“
What is a Juggalo? A dead body / Well he ain’t really dead, but he ain’t like anybody that you’ve ever met before / He’ll eat Monopoly and shit out Connect Four.” –ICP, “What is a Juggalo?”
With the possible exception of the Jews, no other group has eaten as big an amount of shit over the course of its existence as the Juggalos.
From the earliest reviews of the Insane Clown Posse’s singular brand of circus-themed swear-rap, the general contention has been that there is no way music could possibly sink below this point. This is the bottom. It’s almost as if ICP intentionally cherry-picked the worst aspects of goth, punk, gangsta rap, rave, nu-metal, and real metal to create a sub-culture so universally repulsive as to forestall any attempts at outside involvement. Basically, they trumped all previous claims of FTW, and then wrote a nearly unlistenable song called “Fuck the World” just to hammer the point home.
But while everybody else was busy acting like they were above gems such as “Bugz On My Nutz,” Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope were forging a media empire for their base of extremely devoted followers, the Juggalo Family—sort of like a rap-alliance between Deadheads and the KISS Army. The Family spread rapidly across the poorer swaths of the Midwest and established a huge and more or less self-sufficient underground with its own distribution network, porn, churches (seriously), charities, file-sharing services, anti-drunk-driving coalition (JADD), initiatory secret society, GLBT activist, pro- and backyard-wrestling circuits, and two MySpace variations (ninjaspace.net and the possibly defunct
myjuggalospace.com).
If you want some scope of their national coverage, just plug the word “Juggalo” into google. Wait, actually I just tried that and it really wasn’t that impressive, but trust me, they are big and forever getting bigger. I know, because I just spent the weekend with a good 6,000 of them.
The Gathering of the Juggalos is like the horror-rap equivalent of the Hajj. ICP started it in 2000 as a two-day festival in their native Michigan to showcase the bands on their label, Psychopathic Records, but over the next few years it metastasized into a four-day-long acid-tit-and-rap binge, drawing thousands of Juggalos from across the country and featuring performances by outside rappers such as 2 Live Crew, Three 6 Mafia, and Vanilla Ice.
Except for a lucky three-year spate in northern Ohio, the Gathering has been forced to move every year due to crowd issues (the second one in Toledo resulted in a full-scale indoor police riot), and up until the third year, ICP had yet to make it through a complete set on account of audience overenthusiasm. This year’s was being held at a biker camp just outside the 350-person townlet of Cave-In-Rock right on the southern border of Illinois, an hour’s drive in all directions from anything approaching civilization.
I’d been hesitant to dive into the Gathering on my own, but at the last minute a Welsh Juggalo named Daff I’d emailed at
juggalonews.com called me and offered to be my guide. I bought my tickets through ICP’s website, and two days later I was Juggalo-bound.
TO BE CONTINUED:
IN THE LAND OF THE JUGGALOS |
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