You Don't Know Me but You Don't Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music's Most Maligned Tribes

by Rabin, Nathan

  To paraphrase the title of a Phish song Anastasio turned into an appropriately epic symphonic album, at a truly transcendent show time turns elastic and fans are temporarily liberated from the tyranny of the clock.

  We stop being prisoners of time, and for a brief, drugged-up idyll become its master. We are put in touch with the timeless, the unknowable, the divine: pure consciousness. Throughout my travels I experienced moments like that, moments that I never wanted to end. The nice thing about being at a Phish festival is that at the beginning of the day, the concept of a show that will never end seems like an endlessly appealing and strangely palatable option. On that Saturday, for example, Phish began by playing a nearly two-hour-long opening set that would be a more than respectable night’s performance for most bands. For Phish during Super Ball, however, that meant they were barely warming up. By the time they finished playing a wholly improvised secret fourth set with Page on the theremin deep into the wee small hours of the morning, Phish had played for just under six hours, rendering it one of the longest performances in its history—yet it still wasn’t enough.

  That evening I met a gentleman named Andy Bernstein, who had edited and helped compile The Pharmer’s Almanac: The Unofficial Guide to Phish, a seminal reference book on Phish, before becoming executive director of HeadCount, an organization he cofounded with Marc Brownstein, bassist for the Disco Biscuits, that had registered hundreds of thousands of young voters at shows.

  Bernstein had a sweet-ass trailer that was visited that night by Steve Pollak, a songwriter better known to Phish fans under his moniker Dude of Life. Along with his friend Trey, Pollak had written some of Phish’s best and most beloved and memorable songs, including “Fluffhead” and “Suzy Greenberg.” Despite the auspicious place Pollak occupied in Phish mythology—in the early 1990s he’d even recorded a solo album with Phish as his backing band—he had an air of humility that impressed me disproportionately.

  Consciously or unconsciously, I think we all expect impressive people to be unbearably arrogant and self-absorbed and are surprised and delighted when they prove otherwise. Pollak worked as a special education teacher, and I would imagine he’s far too modest to ever tell his students, “Do you realize how fucking excited you guys would be to be in my presence if you were Phish fans? Seriously, among a certain subsection of the general public I am, at the very least, a minor deity.” Shit, I felt honored to be in his laconic presence and Bernstein’s as well.

  A feeling of absolute peace and transcendence swept over me when Phish closed out a remarkable festival with “The Star-Spangled Banner” as July 3 turned into July 4 and fireworks exploded high above Watkins Glen. After a summer of weird vibes and anxious times, everything was seeming to come together perfectly. For the time being.

  THE GATHERING OF THE JUGGALOS 2011: BANG! POW! BOOM!

  Super Ball IX proved a masterpiece of planning and execution. Everything had gone right. The same could not quite be said of the next festival on my schedule: the almighty Gathering of the Juggalos. I had a date with destiny in just over a month. I hoped I was finally ready. I went to my first Gathering of the Juggalos as a curious outsider. By the time I returned to the sacred ground of Cave-in-Rock, I was ready to announce to the world that I was down with the clown till I’m dead in the ground.

  I am not too proud to concede that there was some small, greasepainted corner of my soul that greeted the prospect of a return to the Gathering of the Juggalos with feverish anticipation. For something strange and unexpected happened between my first and second Gatherings: At the risk of losing what little journalistic credibility I have left, I came to enjoy listening to the music of Insane Clown Posse. Make of that what you will. You might be tempted to write my newfound appreciation off as a critical case of Stockholm Syndrome. Alternately, you can attribute my affection to the untreated head injury I incurred at Bethel Woods. In that case, feel free to dismiss the following as the incoherent rambling of the pop-culture world’s answer to Regarding Henry.

  Violent J pointedly did not advise listening to his group’s music. This speaks to a strange duality regarding the role music plays in the Juggalo subculture: It’s at once its epicenter and strangely irrelevant. Without the music of ICP, the Gathering and Juggalos would not exist, but Juggalo subculture has transcended music to the point where you can lose yourself in the iconography and ideas and lifestyle without paying too much attention to the music itself.

