Perhaps that explains why a perfectly nondescript U-Haul van left the parking lot of the Gathering with a naked woman hanging out of both windows. It’s the kind of thing you don’t see every day, except at the Gathering of the Juggalos it’s exactly the kind of thing you see every day. At the Gathering, everything is reversed. The question becomes less “Why would I show strangers my naked body?” than “What am I doing wearing clothes? Who am I, the fucking queen of England? I might as well have that Great Milenko neck tattoo laser-removed if I’m going to get that highfalutin and fancified.”
On her way to park her car, Cadence received several requests to show her tits.
“This early in the festival, boys?”
“We’ll hit you up later,” they replied.
“First time at the Gathering?” asked a woman behind us when she noticed a look of mild surprise on Cadence’s face as she gawked at the girl with the Hitler-mustache pubic hair, clad only in furry boots and smoking a cigarette.
“No, but I just didn’t expect to know so much about that stranger’s vaginal piercings,” Cadence replied.
The media presence seemed way up this year. The press could be profiled from a hundred feet away by their stylish haircuts, fedoras, and cynical air of ironic detachment. The Gathering of the Juggalos was no longer the secret it once had been. Via Twitter I hooked up with an affable young man named Christopher Weingarten, who was covering the Gathering for MTV.com. Once upon a time MTV was Insane Clown Posse’s bête noire. They were the gatekeepers who stubbornly refused to let Insane Clown Posse penetrate the ranks of pop stardom. MTV used to transform unknowns into stars. During Insane Clown Posse’s late-1990s commercial heyday, MTV took established stars with a huge, dedicated fan base, millions in album sales, and an entire subculture marching in lockstep behind them and treated them like unknowns.
This was a new day, however. Weingarten approached the Gathering of the Juggalos and Insane Clown Posse with the same attitude he seemed to bring to everything: an open mind, guileless enthusiasm, and infectious curiosity. He didn’t drink or use drugs, but that didn’t keep him exuding childlike enthusiasm over just about everything, from getting to see some of his favorite overlooked 1990s rap legends in an unfamiliar context to the Faygo snow cones and carnival goodies like popcorn and cotton candy. He was quite literally an overgrown kid at a carnival.
Weingarten’s open mind reflected a gradual softening in the media’s attitude toward Insane Clown Posse. It’s an old truism that everyone grows respectable with age except whores and politicians, and while it would still be a stretch to call Insane Clown Posse respectable, the longevity of these ridiculous men and their carny arsenal of low-rent gimmicks has earned them grudging respect from a media and culture that have historically held them in contempt.
Part of this is attributable to a mellowing in the group itself. In Behind the Paint, a swaggering and inveterately anti-authoritarian Violent J memorably writes that he “gives no fuck” if his theoretical offspring slapped the shit out of a teacher. These days doting dad and happy husband J tweets ecstatically about his son’s victory in the Cub Scouts’ Pinewood Derby and makes homemade music videos starring his adorable son (dubbed Violent JJ, of course) and daughter Ruby. Saturday Night Live ran so many parodies of Insane Clown Posse, “Miracles,” and the Gathering of the Juggalos that the eminently respectable folks at the New York Times ran an oral history (“Fools’ Gold: An Oral History of the Insane Clown Posse Parodies”) on April 26, 2010. True, it was as a joke and as fodder for satire, but they had penetrated the realm of mainstream media.
In an even more auspicious development, Jack White of the White Stripes lent his stamp of approval to the duo when he produced a single for Insane Clown Posse (“Leck Mich Im Arsch/Mountain Girl”) through his Third Man Records imprint. An icon of underground cool who had also produced Loretta Lynn’s breathtaking and universally revered comeback album Van Lear Rose decided that the band was worth his time and energy.
Insane Clown Posse haven’t just survived. They’ve thrived. The record industry has crumbled, major labels teeter on the brink of extinction, yet Insane Clown Posse’s culture and business and mythology have stood the test of time and birthed multiple generations of Juggalos. That alone is enough to engender long-overdue props even from folks who consider the group a crime against music and an affront to all that is good and decent in the world.
