IN DEFENSE OF ICP: The Wicked Clowns as Self-Made Positivity Evangelists
“You know, I’m actually glad they reduced the chicken strip portions.” “My whole month has been awful, but this Cowling dance is gonna turn everything around.” “Have you heard the new ICP song? It’s dope!” These are phrases you won’t often hear at Carleton. If you’ve ever heard anything about the Insane Clown Posse or their Juggalo fanbase – either from the media or just from friends in passing – it probably wasn’t anything positive. Whether you know ICP from their cringe-inducing Gathering of the Juggalos infomercials, their scientist-indicting, magnet-deifying “Miracles” music video of 2010, the SNL parodies of those aforementioned videos, their longtime feud with childhood ICP fan and fellow Detroit native Eminem, their well-publicized attempt to sue the FBI, news coverage of the occasional brutal murder committed by a self-proclaimed Juggalo, or maybe even from the clowns’ actual music, it just isn’t likely that you’ve heard anything that convinced you that Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are incredibly thoughtful, altruistic, purposeful entertainers. In other words, you probably don’t know the Insane Clown Posse that I know. The fact is that a lot of time is spent hating ICP, overwhelmingly by people who know very little about what ICP has done in their 25 years of releasing music. In this set of ramblings I will not seek to convince you that ICP are talented rappers (though I’m honestly willing to take on that challenge if you email me), but instead I’ll non-ironically posit a few points that don’t often get heard about ICP’s credibility and positive impact. In case you haven’t heard any of ICP’s music, their most iconic tracks are usually identifiable by Violent J’s simplistic Dr. Seuss-style couplets about murdering people with chainsaws, while a bouncy carnival-style beat plays. With lines like, “I’m twisted, I’ll cut your finger off and stick it in your butt / Aaaaaaaaaah! And glue it shut,” or “I met this kid named Louie Lou / He thought he could fuck with this voodoo / So I turned his head into a lima bean
and then flicked it off his shoulders,” or “I’ve got your fuckin’ present hangin’ next to my nuts / Now when I’m swingin’ on my hatchet if it hits you it cuts / Don’t make me chop your head in half and smack the side with the cheek,” it’s perfectly reasonable that the average listener might think ICP’s violence is just juvenile, shock-driven senselessness. The only problem with that analysis is that it doesn’t examine the broader context that all of ICP’s songs exist within: an overarching mythology they’ve created called the “Dark Carnival.” Bear with me here as I explain, because this is pretty essential Juggalo stuff. All of ICP’s main album releases are known as the Joker’s Cards. Each Joker’s Card album presents a deity-like “face of the Dark Carnival,” such as The Great Milenko, The Riddle Box, The Amazing Jeckel Brothers, etc. These characters are designed to teach Juggalos to live more righteous, fulfilling, altruistic lives, and ICP’s hyper-violent tracks are actually stories that explain what will metaphorically happen to you if you don’t repent from your evil ways. If this all sounds borderline religious, that’s because it is. In 2002 on the song “Thy Unveiling,” ICP explained that “the truth is, we follow God! We’ve always been behind Him. The Carnival is God and may all Juggalos find Him!” In this song, Violent J explains that the purpose of ICP’s violent themes was to draw in those who would otherwise not hear their positive messages, which they snuck in “subliminally with that wicked shit around ‘em.” Furthermore, a dominant theme of ICP’s music is that they’re quite picky about who they mutilate with hatchets; they almost exclusively kill people who have committed great evil in the world, and when they kill random civilians, they’re almost always punished for it in the end.
By Thomas Hiura
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