  I’m not going to posit Insane Clown Posse as great, misunderstood artists even as I feel they have been greatly misunderstood over the course of their decades in the spotlight. Praise the Clowns as dumb fun, and you shortchange the genuine ambition and vision of the Joker’s Cards and the Dark Carnival. Highlight the ambition and vision of the Dark Carnival, and you end up overselling a guilty pleasure. Praise the group as a Barnumesque racket, and you risk rendering the music irrelevant. Being down with the clown can be a tricky business.

  Listening to the duo’s 1992 debut Carnival of Carnage, it’s easy to see why the group was received as warmly as a NAMBLA delegation at a Boy Scout convention by critics, MTV, hip-hop radio, and other gatekeepers of culture. There’s a rawness to the album that’s at once jarring and strangely seductive, a primitiveness that marks it as outsider art.

  In an endearingly amateurish attempt at an ominous voice, the narrator of the album’s intro track speaks of a gentle night in “your town,” where the peace and tranquility are about to be destroyed by the titular circus of depravity and devastation. He speaks of an evil creeping in from the distance, slithering through quiet streets, and confronting a terrified populace doomed to pay the ultimate price for a trip to the carnival.

  “Intro” establishes some enduring themes within the ICP canon: the contrast between illusion and reality and the need to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In Carnival of Carnage, the urban poor bring the horrors of the ghetto to the ritziest suburbs. They’re the demonic unleashed id of the suffering underclass turned monstrous and eviscerating, a sentient plague upon those who exploit and control the downtrodden. Carnival of Carnage similarly establishes a pronounced anti-redneck bias in ICP’s music that finds its purest expression in “Your Rebel Flag” (as in “fuck your”). Here, as elsewhere, Violent J’s cartoon aggression is undercut by ingratiating naïveté; according to Behind the Paint, Violent J was moved to write songs like “Rebel Flag” and “Redneck Hoe” because he was so horrified by the racism he’d encountered while visiting his brother down South. J writes that before visiting his brother he had never experienced racism before, either firsthand or indirectly, and consequently was shocked and horrified by it.

  By the time of 1997’s The Great Milenko Insane Clown Posse had shaken off the amateurish sociopathology of Carnival of Carnage and found its growling, rasping, ridiculous, and darkly comic voice. “Hokus Pokus” marries an elastic bass groove reminiscent of Cypress Hill’s “How I Could Just Kill a Man” with carnival organ and demented lyrics about walking into a Gypsy’s tent with a food stamp and walking out with a magical lamp. It’s a great hip-hop song, but more than anything it’s a great pop song, with an infectious sing-along chorus that takes up valuable real estate in the mind, then claims squatter’s rights and refuses to leave. Folks laughing derisively at ICP don’t seem to realize that Insane Clown Posse spends much of its time laughing at itself, its fans, and the gothic universe it has created. With the possible exception of the “Miracles” video, Insane Clown Posse is supposed to be funny. That’s the ICP that resonates and speaks to me, the macabre dark humorists transforming everything into a sinister, self-deprecating joke.

  On “What Is a Juggalo?” for example, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope paint an affectionate, gently mocking portrait of their fan base as sloppy drunks, perverts, and out-and-out lunatics. ICP take nothing seriously on the song, including each other’s verses. At one point Violent J raps that a Juggalo’ll “eat Monopoly and shit out Connect 4,” a line that flummoxes Shaggy 2 Dope to t
he point that he actually interrupts his own rap to complain that Violent J’s lyric doesn’t make any sense. In “What Is a Juggalo?” Insane Clown Posse has good-natured fun with just about every element of their fan base, including their education. When the duo insists, “What is a Juggalo? He’s a graduate,” their claim is met by the lonely, mocking sounds of crickets chirping before the duo is forced to concede, “At least he got a job/He’s not a dumb putz/He works for himself scratching his nuts.” Everyone has fun at the expense of Juggalos, even Insane Clown Posse. Especially Insane Clown Posse.

  The monster hook and catchy production of “Down with the Clown” betray one of Insane Clown Posse’s guiltiest secrets: The most reviled horrorcore band in existence is actually a nifty pop outfit. The Insane Clown Posse-versus-the-mainstream dichotomy has more to do with ideology and marketing than it does with the music itself, which can be pretty goddamn infectious if you open your mind to it.