Upon entering the festival, Cadence and I rambled over to a food truck where a Juggalo in a wifebeater and jeans woozily zigzagged up to us.
“Are you guys, you know?” he then thrust a finger through his closed hand in a crude pantomime of sexual intercourse.
We replied sheepishly that we were, indeed, doing what his crude hand gesture was supposed to represent and he mumbled back, “That’s all right. I mean, she’s got boobs and stuff and that’s good.”
The man was the subject of one of the most popular games of the Festival: How is that person still standing? Alternately: How is that person still conscious? Everywhere you looked, people staggered and bumped into each other yet somehow remained inexplicably upright. At a watering hole called Spazzmotic Bar, where people drank booze they’d smuggled into the festival (sales of alcohol were officially forbidden) and cut up lines of cocaine on park tables, Cadence and I watched with rapt fascination as a heroically sweaty fat man clad only in a pair of loose-fitting sweatpants stumbled in weird little sumo steps. There was a strange nobility to the man’s inexplicably successful quest to remain vertical.
At a lunch table, we talked to a pair of Juggalos from Colorado. They had been driving up to the festival and gotten pulled over by the cops. They were busted with an ounce and a half of pot, handcuffed, and put in the back of a police car before being let go on the condition they returned the next month to pay a ticket.
The boyfriend toiled as an assistant manager at a Sonic’s. His girlfriend had dropped out of school and lived with her parents but nursed vague goals to go back to school and get certification in teaching sign language. She described her aspirations with the slightly embarrassed self-consciousness poor people sometimes feel when describing goals and aspirations they fear might forever be out of their grasp.
The Gathering has a way of evening everything out. Once upon a time MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice battled for supremacy over the pop charts. Hammer was once big enough to mount a very public challenge to Michael Jackson’s throne as the King of Pop. (Jackson, meanwhile, had the good sense and solid judgment to ignore him.) Hammer embodied hip-hop-pop sellouts to such an extent that when Violent J imagined himself and Shaggy 2 Dope selling out on “Down with the Clown,” he envisioned himself “sportin’ some Hammer pants/kick-steppin’ with Shaggs and tryna dance!”
At the Gathering of the Juggalos, where failure was celebrated as much, if not more, than success, it could be hard to tell the two apart. In their own strange way, both Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer triumphed. Longtime friend of the family Vanilla Ice used his appearance to announce he’d officially signed to Psychopathic Records, while Hammer’s performance proved an unlikely highlight of the entire festival.
Hammer’s once booming entourage had been reduced to a skeleton crew. Back in the day, Hammer drove himself to bankruptcy putting on ridiculous extravaganzas that rivaled anything the rock world came up with. Now he was cursed by the gods to try to put on a Vegas spectacle on a Reno budget.
At the Gathering, Hammer performed an energetic set that found him wandering into the crowd extensively and working up a James Brown–level sweat, but his set didn’t really come alive until he exited and Juggalos began climbing onstage with expressions of delight mixed with confusion and uncertainty. They’d made the leap onto the stage, but they had no idea what to do with their newfound power. So they fell upon an old standby. “Family! Family!” they started chanting. It was a moment of joyful anarchy and a deliciously literal representation of what the Psychopathic/Juggalo ethos is all about: The fans are as important as the acts. When
Juggalos chant “Family,” they’re celebrating themselves and their connection to one another as much as, if not more than, their alliance to two greasepaint enthusiasts from Michigan.
Then something glorious happened. The telltale first few bars of “U Can’t Touch This” came on and the Juggalos onstage and in the crowd went nuts. A song that once epitomized the slick emptiness of mainstream commercial hip-hop at its most facile and mercenary had been transformed into an unlikely anthem for fans of the most hated band in the world. “U Can’t Touch This” now belonged to everyone. It had been transformed into a motherfucking Juggalo anthem, of all things, and a motley aggregation of face-painted lunatics was having the time of their goddamn lives. I am not too proud to concede that there’s a big part of me that wishes I’d been onstage dancing alongside Hammer when he performed it.
