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

  Violent J’s genius lies in roping an entire world of troubled, bored, angry, and confused kids into his elaborate fantasy world, in constructing a mythology and a worldview irresistible to outsiders and misfits.

  As a kid, Violent J envied his older brother Rob’s deep involvement in role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. J wanted to join in, but he could never figure out the complex rules. The Dark Carnival consequently became J’s homemade version of Dungeons & Dragons, an elaborate mythology where J could map out the contours and details of his own epic creation.

  Like his hero Michael Jackson, J created a hermetic universe where childhood never has to end. The Gathering of the Juggalos offers fans a purposeful regression back to the simple pleasures of childhood. It’s an invitation to a world where adults can frolic on a Moon Bounce, enjoy the magic of fire at Hog Daddy’s Hell Pit, take a helicopter ride, chow down on a hot dog at Violent J’s Big Barbecue Bash or watch, in acid-stoked wonder, stilt walkers. It’s a world of clowns and wrestlers and magicians full of role-playing and exhibitionism and mindless self-indulgence. The attendees of the Gathering are essentially children. Horny, drug-addled, belligerent children with erections and access to a wide array of mood-altering substances. Perhaps that’s why people are so afraid of them. And secretly envious.

  School had nothing to offer a fatherless, seemingly directionless man like Violent J. He dropped out of the ninth grade and found other outlets for his restlessness. He watched kung-fu movies and wrestled and had boyish misadventures with a buddy named Joseph Utsler, whom the world would come to know as Shaggy 2 Dope. In an early burst of inspiration, J joined Shaggy 2 Dope as the leaders of an undistinguished organization named Inner City Posse that was part makeshift gang and part makeshift gangsta rap group.

  In what only appears to be a paradox, J is supremely nostalgic for a childhood that sucked. Or rather he’s nostalgic for the elements of his childhood that allowed him to forget, if only for a moment, how badly his life sucked: ninja movies on UHF, cheap soda pop, the friendship of his brother and later a motley aggregation of wrestling geeks, and, above all else, an imagination that would be his salvation.

  In time, J’s reality would exceed his wildest fantasies. The wrestling-addicted misfit and backyard wrestler would briefly fight alongside Shaggy 2 Dope in the World Wrestling Federation in 1998 at the height of its unlikely mainstream fame before establishing in 1999 his very own wrestling league, Juggalo Championship Wrestling, which continues to thrive to this day and is a major component of the group’s legendary Gathering of the Juggalos festival.

  The night J had a brainstorm and changed the name and image of his struggling young gangsta rap group from Inner City Posse to Insane Clown Posse, he experienced a terrifying vision of a clown. The clown spoke to J in a loud, sinister voice that J could not understand. Suddenly J found himself inside a Fellini-esque carnival full of wonders and horrors: roller coasters that reached to the sky, a twenty-story house of mirrors. In J’s words, this circus of terror was “twisted and strange as fuck.”

  The clown in his dream held an outsize deck of joker cards that he dropped on the ground one at a time. As the clown ran out of cards J was rocketed high into the air, where he could see the whole sprawling carnival and surrounding town. He woke up a new man with a divine purpose. Nothing would ever be the same again.

  The name change from Inner City Posse to Insane Clown Posse brought with it a change of direction. The gangsta rap of Inner City Posse gave way to a horrorcore aesthetic similar to Detroit pioneer Esham, who would one day record for Insane Clown Posse’s Psychopathic Records. In the waning days of Inner City Posse, Violent J noticed that a hype man painted up like a clown got an enthusiastic response from the audience. When Inner City Posse morphed into Insane Clown Posse, it was decided that the entire group—which then also included Shaggy 2 Dope’s brother John Kickjazz, who would leave Insane Clown Posse following the release of its debut, Carnival of Carnage—would perform painted up as wicked clowns.

  In the days that followed J’s epiphany, he came to understand that he had been put on earth to drop a series of “Joker’s Cards” in the form of albums designed to purify listeners and prepare them for the afterlife by forcing them to confront the wickedness and iniquity within their own souls. The Joker’s Cards function as a dark mirror that reveals hidden truths about whoever peers into them. Each Joker’s Card represents a supernatural force with a moral message to impart.