  I came to unironically enjoy Insane Clown Posse’s music because it’s funny and catchy and gloriously unpretentious, but I also responded to its romanticization of a weirdly specific form of poverty. Even if the humor and class consciousness of Insane Clown Posse leave you cold, it’s hard not to admire the conceptual ambition of launching an ongoing, seemingly open-ended narrative that plays out over the course of an entire decade.

  The mythology of the Dark Carnival culminates in “Thy Unveiling,” the final track off The Wraith: Shangri-La and the most important track in Insane Clown Posse’s discography and the Dark Carnival mythology. Everything leads up to “Thy Unveiling.” Everything.

  On “Thy Unveiling,” the past takes on a physical presence as Violent J references the five Joker’s Cards leading up to that pivotal moment before dramatically announcing that time is up. The time for obfuscation is passed. The moment has arrived when all will be revealed. Pulling back the curtain further, Insane Clown Posse reveal that they’d been dropping hints and messages throughout their albums that most of their fans never picked up on because they “stuck ’em in subliminally with the wicked shit around them.”

  The song mounts in volume and intensity as Insane Clown Posse dramatically announce that the Carnival is more than the sum of its parts. It’s bigger than Psychopathic Records. It’s bigger than Insane Clown Posse. It’s an idea as big as the universe itself, if not bigger, since it extends deep into the afterlife and other worlds. The song builds and builds and builds until J unleashes the central revelation behind Insane Clown Posse’s music: “When we speak of Shangri-La, what you think we mean? Truth is we follow GOD!!! We’ve always been behind him/The carnival is GOD and may all Juggalos find him.”

  In Behind the Paint, J writes that the revelation of the final Joker’s Card was so powerful it reduced fans to tears, but I suspect a goodly percentage of the group’s fans felt ripped off. This was the big statement the group was making? This was their big manifesto? Follow God? Wasn’t that what every fucking authority figure they’d ever encountered told them? And now that was the ultimate message of ICP? Follow God?

  Insane Clown Posse inherently acknowledges the inevitable disappointment of Juggalos when it chants, “We’re not sorry that we tricked you!” on “Thy Unveiling” itself. “Thy Unveiling” is a gospel anthem unlike any other, and not just because it’s littered with profanity and references to previous Insane Clown Posse songs. It’s the Gospel of the Scrub, the Holy Book of Juggalo. Insane Clown Posse brings the full weight of the Dark Carnival mythology to bear on “Thy Unveiling,” crafting a weirdly if characteristically profane rap-operatic mission statement that thunders with pop-messianic purpose.

  By the time 2009’s Bang! Pow! Boom! arrived, Insane Clown Posse was ready to embrace its inner pop star. The title track is a groovy throwback number that finds ecstasy in a bleak moral reckoning. It’s Insane Clown Posse in microcosm: finding the joy in the macabre and the celebration in the gothic. Also, it’s catchy as fuck.

  This brings us to “Miracles.” That song changed my life. Without “Miracles,” there would be no Gathering of the Juggalos for me, no Hallowickeds, no Joker’s Cards. I would have missed the whole surreal circus. I don’t know whether to be grateful or rue the day I ever heard that song.

  When I first listened to “Miracles,” all I heard was the mind-boggling incongruity of violent clowns calling attention to the wonder and mystery of our world with hilarious earnestness. I grooved to the surreal juxtaposition of profane language expressing clumsily sacred sentiments. “Miracles” awkwardly but gloriously captures Insane Clown Posse’s childlike sense of wonder, its profound if cockeyed appreciation for the endless bounty we’ve been given. “Miracles” may have made Insane Clown Posse even more of a laughingstock than before, but is there really anything wrong with finding the fantastic and transcendent in the everyday, in imploring your fans to look at a corrupt material world and see the timeless and the divine? True, the message of “Miracles” would probably be more powerful and better received if it didn’t also contain bizarre non sequiturs about pelicans trying to eat cell phones or angry demands to know how fucking magnets work, but on “Miracles” the duo’s intentions are nothing if not admirable. Shaggy 2 Dope’s line about not wanting to talk to a scientist was ridiculed as an ignorant antiscience screed, but—and I will concede that this is a little generous—I think the line is critical of those who look at the wonders of the world and see only science, without leaving any room for awe or the divine.

