NEWSLETTER

DAY ONE
“What is a Juggalo? A fucking lunatic / Somebody with a rope tied to his dick / Then he jumps out a ten-story window / [slide whistle followed by breaking glass] Oh.”

I wanted to arrive by Friday afternoon, in time to get situated and catch Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony’s evening set, but shitty traffic caused me to miss the boat (like, literally—the last ferry across the Ohio River left an hour before I got there). After driving up and back down the river for two hours in search of a bridge I gave up and crashed in the back seat of my rental car next to a cornfield.


DAY ONE
“What is a Juggalo? He ain’t a bitch, boy, / He’ll walk through the hills and beat up a rich boy / Walks right in the house while you’re having supper, and dips his nuts in the soup… bwoop.”

As I pulled up to the gates of the campground the next day, two well-dressed older men shoved a couple of Jack Chick tracts through my passenger window while a group of Juggalos super-soaked them from across the street. Based on my later run-ins with crowd-sprayers, it’s safe to assume that the substance being rained down on the preachers was at least partially Faygo, a Detroit-based bargain soda ICP has elevated to the level of Juggalo sacrament—arguably keeping the business afloat for the last decade). Starting right when I got there and culminating in several full-scale drenchings on the final night, I was personally subject to no less than eight separate Faygo showers over the course of the weekend.

In spite of their hosing, the two Christian guys stood their ground with strained smiles. During the month leading up to the Gathering, another minister led a campaign to ban the Juggalos from Cave-In-Rock which ended up doing little more than providing fodder for the local paper and turning its message board into a hilarious shouting match between residents, Juggalos, and Juggalos pretending to be residents. He also supposedly converted an Arizona Juggalo who accidentally showed up a week early and was stranded in the woods without any sort of vehicle, as the Southern Illinoisan dutifully reported.

Following a lax security check by a pair of girls in lawn chairs, I drove down a short gravel path and parked on a hill above a sea of early 90s Mercurys and minivans, makeshift tents, and luminescently pale skin. From my vantage point I was one of maybe two guys and three girls I could see wearing a top.

The creeping sensation of culture-shock reminded me of going to my first concert in middle school, but a lot more dread-y than exciting. Not only did I look nothing like anyone I had seen since I crossed the river, but I was also a good five-to-ten years older than most of the kids milling around, thereby abrogating my right to not have the shit beaten out of me should things turn ugly.

After finding a good plot to park and pitch my tent, I hopped back in the car and thumbed through the surprisingly well-printed festival guide. There were an ridiculous number of activities scheduled around the performances: Wrestling matches, autograph sessions, movie screenings, a magic show, a talent show, poker tournaments, foxy boxing, foxy wrestling, carnival rides, helicopter rides. Each day officially ran from 1 PM to 6 in the morning.

I decided to check out one of the hour-long “artist seminars” to get things started. On my way from the camping area to the seminar tent, I was overtaken by the Love Train, a tractor-drawn flatbed trailer which slowly circles the campground—essentially your typical hayride, but with more trash-throwing and tits. One of the passengers nailed me with an empty plastic bottle and shouted “Woot woot!” the call of the Juggalo, I quickly learned.


During one of our crackly phone conversations a few days earlier, Daff had told me he’d be hanging out with friends of his in the Detroit Hatchet Rydas Car Club. I figured that by canvassing the participants in that day’s car show, I’d have a fighting chance of tracking them down. As it turned out, their three cars were the sole vehicles in a huge cordoned-off field. Two of the Rydas, a heavily pierced kid named Kent and an older, spider-dreaded guy named Bill—both dressed in loose gangish reds—led me up to a pavilion where my host was seated at a picnic table with five other dudes playing a board game called The Quest for Shangri-La. It’s sort of a cross between D&D and Clue, but for Juggalos.

After wrapping up his game, Daff led me on a tour of “Hatchet Landing,” the official Juggalo name for this year’s campsite, and filled me in one what I’d missed so far. Not only had Bone-Thugs-N-Harmony played a mostly un-booed set (the traditional reception for non-Juggalo bands—the first to crack and leave the stage is the winner of that year’s “Bubba Sparxx Award”), they’d been followed by one of Psychopathic Record’s two ICP-led supergroups, Dark Lotus, who wear Sunn 0)))-style monks’ robes and are otherwise vaguely “mystical.” The other one, Psychopathic Rydas, is a 90s-gangsta-rap pastiche composed of roughly the same members. They played the other stage that night at two.

