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

  O’Reilly is only warming up. As his next gotcha clip, O’Reilly shows Violent J, apparently acting in his unofficial role as the universe’s guidance counselor, asking a fourteen-year-old if he used drugs, then urging him to go home and “smoke something.”

  Violent J defends his actions as the kind of goofy ribbing a salty uncle might give a favorite niece or nephew.

  “What if that kid goes home and smokes crack?” O’Reilly continues. Do you have any responsibility for it because you said it to him one-on-one?” To O’Reilly, Insane Clown Posse weren’t just making music the elite disdained; now they were getting little Timmy hooked on crack cocaine as well. Are there any limits to their capacity for evil?

  His voice quaking with anger, O’Reilly impatiently holds Insane Clown Posse responsible for being negligent father figures to an entire generation of lost youth when he urgently inquires, “How are they going to make it in the world, how are they going to have good relationships, to get a good job, support themselves, and raise families? How are they going to make it if they don’t have any parents who care about them and they look up to you two and you two are telling them to smoke dope, to do sex stuff, to go out and get arrested and commit crimes, how are they going to possibly prosper with role models like you?”

  To give O’Reilly credit, he was directly referencing the early ICP album Smoke Dope and Do Sex Stuff as well as their later EP Go Out and Get Arrested and Commit Crimes (they do have some awfully heavy-handed album titles). He’s much better-versed in the duo’s oeuvre than I had expected. To O’Reilly, ICP are more than just the worst role models imaginable. They’re also monsters personally responsible for ensuring that their fans never have good relationships, get good jobs, support themselves, or raise families. That’s an awful lot of responsibility to lay on anyone.

  In the nine years separating O’Reilly’s legendary 2001 summit with the clown-painted corrupters of youth and a 2010 profile on Nightline, the ICP menace only grew in strength and pure evil.

  At least that’s what Martin Bashir’s March 9 exploration of the shadowy world of the Dark Carnival suggests. Bashir begins with lofty talk of “real-life murder and mayhem some believe may be motivated by a certain sound and stagecraft” before introducing Insane Clown Posse as a pair that “raps about acts of savagery and violence” while “some of their fans are living them” before asking, “Should the artists share in the blame?”

  Like much of the mainstream media, Bashir exhibits a distinct tone-deafness when it comes to Insane Clown Posse. He seems intent on deliberately misunderstanding the duo, its fans, and its mythology in ways that support a preconceived thesis.

  On Nightline, that thesis was, of course, that the Insane Clown Posse were poisoning the minds of their fans with sinister voodoo and transforming them into an army of miscreant mass murderers.

  Bashir’s talk of a “sound” that motivates “real-life acts of murder and mayhem” hearkens back to criticism that early rock ’n’ roll’s infernal jungle rhythms would transform the younger generation into a giant interracial bisexual fuckfest, and later hysteria that heavy metal bands somehow crafted subliminal messages that could only be heard when their records were played backwards. To the Music Menace folks, these albums and artists aren’t just dangerous because of their lyrical content; the danger lies in the grooves themselves, in the power of noise to hypnotize and control. Endemic to this way of thinking is a pronounced lack of respect for the autonomy and intelligence of teenagers.

  Bashir’s piece adds a whole new wrinkle to the Music Menace spiel: These agents of pure evil weren’t just leading little Timmy astray. They’re also the literal leaders of a vicious gang.

  Nightline lays out its case in screaming tabloid hyperbole, flashing graphics like “JUGGALO” INSANITY over grim black-and-white footage of shaggy-haired Juggalo murderers being led away in handcuffs for their crimes. The venerable late-night news institution cynically tries to massage a pair of murders committed by self-identified Juggalos into a nationwide epidemic of horrorcore-induced ultraviolence.

  What the Juggalo murder squadron lacks in numbers it apparently makes up for in brutality. Not even Juggalos are safe from blood-crazed Juggalos. Bashir reports ominously of a twenty-one-year-old named Tony Lacasio who “called himself a Juggalo but it’s alleged he snitched and lost his life.” Nightline once represented the unassailable apogee of late-night journalistic excellence. Then it succumbed to the tabloid mania sweeping our culture and became a forum for reporting on “snitching” within the Juggalo community.