Busta Rhymes is one of the most combustible live performers in all of popular music, but his set couldn’t help but feel like a letdown following “U Can’t Touch This.” In a bid to compensate, Rhymes laid it on thick with the crowd, describing the performance he’d just given as a defining moment in his career and the crowd as unlike any he’d ever played for. In a bit of false humility, Rhymes all but begged to be invited back next year as if he were some unknown angling for a big break and not a megastar picking up a giant paycheck.
On Friday night our trip to see Lil Jon expectorate hoarse shouts was interrupted by a pair of second-stage performers who spotted our press badges and seized upon us a fortuitous forum to air their grievances.
The man was in his early forties and had a billy goat scruff and eyes alive with righteous indignation. He performed as the Real V3NOM alongside his wife, MissCyainide, a heavyset twenty-one-year-old with tattoo tears on her face. They had come early to the Gathering to help set things up, as they do every year. This year marked their debut as performers, but the excitement of being able to actually play at the big show was tempered by the disappointment he felt when he and his wife were denied an artist’s pass and had to pay their own way.
The Real V3NOM was an old-school Juggalo from way back. To MissCyainide, the Real V3NOM served as a one-man crash course in all things Juggalo. They had met when they were both at a county fair in full Juggalo makeup. MissCyainide said to one of her girlfriends, “Who is that hot Juggalo over there?” The rest was history.
There was something oppressively adorable about the couple. They had matching Hatchetman and Hatchetwoman tattoos on their forearms so that when they’re combined it looks like they’re hugging instead of, you know, killing each other with hatchets.
Being denied an artist’s pass was a major blow to the man’s ego. He’d put in his work in the Juggalo trenches, helping out wherever he could, and now he was being treated like a mere fan. It was disrespectful, but he still couldn’t shake his love for the music and the culture. The man still flew the flag proudly, but there was clearly some part of him that wondered if all this time and energy and emotional investment were for naught.
Deadly Poisons, as the couple were collectively known when they performed together, still loved ICP. They still loved the Gathering. They still loved Juggalos. But they were disappointed by the state of the scene and the band that fuels it. The Real V3NOM, the true believer, saw fewer and fewer of his kind out there. He sneered dismissively at what he called “Merchalos,” newcomers who dug the gear but couldn’t care less about the band, its music, and its message. As with seemingly all subcultures, the old guard was innately suspicious of newcomers.
“What kind of music do you play?” I inquired.
“I guess I would call what we perform like ‘conscious rap,’ like rap that means something and talks about real stuff that we’re all going through like,” MissCyainide said, and then began rapping while I stood there awkwardly.
The Drug Bridge horrified the couple. The Real V3NOM smoked weed because it helped him with his back pain, but he was understandably disturbed by the sight of shirtless seventeen-year-old kids holding cardboard signs advertising coke, weed, Oxy, and pills. It was a gauntlet of sketchy characters peddling illicit wares, to me kind of glorious in its own seedy fashion, in its inimitably ugly-beautiful Juggalo kind of way. But it pissed the Real V3NOM off. “Why the fuck are there people on the bridge trying to sell crack to a Juggalo?” he asked angrily. “Why are there fucking families on there selling drugs together?”
The Real V3NOM felt that ICP was slowing down and preparing to retire so that they could launch the next generation of Psychopathic Artists. He found that troubling. Insane Clown Posse was the linchpin that held everything together.
In a sentiment that was echoed throughout the Gathering, the Real V3NOM felt the Gathering had gotten too mainstream, that it was chasing pop fans who never in a million years would travel to the Deliverance country of Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, for an opportunity to see Ice Cube. No, they came to see the wicked shit.
The couple lived in what they described as a horrible little shit town in big, weird-ass Ohio called Coshocton (which sounds less like a town than a disease), where they were predictably ostracized and ridiculed. It would be hard to imagine a less commercial proposition than a middle-aged white man and his zaftig wife recording conscious hip-hop for Insane Clown Posse fans from the hip-hop mecca of Coshocton, Ohio. Yet this pair was soldiering on all the same, united in their belief in themselves, their abilities, and each other. They took the Dark Carnival as seriously as anything involving Moon Bounces, helicopter rides, and constant cries of “Show me your titties!” can be taken. That’s why the rejection stung so badly.