We caught the tail-end of a show by Liquid Assassin and Killa C, who were dead-on a rap version of Yogi and Boo Boo. Following the last song, C made some cryptic remarks about being tailed by “the feds” and hurried offstage, leaving Liquid Assassin to gush over their reception:

“I don’t know if you guys realize, but it touches us to know we’ve got so much support out there and that we’re all a part of the same Juggalo family—”

The fact he was saying this to a crowd of maybe 50 people in front of a park pavilion in the middle of the afternoon didn’t strike anyone around me as funny. Actually, the majority of them took the sincerity and ran with it, cutting him off by chanting “FAM-I-LY! FAM-I-LY!” It was the first of many, many, many times I’d hear that specific chant over the next two days. Then Killa C used his wireless mic to do a shoutout from the bathroom. That part was actually pretty classic.



Daff and I crossed a gravel path to a little tent compound where he introduced me to Scottie, a Texan ninja who runs Juggalonews’s chief competitor, faygoluvers.net. Scottie explained for me the difference between the terms Juggalo and ninja (ninja’s more casual and familiar, like dawg or nigga—but there’s also a weird sense in which it refers to real ninjas) and then elaborated on the “real” meaning behind the J-word.

“For all the kids you see who are into it and are wearing the same clothes or face-paint or whatever, that’s not all being a Juggalo is,” he told me. “It’s actually more about having a certain mindset, and understanding who you really are without getting bogged down with what the rest of the world feels. Violent J has said, you don’t even have to be a fan of ICP to be a Juggalo.”

I got roughly the same answer from everyone else I asked about the nature of Juggalodom. As we left the tent, Daff remembered something he had been trying to tell me during Killa C’s set before a barrage of garbage from the Love Train broke his train of thought.

“A lot of the lyrics can seem dark when you first hear it, but if you listen to them in their proper context it’s really quite a positive message that ICP are trying to get across. There’s some cartoonish violence going on, but generally the people on the receiving end are the types of people who deserve it—racists, child-molesting priests, those sort of folks. Mostly though, the music’s all about unity, and looking out for the members of your Juggalo Family. Really more than anything, the feeling of being at the Gathering every year is like being at a reunion—except in this case it’s a family of your own choosing.”

I felt like this was sort of the same deal as with any fan-centric band, but then he clued me in to ICP’s central credo.

“The biggest part of the Insane Clown Posse up until recently has been the six Joker’s Card albums, which are based on a revelation Violent J had when he and Shaggy first formed the band,” he told me. “The first card was the Carnival of Carnage, which established this idea of the Dark Carnival [kind of their personal metaphor for life or society]. Every few years they’d put out another Joker’s Card album revealing a new aspect of the Carnival—first Ringmaster who was kind of the Carnival’s overseer and a manifestation of people’s sins, then Riddlebox, The Great Milenko, The Amazing Jeckel Brothers, and then they announced that for the sixth and final card, there would be two releases.

“When the first one came out, The Wraith: Shangri-La, it was totally different from anything they’d released up to that point,” he went on. “There’d been hints of the direction in which they’d been heading if you followed the lyrics closely, but here they laid it all out straight and said, ‘The Dark Carnival is God, we’re not sorry if we fooled you—we’ve always followed God and want all Juggalos to find him.’ The second part took a while to come out, and there were rumors that ICP were sort of reluctant to make it. It was called The Wraith: Hell’s Pit and is all a warning about the perils of Hell.”

As I was digesting all this, we passed by a small, fetid pond in the middle of the site where several ninjas were lounging on a floating dock. There were about four or five large upside-down fish at the surface of the water near our end, and three more flattened and covered with flies in the surrounding grass.

“Every year there’s some sort of swimming hole at the Gathering,” Daff told me, “The guys from Twiztid dubbed it ‘Lake Hepatitis.’ I’m not sure what happened with the fish, but they weren’t floating like this the first day.”

Maybe runny face paint had thrown off the ph balance, I suggested.

“Maybe. Folks were slapping each other with them when they first started surfacing.”

