostar" is one of the very few times I actually made use of a parodic, "meta" style of humor. The rest of the humor I used throughout "Sonic degeneracy" and later works is pretty much the same type of "dumb", unpretentious humor that was the norm for most 80's thrashcore/crossover/grindcore bands, which presents no parody/meta-commentary undertone that might be traced back to modern comedy rock in the vein of Elio or Weird Al. Postmodern meta-humor, as fun as it is to create, is such a painfully overdone trope by this point (with any fucking piss-panty zoomer on social media believing himself to be a "meme master" just by shitposting some nonsensical blabbering with deliberate typos) that I doubt I'll still be willing to use it in my music anytime in the future, save for a few easter eggs here and there.

Regardless of that, after so many years, I'm still endlessly fascinated by this experiment that has brought me so much gratification, in which I think I might have engraved more secrets about myself than I could imagine at first. At the age of 15, when I first came up with the Jesus/Magdalene story, I was only interested in creating something edgy, blasphemous, hideous, outrageous, crazy and deliberately dumb; however, a side effect of creativity (no matter how ironic and light-hearted it may be) is that it exposes us for who we are, in our underlying patterns and inner workings, more than we might realize during the process of ideation.

I realized what "Jesus Christ pornostar" truly meant for me - beyond all the silly humor bullshit and socio-political undertones (the latter being quite "on the nose" after all, even rather trite in their critique of religious wars) - only while I was in the midst of recording it, back in 2018, already in my 20s by then. And to be honest, it was not a nice realization: what I found out about myself between the folds of this suite was rather ugly and sad. I won't elaborate further: it's all written down there.

I'd rather want you to think of how the story concludes with what seems like a happy ending (at least for Jesus and Magdalene - not quite as much for the two peoples living over there!), and yet the suite closes with an extremely melancholic, bittersweet arpeggio. What if the happy ending was actually less happy than the lyrics would suggest? What if, in reality, something has gone horribly wrong? What if something... will go horribly wrong? What if...?

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