The Real V3NOM groused that Violent J drove a 2006 Escalade while he drove a busted-ass hooptie from the 1980s. There were savage iniquities all around. Yet Deadly Poisons flew the flag all the same.
Next to Deadly Poisons stood a quiet young man who looked a lot like Jesus with his long light-brown hair, beard, and general air of mellowness. He looked like Jesus but he also looked like someone who had gotten lost on his way to a Dave Matthews Band show and ended up in Cave-in-Rock, Illinois.
The young man came to the music of ICP in a backwards way. As a kid in southern Michigan, he was into wrestling and knew Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope solely as wrestlers in the WWE. Then one day he discovered The Great Milenko and was shocked to discover those weird wrestlers with the face paint also had a sideline in hip-hop. He bought his first album and fell in love.
The man had been dubbed “Sexy Jesus” for good reason: He loved Insane Clown Posse but also thought a lot of Juggalos were losers. When Cadence asked him why he didn’t have any ICP tattoos, he replied, “In case I ever want to go into the corporate world or move up in my job at all, it would really harm me if I had too many visible tattoos or piercings.”
That kind of common sense and reasonable thinking had no place in the Gathering. Nor did Sexy Jesus’s measured appraisal of a scene he enjoys but finds fundamentally depressing. I immediately pegged him as a pothead, but he told us that he never smoked weed. He never even drank. He just liked the music and the company and hanging out with his friends from Texas he gets to see once a year. And Faygo. He really, really dug Faygo.
The man defied every stereotype and preconception about Juggalos. He was handsome and unadorned. He didn’t drink or smoke pot and he thought seriously about his future. He was in complete control of his faculties and just wanted to hang out and have a good time.
Cadence and I agreed that if Sexy Jesus had been born in Alaska and was rich instead of poor, he’d be a hippie rather than a Juggalo. He was particularly annoyed that ICP put out three different collector’s editions of Bang! Pow! Boom! There was one with a blue cover. Then there was one with a green cover, and finally a red cover. Each had a different intro and a different bonus track, but they were otherwise the same.
As Sexy Jesus noted wryly, “If you know one thing about Juggalos, it’s that they’re broke. As far as I know, rich Juggalos don’t exist, so it’s asking an awful lot of fans to buy three nearly identica
l albums, especially in a record-industry climate where nobody but nobody is buying albums anymore, especially not CDs.”
ICP is rich, and their fans are often very poor. This allows Juggalos to live vicariously through the larger-than-life exploits of their heroes, but on some level jealousy has to sink in, especially considering how many Juggalos would literally murder someone with a hatchet to join their ranks.
J acknowledged the limitations to what ICP could do for their fans when I spoke to him. “Everybody always talks about how they wish we could all live together all the time, and I always say if we were mad rich we’d buy like an old hotel somewhere downtown, with like ten floors and thirty rooms on each floor, and we’d just fucking rent them out for cheap and have them be a Juggalo haven. Where all the Juggalos are living in every room, we’d just hang out and go room to room, it’d just be awesome. But we’d have to lock the doors. We talk about that, like how dope that would be to do that one day, but I don’t know if that’s even legally possible, but that’d just be the shit.”
Alas, those were just words, and at the end of the day Violent J would return to his lush life in Michigan and Deadly Poisons would return to Coshocton, Ohio, and immediately begin daydreaming about the next Gathering.
Though he performed before Anybody Killa, the big star Friday night was gangsta rap pioneer Ice Cube, whose performance of “It Was a Good Day” had special resonance for the Juggalos in attendance. One of the most furtively sad feel-good songs in existence, “It Was a Good Day” is ultimately about the ephemeral nature of happiness and the way a good day for the beaten-down and oppressed is about the momentary absence of all the terrible things. “It Was a Good Day” implicitly says that happiness never lasts, but that every once in a while you can grab a few isolated moments of peace and contentment between the bullshit. What Juggalo can’t relate to that?
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 Page 18