  The first Joker’s Card arrived in the form of 1992’s Carnival of Carnage, a concept album about class warfare at its most overt, about bringing the pain of the downtrodden to the living rooms of the oligarchs who oppress them. The second Joker’s Card, 1994’s Ringmaster, focused on the impresario of the Carnival of Carnage, a macabre figure created through sin who helps determine whether the dead will ascend to Shangri-La or descend to the bowels of Hell’s Pit. The Riddlebox, from 1995, introduced Juggalos to the equally sinister figure of a mysterious jack-in-the-box adorned by a faded question mark that the dead encounter upon shedding their mortal coil.

  In 1997 the fourth Joker’s Card dropped in the form of The Great Milenko, an album about a ghoulish necromancer who tries to tempt humanity into indulging its worst instincts. That album was followed by The Amazing Jeckel Brothers, which centers on a pair of brothers, one good (Jake) and one bad (Jack), who juggle fireballs representing the sins of the dead.

  The Dark Carnival mythology gave Insane Clown Posse’s music, iconography, and ideology something rare and precious in low-budget trash culture: an intriguing element of mystery. Insane Clown Posse songs pointed to a greater whole the full meaning of which would not be revealed for years or even decades to come. For kids who grew up on wrestling and fast food and video games, Insane Clown Posse offered both the thrill of instant gratification and the tantalizing promise that there was always more to come. As J writes in Behind the Paint, “Other rap groups were putting out singles. We were releasing the end of the world on an installment fuckin’ plan.”

  J expounded on the enigmatic appeal of the Dark Carnival mythology when he told me, during one of two interviews I conducted with him for the A.V. Club, “There’s nothing to study about [other] bands. There’s nothing to uncover. There are no secrets. It’s just all about the latest single. They don’t even respect each other. And the fans in the crowd are the same way. They don’t even respect each other. Juggalos are a whole different story.

  “There are secrets to uncover about the band. There’s stuff to uncover, the fact that there’s secrets and things, that keeps it exciting. They keep it about more than a fancy hook. For a collector, it goes on forever. There’s stuff to collect and find, and rarities—forever. I just think there’s a lot to being a Juggalo. There’s a lot to keep you busy, uncovering these things, and traveling to special gatherings and special events, and carpooling with people you don’t even know, but they’re all Juggalo family, so it’s okay.”

  Insane Clown Posse’s story transcends hip-hop. It transcends music. In many ways, it transcends entertainment altogether. It’s a story about alienation and family and loneliness and sadness and anxiety and imagination and ego and resentment and fame.

  At a time when hip-hop nakedly embraced crass consumerism and unabashed materialism, Insane Clown Posse romanticized poverty and outsiderdom, albeit in its own grubby scrub fashion. In a culture obsessed with wealth, social standing, beauty, and competition, there’s something liberating and transgressive about a group that tells kids with nothing that being poor is cooler than being rich and that being a loser, a scrub, and a Juggalo is infinitely better than being a winner. Jay-Z brags about drinking Cristal because he’s rich and can afford it even if his fans can’t; Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope rap about bargain-priced Faygo soda because it’s dirt-cheap and anyone can afford it. Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope transform weaknesses into strengths. Insane Clown Posse can’t do anything to help their fans scale the wall of upward mobility, but they’ve made them
feel better about where they are.

  Even in their early days, Insane Clown Posse never simply performed music. It wasn’t about virtuoso displays of lyricism, witty freestyles, or devastating battle raps: It was about putting on a show. And if the show looked and felt more like a backyard wrestling match or haunted house or sideshow than a rap concert, the fans weren’t complaining. On the contrary, the fans were ecstatic.

  Violent J reasoned that if Insane Clown Posse always behaved like big shots, then the world would treat them accordingly. They were convinced that if they cracked the local market, then major labels would scoop them up.

  It didn’t quite work out that way. Insane Clown Posse did break wide open in Detroit. They weren’t just a local act; they were a local phenomenon. During an early show, Violent J noticed a heckler flipping him off, so he unscrewed the cap from a two-liter of Faygo (the group kept a bucket onstage) and whipped it at him. A dead show suddenly became a riot of carbonated madness as Insane Clown Posse sprayed the crowd with soda. A bewildering new tradition was born. It might have seemed patently ridiculous to non-Juggalos, but it was another way to set ICP apart from artists who performed only music.