  “We’ve got multiple individuals committing gang-related crimes, gang-motivated crimes, and they’re using the name Juggalo,” reports an Arizona cop in a dizzying torrent of frightening-sounding phrases that are vague to the point of meaninglessness. Who are these “multiple individuals”? Are there hundreds of thousands of them conspiring to overthrow the government? Or two dudes on meth in a trailer somewhere huffing paint thinner and listening to a CD of The Great Milenko on repeat? Doesn’t “multiple” just mean there’s more than one of them?

  What exactly is a gang-related crime? How does it differ from a gang-motivated crime? And what does it mean to say that this fuzzy aggregation of gang-related, gang-motivated individuals is “using the name Juggalo”? These are all relevant queries the show has no interest in answering. Instead it lets a flurry of quick cuts of dead-eyed Juggalos being led away in handcuffs married to horror-movie music create the impression that Juggalos are everywhere and intent on murdering you and your family.

  At the Gathering of the Juggalos, I found the constant chants of “Family! Family!” to be the strangely poignant cries of exiles from broken homes creating makeshift families to make up for backgrounds riddled with deadbeat dads and moms zonked out on pills and cheap booze. But within the context of the Nightline piece, footage of Juggalos guilelessly shouting “Family!” in unison takes on a sinister connotation. The “family” the piece means to invoke is less the brotherhood of man than a crime family, or the Manson family.

  Bashir calls Insane Clown Posse “one of the most successful bands you’ve never heard of.” Like O’Reilly, Bashir assumes that his audience knows nothing about Insane Clown Posse and consequently is liable to believe the worst about them, especially if it’s presented in a quasi-news format by a man in a suit with an authoritative British accent. Bashir warns us that horrorcore videos are “all over YouTube” (not unlike similarly corrosive clips of cats flushing toilets). Then he takes us to the set of one of these promotional clips of the damned—a song that, in Bashir’s weird turn of phrase, “characterizes murder”—called “In Your Face.”

  In what could very well represent a nadir in the history of journalism, if not civilization as a whole, Bashir sits down opposite Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope and inquires solemnly, “How do you write a line like ‘From Pluto to Uranus [pronounced crisply and clearly as your anus] we are underground famous’?”

  What does that question even mean? Is Bashir legitimately interested in Insane Clown Posse’s creative process? Does he want to know whether they favor internal rhyme schemes, alliteration, elaborate metaphors, or even iambic pentameter? Or is he inquiring whether Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J memorize their lines rather than writing them down, à la Jay-Z and Eminem? Do they freestyle? Do they jot down rhymes in notebooks? How do they feel about thesauruses and rhyming dictionaries? Do they prefer complicated, polysyllabic Pharoahe Monch–style rhyme schemes or blunter, more forceful lyrical styles? Or is he just singling out a particularly juvenile lyric in an utterly redundant attempt to make a pair of middle-aged men in clown makeup look silly?

  When Violent J tries to defend the lyrics as fresh, Bashir testily counters, “But isn’t this almost prepubescent, barely literate writing?”

  Once again, the fat man in the clown makeup pushing forty emerges as more civil, reasonable, and rational than the ostensible newsman alerting audiences to the Juggalo menace. With cheerful good humor, Violent J responds
, “Probably to you, because you sound smart as a motherfucker.”

  GOOD-BYE, WOODSTOCK, HELLO, GATHERING OF THE JUGGALOS: CURIOUS TIMES IN CAVE-IN-ROCK

  Insane Clown Posse’s strange flirtation with the mainstream peaked with its appearance at Woodstock 99. The duo’s appearance was considered controversial by fans who worried that these preeminent outsiders had sold out by appearing on the same bill as Sheryl Crow, Bruce Hornsby, and their old rival Kid Rock. To J, Insane Clown Posse didn’t pander to the mainstream by playing Woodstock 99; the mainstream pandered to Insane Clown Posse. J writes in his autobiography that Woodstock 99 paid the duo a cool hundred grand for a single set and afforded it complete creative freedom to go as Faygo crazy and carny theatrical as it pleased, boasting, “[Woodstock] sold out the mainstream style for us! Woodstock never came to us and asked us to change one fuckin’ thing about us or our show! They wanted ICP just as ICP is, and nothing else. If that ain’t fresh, then I don’t know what the fuck is!”