I was having a bit of a hard time reconciling all the weird spiritual and individual-empowerment business with the general adolescent dumb I’d been basting in all day. The few people I’d talked to so far had been really well-spoken and thoughtful, but it seemed like everyone around me was inarticulate to the point of it being sort of endearing. Daff was able to put it into concrete terms:

“The thing with ICP is there are very few sort of ‘casual fans.’ I’d say people who like the music but don’t consider themselves Juggalos make up maybe five to ten percent of their overall fanbase. The rest are the type of kids you see here.”

I was momentarily distracted as we passed by a pavilion full of ninjas bouncing a beach ball to the strains of “Help Me, Ronda.”

“Oh, that’s Violent J’s Beach Boys Blowout Beach Blast, or some other alliteration,” Daff informed me. “He’s really into the Beach Boys.”

After I regained my composure, he resumed his explanation.

“Then there’s five or ten percent of Juggalos at the other end of the spectrum who are the sort of people I like to hang out with. They’re the type who really think about the whole Dark Carnival and are into things like the Quest for Shangri-La and Morton’s List.” He took a minute to choose his next words. “There’s sort of an opinion about Juggalos, that a lot aren’t very bright—”

There was a sudden eruption of cheering down the hill from us, where the Love Train had just rolled behind some trees.

“You know what that is, right?” Daff asked me.

“Titty-flash?” I hazarded as a guess.

Daff nodded gravely.




NIGHT ONE
“What is a Juggalo? He just don’t care / He might try to put a weave in his nut-hair / Cause he could give a fuck-less what a bitch thinks / He tells her that her butt stinks, and all that.”

At around seven, people started migrating from the campground to the main stage en mass. There was a lot more face paint and fake blood than during the day, as well as costumes ranging in complexity from basic jester get-ups to Faygo Man suits improvised out of empty 12-packs to full-on ensembles of kids in matching face paint and blood-stained aprons with the Psychopathic Records “hatchet man” logo (sort of a reworked kokopelli with a meat cleaver).

As the evening performances began I started picking up on the nuances of Juggalo trash-pelting. It, like the Faygo drenchings, seemed to be more a measure of general audience enthusiasm than any sort of commentary on the target being pummeled. For instance, during Anybody Killa’s set, the throwing dwindled down to just a few wayward bottles and was replaced in some segments of the crowd by ninjas facing away from the stage while giving a backward double-bird—the apparent result of an old beef between ABK and the rest of Psychopathic’s talent pool. When Mushroomhead took the stage afterward, the fusillades began picking up steam, finally reaching a fever pitch by the time that night’s headliners, Twiztid, started playing.


Once the performances had ended, the herd made its way over to the wrestling ring for Bloodmania! a tournament pitting amateurs against professionals from ICP’s Juggalo Championshit Wrestling league.

By this point I’d grown more or less inured to the “Woot woot!”s and the “FAM-I-LY! FAM-I-LY”s and the “SHOW YOUR TITS! SHOW YOUR TITS!”s. I was even starting to get into the throwing shit. The guy in front of me was really giving it his all on this front, dropping to his knees after each lob to scrounge up more ammo. Even though it was massively interfering with all the matches I assumed everybody outside the ring was cool with the perpetual garbage shower. Suddenly, out of the blue, an anti-pelting contingent sprang up behind me and began chanting “STOP THROWING SHIT! STOP THROWING SHIT!” It was the first time I’d ever seen a crowd chastise itself.

The guy in front of me shrugged it off until one of the chanters singled him out and yelled, “Hey asshole, I just want to see some fucking wrestling, all right?”

Furious, the shit-chucker spun around and faced his accuser, bellowing, “And I just want to see some fucking wrestler get nailed with some fucking shit!”

I was certain someone was about to get clocked, but before punches could be thrown two dudes in huge shorts ran up panting like they’d just discovered gold.

“Dude! We’re going to go get a dead fish to throw up there!”

I didn’t catch the anti-throwing guys’ reaction to this announcement, but pro-throwing guy yelled louder than I’ve ever heard anyone yell in my life.

At around three, my exhaustion from a full day in the sun started to compete heavily with a burgeoning sensation of titlust. I held out for one last set from the girls who hold those number cards between rounds, then made my way back to the campground, where most of the surrounding tents were blaring hip-hop. I thought briefly of trying to make some night buddies, but I was way too zonked.

The second I zipped my flap shut, somebody came by and tried the doors of my car.

THOMAS MORTON


TO BE CONTINUED:
IN THE LAND OF THE JUGGALOS | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

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