Religion comes to mind frequently when you watch Rockstar: Supernova, the reality television show that Icelandic country band singer Magni Ásgeirsson somehow got himself involved in. In fact, I would compare the show to the religious paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. Presented with such supernatural grotesquery, your mind searches for myths or stories that might help you clear a path before the nasty confusion. So it is that Magni, a soft-spoken, decent small-town Icelander, has taken the role of Jesus in the Satanic shitfest that is the Rockstar, described before in this paper as karaoke from hell.
To be cast as Jesus, you need to perform some miracles, though. Magni is up to his third right now. As we reported in the last issue, Magni managed to bend the universe and atomic structure of Los Angeles so that, somehow, Tommy Lee was capable of wordplay. Astounded by Magni’s performance of, of all things, a Stone Temple Pilots cover, Tommy Lee jumped to his feet and said the word “Magni…. Ficent.”
By any account, that is a freakin‘ miracle.
One of this week’s miracles also involved Tommy Lee.
As Magni concluded a passable, honest interpretation of a Coldplay song, Tommy Lee announced that he understood the needs of the family, and told Magni, “We all appreciate your sacrifice here. We would like to fly your family out.”
Magni’s reply, a humbled, “I’m going to go cry now,” likely convinced many that, somehow, family has a place with the rock ‘n‘ roll lifestyle on Rockstar.
In the realm of miracles, this ranks pretty high.
We can’t question Magni, who has a legitimate reputation in Iceland as a good father and boyfriend. (It’s a small country, people’s conduct gets out, even the positive stuff.)
However, Tommy Lee, by interacting with Magni, somehow came off as a rock n roll Alan Thicke.
It prompted some of us to go back to the book of Tommy Lee, his band’s autobiography Dirt. In that text, Tommy Lee extols different domestic virtues. There, when his fiancée insults his mother, who accidentally called her the name of another of Tommy Lee’s girlfriends, he throws her out of a limousine.
Here is how Tommy Lee resolved the conflict, in his own words:
“I drew my arm back and… squeezed my hand into a fist and fucking smashed her right in the grille, dude. Her hands flew to her mouth, and she dropped to the ground… I jumped back in the limo and slammed the door shut. As we drove away, I looked back and saw her kneeling on the pavement and spitting teeth into her hand, which was dripping with mucusy strands of blood.”
Again, Magni made this guy look domestic.
Magni’s other miracle was his performance on Rockstar, where he somehow picked up the song “The Dolphin’s Cry”, by Live, a number with lyrics even more mind-numbingly stupid than its title, and made it sound like it meant something.
Maybe this is the best way to explain the power of his performance, and of his overall charm, in the last weeks. A message on the chat board for Rockstar from Julius in the Philippines stated the following: “We love you in our country. I got my last month’s salary and I spend it all voting for you.”
Yeah. This was definitely the week Magni became a Jesus figure.
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