  At another concert, Violent J started playing with the title of one of Insane Clown Posse’s earliest songs, “The Juggla,” and accidentally stumbled upon a word for his fans that would live in infamy: Juggalo.

  Insane Clown Posse fans now had a distinct identity. They weren’t just poor kids from shitty neighborhoods in Michigan who got drunk and high and indulged in curious rituals; they were Juggalos. They had a name. They had traditions. That gave them a form of power. Following Insane Clown Posse wasn’t something they did. It was who they were. Even more than Phish followers, fandom defined them. It set them apart from the rest of the world and drew a thick, impregnable line between Insane Clown Posse fans and everyone else. The group didn’t seem to have casual fans: Either you had a fucking Hatchetman neck tattoo, or you thought they were a crime against music. There was precious little in between.

  Being a Juggalo entailed a level of commitment inconceivable to most. It wasn’t enough to simply listen to the albums or go to the shows. No, Juggalos had to wear clown makeup and adopt new Juggalo personas and evangelize on the duo’s behalf to uncomprehending, sometimes judgmental and scathingly critical friends. They had to buy the merchandise. They had to become walking billboards for Insane Clown Posse, Psychopathic Records, and its wildly successful, enduring apparel line, HatchetGear. Around the time branding became a nauseating buzzword, Insane Clown Posse were intuitive geniuses at it. They were gods of self-promotion, face-painted P. T. Barnums of hip-hop. Ringmasters.

  Yet the duo’s astonishing, almost unprecedented local success (the only other competition was Esham and a redneck dude who called himself Kid Rock) didn’t lead to offers from major labels. Major labels didn’t understand Insane Clown Posse or its fans.

  Insane Clown Posse understood, on a profound level, how to reach poor, angry, directionless kids hungering for any form of escape from the drudgery of their everyday lives. The group knew how to get people emotionally invested in the Joker’s Cards and Dark Carnival because they were so emotionally invested themselves.

  J happily conceded as much when I asked him if he still considered himself a scrub and he answered, “In my heart and in my soul. We’re scrubs, man. We’re the underdogs, we’re blue collar, we’re not VIP. We’re fucking fast food man, we’re not caviar.”

  When Insane Clown Posse looked at their ecstatic audience they saw themselves. When major label executives looked at Insane Clown Posse’s audience, they saw something much different.

  Class played a huge role. All fan bases are not created equal. As in every other aspect of American society, there is a class-based hierarchy of fans. At the very pinnacle lie Radiohead fans and NPR subscribers, wealthy, desirable, well-behaved bourgeois bohemians with impeccable taste and plenty of disposable income. At the very bottom lie Juggalos. The music industry did not value these people. Society didn’t value them either. But Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope did. They do. That must be extraordinarily validating. The world treats Juggalos like freaks, but they are always welcome in the literal big tent of the Dark Carnival.

  Finally, Insane Clown Posse’s local success became too big for even the most conservative major label executives to ignore. The prospect of scoring a big payday off a band with a rabid built-in fan base overrode their personal and professional contempt for the duo. Somebody was making a fuckload of money off the wicked clowns. It might as well be them.

  So hip-hop, boy band, and R&B giant Jive held its nose, swallowed its pride, and signed Insane Clown Posse to a contract with a modest advance. Violent J imagined that Jive would use its corporate clout and muscle to break Insane Clown Posse nationally. If the rest of the country embraced Insane Clown Posse with the fervor and devotion of the duo’s hometown, then there was no limit to the heights they could climb. The little horrorcore duo that could would finally be playing in the big leagues.

  In Behind the Paint, Violent J has a vivid phrase that succinctly encapsulates the dramatic twist of fate that transformed Insane Clown Posse from put-upon poindexters to the world’s least likely pop stars this side of the Benedictine Monks: scrubs fucking cheerleaders. For Violent J, it was a profoundly mixed blessing: He obviously enjoyed having sex with women who never would have given him the time of day in high school, but the hedonistic kicks were undercut by the understanding that these women were interested in him only as a celebrity, a pop star, a local hero. They all wanted to fuck a pop star named Violent J, not a fat, lonely, vulnerable outcast named Joseph Bruce.