  But more than anything, what I responded to in Insane Clown Posse’s music was the exhilarating sense of freedom I experienced at the Gathering: freedom from shame, freedom from self-consciousness, freedom from even the foggiest notion of good taste. A world of freedom opens up when you decide to stop caring about what the world thinks of you. Musically and otherwise, Insane Clown Posse take full advantage of the freedom that comes with having nothing left to lose, with having been mocked or derided from the very beginning.

  For the twelfth Annual Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse headlined a 1990s hip-hop head’s wet dream. It’s as if Insane Clown Posse shuffled a pack of Yo! MTV Raps cards from 1992 and picked out the festival’s entertainment at random. So minor West Coast legend DJ Quik (can you be a minor legend? If so, then Quik is definitely it) is joined on the bill by slang-spitting Bay Area linguist E-40, former stockbroker/Black Nationalist rapper Paris (best known for his controversial single “Bush Killa”), West Coast gangsta rap pioneer turned children’s entertainment mogul Ice Cube, crunk kingpin and hoarse-shouting enthusiast Lil Jon, once-controversial early 1990s pop-rap megastars Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer, R&B superstar turned professional fuck-up Bobby Brown, and far too many other big names and fascinating stories to go into. Tila Tequila had threatened to shut down the Gathering but it had returned bigger, fiercer, weirder, and more defiant than ever.

  Between my first and second Gatherings, I had forgotten how impossible the roads leading to Cave-in-Rock are to navigate. Hog Rock, the campground where the festival is held, is so remote it doesn’t even have an address. Streetlights are nonexistent. The road is unpaved and uneven. We drove past a busted-down old shed with graffiti crudely reading WHOOP WHOOP and JUGGALO and knew we were officially in Juggalo country once we saw a steady stream of cops pulling folks over and putting them away in handcuffs. The police were out in full force that year, though there were massive limits to their powers. They could pull over and arrest anyone they wanted, but since the local jail housed only eight or nine people (this is Cave-In-Rock, Illinois, we’re talking about, after all), pretty much everyone had to be released at some point.

  Behind us in line to receive our press passes, a naked woman stood looking bored with studied nonchalance, affording the Gathering a full-on glimpse of the gaudy burst of vaginal jewelry decorating her pierced clitoris and the Hitler mustache line of her pubic hair. I should point out that Cadence made that observation, not I. It’s remarkable how quickly you become jaded at the sight of naked flesh of all varieties at the
Gathering. And, oh, sweet Lord, do you see naked flesh of all varieties. It’s an empowering realm where women who weigh three hundred pounds can strut around topless and win only approving grins and cries of, “Whoop! Whoop!” from their compatriots.

  Public nudity is a not insignificant part of what makes the Gathering the Gathering. The transgressive allure of the festival is that it’s a world without consequences, where everything is allowed and the only real imperative is to not harm thy fellow Juggalo or lose thy shit.

  Of course plenty of folks blatantly ignore the imperative not to harm thy fellow Juggalo. Just about every year at the Gathering somebody gets stabbed or killed or winds up dead. There’s a strange air of inevitability to it. If you bring together thousands of largely poor, uneducated people without opportunities or resources and get them drunk and high on just about everything, then some violence is going to occur. It’s just going to happen no matter the safeguards put in place, and, to be fair, there are very few safeguards put in place.

  I think it would behoove Violent J to just kind of throw that out at his yearly seminar, to say, “Look, guys. We’re all going to have a blast here at the Gathering. We’re going to make memories to last a lifetime, and also someone is going to get stabbed, probably over a drug deal. So while enjoying yourself at the festival, take care not to get stabbed.”

  The Gathering isn’t just about the yearly stabbing. It’s also about performing, and many of the performers aren’t onstage. They’re people who’ve chosen to make a spectacle of themselves for this very special occasion and have pieced together papier-mâché hatchets and homemade Dark Lotus costumes and more jailhouse tattoos than can be found in most major correctional facilities. At the Gathering of the Juggalos, you do the wrong thing just because you can. Hell, you do the wrong thing because that’s pretty much what’s expected of you.