Hot Dogma is the second studio album by the Australian alternative rock band TISM. It was released on 1 October 1990 and peaked at number 86 on the ARIA Charts. The title comes from a joining of the two phrases hot dog, a food, and dogma, a specific religious belief.[citation needed] An additional disc, Hot Dogma - The Interview Disc was added to initial sales copies and contains live responses by TISM to an unheard DJ’s questions.
In a review of TISM’s sixth studio album The White Albun, Anton S Trees of FasterLouder compared it to Hot Dogma, where the latter is "filled with moments of introspection and reflection on the nature of self, existence and mortality – TISM examine the value of life. Most prominent amongst the examinations of mortality and the cyclical nature of existence is 'Life Kills'."[1]
Steve Bell of theMusic.com.au website noticed it "quickly became a fan favourite but didn't set the world on fire commercially nor bother the charts, so TISM were soon unceremoniously dumped by Phonogram during 1991 and found themselves homeless."[2]
The cover of the album features what appear to be Chinese Red Guards carrying a large banner with “TISM” written across it and carrying what, on first look, appears to be Mao Zedong's Little Red Book, but is on closer inspection The TISM Guide To Little Aesthetics. The artwork closely resembled posters of the time of Mao's reign.[citation needed]
The Chinese on the cover translates into "The unification of the proletariat under the banner of TISM".[citation needed]
The back cover of the album has the track lists in Chinese, however the band have repeatedly claimed that the Asian division of Polygram released a version with the track titles in English.[3] The titles are listed in English in the liner notes.
The unlisted segue and "Life Kills" are indexed as one 5:52-long track on the iTunes and Spotify releases.
LP copies of Hot Dogma were bundled with a pack-in 7" single, containing a humorous open-ended interview with TISM and blank spaces for a DJ to insert the questions. Both sides contain the same interview.
The last four tracks on the disc are questions from TISM to the DJ.
On 17 and 18 March 1990, TISM recorded demos for what eventually became Hot Dogma at Sing Sing Studios. Six tracks from the session were released in 1995 on Collected Recordings 1986-1993, while the whole set of demos was eventually released on 18 August 2023, as part of the ongoing reissue campaign of TISM's discography, and hit #14 on the ARIA Australian Artist charts.[4]
Notable inclusions are the first known studio recording of "Opium is the Religion of the Masses", a song previously only known from live recordings from the Great Truckin' Songs of the Renaissance era, and "Greece is Still Greece", which provided the backing music for the album version of "The TISM Finance Plan Offer", as well as "Too Cool for School, Too Stupid for Life", a song that had been performed several times by TISM in 1989 but never used on an album.