  As fresh as it might have been to play Woodstock 99, the infamous festival was most assuredly not Insane Clown Posse’s party. They were the sideshow, not the main attraction.

  That would not be the case at the very first Gathering of the Juggalos, an Insane Clown Posse–curated festival of arts and culture J’s brother Rob (alternately known as rapper-wrestler Jump-steady) put together that debuted in 2000 at Novi, Michigan’s, Novi Expo Center.

  An army of some seven thousand Juggalos descended upon the Novi Expo Center for the first Gathering, surprising even Insane Clown Posse with their sheer volume and dedication. The first Gathering was barely restrained chaos that eventually gave way to complete, unrestrained anarchy when Juggalos rushed the stage during Insane Clown Posse’s climactic performance. The powers that be shut the show down before the frenzy escalated into a full-blown riot.

  From the start, that was part of the appeal of Gathering of the Juggalos: It was a place where anything could happen and a riot was perpetually on the verge of breaking out. Novi, Michigan, did not want these curious young men and their even more curious fans to return to wreak more havoc, so the second Gathering took place at Seagate Center in Toledo, Ohio, where chaos once again erupted during the climactic performance and, according to an oral history on the festival in Spin by Christopher Weingarten (whom I would have the pleasure of hanging out with during my second Gathering), Violent J ended up beating a fan bloody with his microphone after he attempted to snatch Violent J’s Hatchetman chain. To the surprise of no one, Insane Clown Posse was informed that it was no longer welcome in Toledo, and the festival migrated once again, this time to Peoria, Illinois, a small town well known for the cliché “Will it play in Peoria?” and desperate enough for revenue to welcome a group and its fans whose terrible reputation for vandalism and destruction essentially got them blacklisted from the nation’s convention centers.

  The third Gathering only contributed to the burgeoning countercultural institution’s notoriety when Bubba Sparxxx was booed offstage and a riot broke out over an issue of central importance to Insane Clown Posse and its fans: naked breasts. When the police grabbed a woman flashing her breasts and her boyfriend, the crowd rebelled and tear gas was employed to break up the chaos.

  Insane Clown Posse needed to find a nirvana where fans could expose their naked breasts and destroy things free from the prying eyes of those who do not understand. They seemingly found just that in Nelson Ledges Quarry Park in Portage County, Ohio, the sight of the fourth, fifth, and sixth Gatherings. In the woods of Ohio they found the freedom they’d been looking for, but even Portage County, Ohio, has a breaking point, and after the sixth Gathering the group was once again informed it would need to relocate its festival. After a muddy year in Pataskala, Ohio, the Gathering of the Juggalos found a seemingly permanent home in 2007 in a strange backwater town called Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, that I would come to develop a deep fondness for.

  And it is in Cave-in-Rock, Illinois, at the tenth annual Gathering of the Juggalos, that my story and Insane Clown Posse’s begin to overlap. Driving to Cave-in-Rock, I experienced the feeling of leaving civilization in search of a stark, beautiful, and savage new world. Cadence and I drove for miles without running across even the faintest reminder of human habitation. Long stretches of road boasted no illumination. We passed a prison. Cadence was alarmed until I assured her that should a prisoner ever escape, the many serial killers in the region would take him down before he could hurt anybody.

  Cave-in-Rock is a place where hope goes to die, a grubby realm of clapboard churches and failing businesses in rust-covered converted trailers where a Ponderosa Steakhouse stands out as an oasis of civilization in a sea of small-town hopelessness. It was, in other words, prime Juggalo country.

  I would come to identify with Juggalos in ways that troubled my friends and family, but I was still on the outside looking in when Cadence and I checked in at a Comfort Inn on August 15, 2010, where our call for a car service was answered by a dapper man in his midfifties who spoke in the booming, stentorian cadences of a professional speaker.

  “You’ve a great voice,” I said from the backseat. “Did you ever do any announcing or anything?”

  “Why, yes,” he answered, clearly pleased to be asked. “I used to do a fair amount of racetrack announcing back in the day.” In fact, he seemed to have done a little bit of everything.

