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”In Defense of ICP” by Thomas Hiura
IN DEFENSE OF ICP:
The Wicked Clowns as Self-Made Positivity Evangelists
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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
The reason that maybe 99% of non-Juggalos don’t know this about ICP is that one would have to listen to several of their albums in full to really identify these recurring themes, and anyone who would spend their time doing that is probably already a Juggalo. I’ll admit, it’s not a great marketing strategy, but that’s not really the point.
In case anyone is thinking that ICP just slyly throws in a few anti-evil messages here and there on deeper album cuts in order to excuse the rest of their gruesome and offensive music, it’s important to mention that their most iconic songs often tackle these themes head-on. For example, on October 25th I went to my 4th ever ICP concert, and out of their set list (which is essentially a greatest hits compilation from the 500+ songs they’ve released), most of them explicitly articulated ICP’s vigilante-like violence against evildoers. Here’s a short list from just that one show:
Song Themes Explicity Addressed
Terrible Homelessness, wealth inequality, sensationalization in the media
Hellalujah Religious corruption and greed, specifically among televangelists
Tilt-A-Whirl Child abuse, wealth inequality Piggy Pie (Old School) Police corruption, wealth inequality, bigotry
Burning Up Violence against women, child abuse, cheating, wealth inequality, corruption
Under the Moon Rape, bullying
Halls of Illusions Domestic violence, alcoholism Bang! Pow! Boom! Racism, rape, pedophilic abuse, domestic violence Night of the Chainsaw Abuse of hard drugs (especially evident in music video)
Bazooka Joey Fox News Let’s Go All the Way Aspiring for a utopian world free of hatred, disease, and prisons
Amy’s in the Attic Murder cover-ups
Chicken Huntin’ Racism, bigotry, incest, sexual violence
So why is it noteworthy that ICP is addressing these themes that most of us (especially in the ultra-privileged Carleton world) already know to be wrong? Because they do so in a way that specifically appeals to the demographic they come from: underprivileged, bullied, poor youth from inner city neighborhoods and unstable families plagued with drug abuse and domestic violence. The members of ICP were high school drop-outs who ended up working at fast food restaurants and gas stations for years while they tried to make it as musicians. They were bullied severely as children, were sexually abused, left behind by their fathers, undereducated, and altogether raised in extremely dire circumstances. So is it really any surprise that their music is angry, politically incorrect, and syntactically simplistic?
When a young Violent J was 7 years-old (and going by Joseph Bruce), he and his brother Rob were playing in their small backyard. On this particular evening, Rob managed to catch a butterfly out of the air with his bare hands. Joseph and Rob put the butterfly in a jar, poked a ton of air holes into the jar, and excitedly brought it into their room. They decided to spend just one night admiring the beauty of their new friend before releasing it back into the wild. This was a particularly hot Michigan summer night, and since they wanted their guest to sleep comfortably at the expense of their own comfort, they pointed the fan right into the holes of the butterfly’s jar. The following morning, the boys were heartbroken to find that the butterfly was dead. They had a funeral for the butterfly that day, where they made a vow: “One day, we’ll both make it to Heaven and apologize to the Butterfly, face to face.” Since 1992, the liner notes of every ICP album has included the text “Dedicated to the Butterfly.” 33
In every album that ICP has made, they have explicitly made it their goal to use their platform to reach out to their fans and help them cultivate righteousness in their lives, in hopes that every Juggalo will get to meet up with them in heaven. Having had the chance to spend time with ICP for the first time recently, it was incredibly evident to me how much they still care about their fans, 25 years into their careers. But you know what? A lot of bands care about their fans, and a lot of bands write music that inspires individuals to better themselves. Beyond these feats, has ICP had any real accomplishments? Do I use rhetorical questions when I don’t know how to make my arguments seem more interesting? Absolutely. Not only have the wicked clowns accomplished things that nobody else has before them (and that many musicians have only dreamt of), but they’ve done so with almost no outside help.
ICP has sold 7 million units and 2 platinum albums in the U.S. and Canada without video airplay or anything close to a radio hit. They’ve built one of the most successful independent record labels of all time, Psychopathic Records, completely from the ground up. They’ve founded their own professional wrestling league, Juggalo Championshit Wrestling, put together 15 massive music festivals (which have actually attracted a ridiculous amount of big name artists), and hosted multiple seasons of their own TV show on Fuse. They’ve created two feature-length films and an entire subculture of perhaps the most loyal fans that any band has had in the last 30 years. So while it’s easy and popular to hate on ICP and the Juggalos, tons of hip-hop legends have given ICP props for the robustness and staying power of the empire they’ve created. Rappers like Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Ice-T, Snoop Dogg, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Busta Rhymes, The Geto Boys, Coolio, Naughty By Nature, Raekwon, Tech N9ne, Danny Brown, and countless others have expressed love and admiration for ICP, and I think that counts for something.
When I was in 7th grade, the first ICP song I ever heard was “Bring It On.” At the time I was about as into rap music as a Japanese-American middle-schooler from Eugene, Oregon could be. I loved Eminem’s complicated rhyme patterns and emotional sincerity. I loved the grandiosity of Kanye’s beats and his poignantly political lyrical themes. Then there was ICP, with “voodoo chickens and magical wands / dead bigots, lying face down in a pond.” The sheer simplicity, the angst, and the dark humor of their music and lyrics drew me in, as ICP might have been the first to show me that even if you’re not actually a good rapper at first, you can have success as long as you’re passionate and authentic. They made me think that maybe I could be a rapper too. So I guess what I’m saying is that if you hate Gradient, you can hate ICP even more for inspiring me. Nah, but really, ICP changed my life for the better, and I’ve met Juggalos from much worse circumstances than I’ll ever know, whose lives, whose drug addictions, whose emotional circumstances have completely turned around because of the community they’ve found through the Juggalos. Whether you like the music or not, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that while we’re taught to sympathize with the underprivileged, hating on Juggalos is normalized. What matters is that there are powerful identity narratives out there that are not only going untold, but that are simply being laughed at because they’re Juggalo narratives. And that is certainly not dope. 34
