Day 9: Insane Clown Posse

Let me preface this by saying that everyone was stupid when they were a kid but that doesn't mean that stupidity is exclusive to kids. "Kid" is a pretty loose term, too. Some people are still kids well into their 30s and they are also stupid. There's another important distinction, too, because some people are childish, some people are naive and some people are just stupid. I can't stress that enough.

You happy little fool.

                                                                     
                                       
So, as a stupid kid, I was also shy and awkward. I lived about 90% of my life inside my own head. My older brother was boisterous and personable and people loved him. I wanted to be like him but he was also six feet tall and super smart. The weird thing is, I was also a little bit jealous of my younger brother, too, because he also made a lot of friends, especially in high school. The other thing about me was I loved rap music but until late middle school, all we listened to was Christian music and I found out later that Christian rap was mostly just regular rap with certain words replaced with "Jesus" or "pray". That's not to say there are no good Christian rap groups but, oddly enough, I found most of when I was much older.

Okay, I'm in high school, I'm a nerd and an outcast, oh and my aunt loves the Jerky Boys. We listened to one of their albums over and over. Well, on the radio, a local station has some weird rock group called "Insane Clown Posse" take over the station for a while and I was interested because their name was funny and they happened to be touring with the Jerky Boys(that might actually be Jerky Boyz because it was the 90s and "z"s were everywhere but whatever). Anyway, then they played one of their songs and I realized I had heard them before but I didn't know who they were. I also saw their video for House of Illusion and thought it was awesome because I was fifteen and I hadn't really been exposed to things like weird freak shows and rapping clowns.

With the knowledge of who these guys were, I suddenly saw them everywhere. My dad is a huge comic collector and he always had an issue of Wizard close by so I saw that these guys had a comic in the works. Around that time, they also  were showing up in the WWF, which I loved because I was a teenage male in the late 90s and their  marketing was aimed directly at me. Then, my younger brother showed me this album called Great Milenko and I guess from their I just dug deeper and deeper into the life of an ICP fan, aka a juggalo. After graduating from high school, I felt aimless and stupid and instead of doing something cool like going far away to college, I got a job at Hastings. There, I had access to everything I loved and I started obsessively collecting ICP merchandise.

I guess the reason I loved the band so much was they hit the right notes (no pun intended because if it was, that would be almost a crime) with me as a young, confused person. First of all, it gave me an immediate identity as a juggalo. In addition, their raps were something I could practically have thought of myself because they loved all the stuff I liked, like horror movies, D&D and sweet sweet vengeance on whoever made your own life difficult. But as I gained a clearer vision of who I wanted to be, I found that ICP lost it's luster. For one thing, they began to take their own false bravado, which I had always thought of as being played for jokes(a clown thug is ridiculous and should only exist in comics and possibly video games based on comics). I think that as a kid, I was naive enough to believe that two white guys who painted their faces and did some simplistic rapping over circus beats weren't seriously thinking they were gangstas but twenty years or so later, the latest ICP album has a song called "Ghetto Rainbows", as if multimillionaires know what someone in a ghetto goes through. Full disclosure, I haven't listened to the song but I am not going to so if you do and it's actually touching and heartfelt, great.

There are lots of other reasons I lost touch with the band. People that I liked and genuinely respected usually reacted with thinly veiled contempt at the band. The idea of being a juggalo was appealing because it's supposed to be a clique for people who weren't cool enough to be part of a clique. Then, some people at my sister's high school decided to beat up kids who were dressing like ICP but weren't doing the makeup right. Good job, kids. How shitty would you feel if you thought "Well, at least I'll fit in with these losers." and then some assholes jumped you because you dressed like rappers you liked but you "did it wrong". So, any sense of community was slowly broken. Then there was the idiotic girl ICP fan who said really stupid things like "I hate people who have a rebel flag on their truck. They are racists and we should blow up their truck and hang them." and about the Gathering of the Juggalos, a giant festival ICP throws every year, "You can just feel all the love around you, you just have to go and you'll understand." My girlfriend pointed out that's what a lot of people say about church, too. That brings me to ICP's shitty pseudo religious status. When I was a kid, one of the coolest things about them was they had this set, clear goal of releasing six "Joker's Cards", six albums based om these six different creatures inhabiting the Dark Carnival. Then, on the sixth Jokers Card, they revealed that the Dark Carnival was God and they sincerely hoped every juggalo would find him.

Seriously? I was in shock when that happened. What kind of bullshit was this? Part of the reason I liked them was I was going through my teenage rejection of my parent's religious values and moral ideas but I really liked the idea that these creatures inhabited this carnival and they kept tally of your sins and meted out justice against evil doers. What a cop out for ICP to basically say "Oh yeah we like Jesus". After that, I felt like everything was just shitty cash grab music. I remember buying the album after the sixth joker's card album. It was called "The Tempest" and all I can remember is buying it for a road trip and taking it out before I had even left city limits.

After all this stuff, though, I was still willing to give them a chance. My siblings(minus my older brother) loved them so much. In fact, the retarded girl that said the stupid things I quoted earlier is the mother of my brother's kids. The final nail in the coffin was when I lived in Detroit. Yup, ICP got street cred for being from there, even if they were actually from Warren. I had the privilege to be in that mess of a town around Halloween and I thought I was lucky. I was talking to a guy I worked with, a Detroit native, and I mentioned I might check out Hallowicked, the annual ICP concert and he raised his eyebrows and just shrugged, more confused than anything. I always assumed that even if Detroit natives didn't care for ICP, they would know who those guys are. I was wrong. It's even worse than hate from Detroit, most people don't care about the band either way. I always said that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. Detroit is pretty much indifferent about these clowns.

I kept my CDs for about a year after that for sentimental value, mostly. I think last year I finally sold them after they had sit gathering dust for the longest time. To be fair, though, I sold all my CDs that I could because I have Spotify and that pretty much covers nearly anything I'd ever want to hear. I guess I don't really care about the band anymore but there's this really perverse fascination that I have where whenever I hear about something that they did, I call my younger siblings and ask them about it. The reaction that this unbelievably bad band can stir in people is amazing. It's like a fierce Democrat defending Obama's horrible debate performance or a staunch Catholic trying to justify all the boy-touching priests. In a way, I'm really glad that people still love them but in the same way that I'm glad people like horrible movies or TV shows, because if these people exist and not only find others like them but even procreate then life is completely absurd and unpredictable which means there is no grand design which means that ICP still being popular proves free will and the absence of God.

"10 years from now I'm going to hate you guys so much. Let's hug."