  Like many of the townies, he was fascinated by the strange influx of clown-painted outsiders who pumped money and drugs into the infrastructure every year, then disappeared.

  “Does this band, this clown band. Do they make a lot of money?” the driver asked fairly deep into a conversation that got more interesting and unexpected by the minute. The gentleman told us he had moved into the area because a Google search revealed that it had the highest concentration of people with postgraduate degrees in the country, but that other than membership in a nearby book club, he was woefully disappointed by Cave-in-Rock.

  “Yeah. They do. They’ve never attained the breakout mainstream success of someone like Kid Rock or Eminem, but they’ve managed to hold on to substantive popularity for two decades in an incredibly hostile market, which is an incredible achievement,” I answered.

  He spied an opening. “I see.” The man had a hypnotic habit of pausing dramatically before he said anything, almost as if waiting for words to appear on a teleprompter so he could deliver them as crisply and professionally as possible. “Of course the only time I ever cracked six figures or more in a year was when I liquidated my DeLorean dealership.”

  “Oh my God. You had a DeLorean dealership? What was that like? What was he like?” I inquired excitedly, delighted to be in the presence of someone who knew eccentric and disgraced would-be automotive pioneer John DeLorean.

  “He was,” the driver paused dramatically again, “a complicated man. Very charismatic, but also very dark. He had the kind of magnetism that made you want to follow him, though we all know how that ended,” he said just before he dropped us off at the Gathering.

  It was well over a hundred degrees when Cadence and I entered the campgrounds. Immediately we were good-naturedly assaulted with super-soakers filled with Faygo (if you miss the essentially good-natured manner in which business is conducted during the Gathering, it’s easy to get scared or freaked out) and overwhelmed by the sheer number of homemade ICP-themed tattoos. Everywhere you went there were young men carrying crude cardboard signs reading, SHOW ME YOUR TITS. In other circumstances this message might be conveyed orally, but the Juggalos were taking no chances: They preferred what Cadence referred to as a multidisciplinary approach.

  At every Gathering there is a plethora of brave souls carrying shabby cardboard signs begging Juggalettes to relieve them of their cursed virginity. At the Gathering, the mating dance takes on a new and radically different form. Subtlety, understatement, and gentlemanly wooing are out: Braying unashamedly for female flesh and/or a mercy fuck is in.

  There was infinite variety behind this
ubiquitous cry for the display of naked breasts. Within five minutes of hitting the Gathering, Cadence was propositioned twice. A gentleman on a stage next to the tent where Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope would be giving what I liked to think of as a State of the Juggalo address had planted a sign into the ground reading

  Hey,

  So do u think you

  have a nice rack?

  Are you thirsty?

  Show me your Tit-Tays . . . PleasE!

  & Get a free drink

  Its Hot Stay wet!

  Whoop

  Whoop!

  To drive his message home, the enterprising gentleman included a smiley face, a childlike drawing of a glass of water, and a pair of smiling clown faces made up to resemble the professional guises of Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J.

  An even more enterprising young man flashed Cadence the requisite IF YOU SHOW ME YOUR TITS I’LL GIVE YOU A DRINK sign with a big Colgate smile. When she respectfully declined, he made an exaggerated frowny face and flipped over the sign so that it now read, AW, C’MON. I’LL GET YOU HIGH TOO! It was a real mark of Juggalo ingenuity that the youngster anticipated consistent rejection and had another offer on the table immediately. That’s the kind of persistence that will someday land that young man in the White House. Other boob lovers in the crowd opted to mix a little autobiography into their appeal. A scrawny-looking African-American man wandered around with a sign pleading, FIRST GATHERING. PLEASE SHOW ASS, PUSSY OR TITS.

  As is generally the case with Juggalos and ICP, there is no need to read between the lines or infer indirectly. The notorious infomercial for the 2010 Gathering spells it all out explicitly: “The magic in the air. The feeling of ten thousand best friends around you. The camaraderie, the family, and the love felt throughout the grounds. You’ll meet people, make future best friends. You’ll probably get laid. And you’ll realize that the family coming together is what this is really about.”