  This last point was tragicomically illustrated when Violent J invited a particularly hot groupie onto his tour bus. The groupie promised to rock his world the moment the tour bus reached the hotel, but when a member of Insane Clown Posse’s entourage smacked the hot-to-trot young lady on the ass, she turned around and hissed, “You’re not important enough to touch me.” The groupie’s actions were understandable—sleeping with Violent J does not give everyone associated with him license to smack her ass—but Violent J nevertheless had an epiphany and kicked the groupie off the bus. He learned the hard way that fucking the cheerleaders of the world didn’t make him anything less of a scrub; it just made him a scrub rich and famous enough to appeal to women who derive their self-esteem from casual sex with famous people.

  It turns out Jive didn’t love Violent J or Insane Clown Posse any more than the aforementioned groupie. In signing Insane Clown Posse, they saw an opportunity to make a quick, dirty buck with a group already equipped to move albums and merchandise. Jive thought Insane Clown Posse was ugly as fuck, but hot damn if their selling power didn’t make them beautiful.

  But Jive showed no interest in exposing Insane Clown Posse to a national audience. The last thing it wanted to do was broadcast to the world that it had gotten into bed with the reviled iconoclasts from Detroit. The duo remained an embarrassment to Jive and to the music industry at large—Jive simply hoped it was an embarrassment that could make money.

  Violent J understandably nurses a persecution complex of Nixonian proportions, but even he didn’t realize the full extent of his label’s contempt for him, his fans, and his music. As the duo’s stint as major-label musicians approached its final death throes, an executive at Jive hipped Insane Clown Posse to the real reason why its support was nonexistent: “I never told you this,” confided the executive, “but some of the people at the label thought the ‘Chicken Huntin’ ’ song [the single] was racist toward black people. They thought the whole clown makeup thing was you guys making fun of black people rapping.”

  Violent J didn’t don face paint and reinvent himself as a scary clown to push hyperaggressive hip-hop clichés past the point of absurdity. He donned face paint and reinvented himself as a scary clown because wrestling and his brother’s role-playing hobby taught him the value of showmanship and surprise, of baiting audiences and having an immed
iately identifiable gimmick.

  I doubt Violent J considered the troubling racial connotations of smearing on face paint and performing black music. I doubt he’s familiar with the myriad permutations of minstrelsy, past and present. When he conceived of the Dark Carnival, or rather when the Dark Carnival revealed itself to him in the form of a prophetic vision, he wasn’t in a Bamboozled state of mind. When he decided to put on the face paint for the first time he was a failed would-be gangsta rapper whose pre–Insane Clown Posse outfit, Inner City Posse, impressed no one with its street credibility or lyrical ability. He was looking for that tricky X factor that would catapult him from wannabe to star.

  In the Dark Carnival, he found it. On a pragmatic level, Joseph Bruce will be the first to concede that he is not a particularly handsome man, and black-and-white clown paint transformed him from a guy who looks like he should be slicing ham at Subway to a larger-than-life figure of menace and fun. For Bruce at least, becoming a wicked clown constituted a big step up.

  Yet people looked down on Insane Clown Posse and Juggalos. The perception conformed to narrow, reductive stereotypes about how poor, uneducated white people think and behave. The irony, of course, is that people who know nothing about ICP—yet very strongly believe that their music is worthless and their fans are illiterate and racist—are doing exactly what they accuse ICP of doing: forming concrete ideas about how an entire group of people think and act based on their appearance, place on the socioeconomic ladder, and the kind of music they enjoy. Only instead of deciding that all black kids who wear baggy jeans and listen to gangsta rap must be drug dealers, gang members, or high school dropouts, the ICP-is-racist contingent decided that poor white kids who rock ICP tattoos and listen to horrorcore must be racist. And also gang members and high school dropouts.

  Insane Clown Posse makes music for Juggalos. It has always been ambivalent about crossing over into the mainstream, but when one of the major labels of the Disney Music Group, Hollywood Records, plunked down a cool $1 million to buy the duo’s contract from Jive, it obviously had a lot more on its mind than making sure Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope sell out the Fillmore in Detroit every Halloween for their annual Hallowicked concert.