“This must be your first time,” the tall Juggalette yelled, tugging at the sleeve of the now-sticky trash bag I’d improvised into a poncho for Insane Clown Posse’s recent show at the Mission Ballroom. “The fuck is this? You got it all wrong. You’re supposed to get soaked in the Faygo. You want to get soaked!”
Based on how many of her chanting, whooping compatriots seemed ecstatic to have ended the show covered in Faygo soda, she was clearly not alone in this opinion. I had tried to come to this Insane Clown Posse show, like hundreds of other intrepid journalists before me, to go “undercover,” willingly subjecting myself (a non-Juggalo) to some of the group’s rituals. I’d started high up in the seats at the back of the Mission Ballroom, simply observing. — “Whatchu takin’ notes for, homie?” one attendee bemusedly asked when he saw my notebook.
I decided to meander down to around the middle of the crowd, close enough to feel the energy and catch a few drops of Faygo without having it dumped on me by ICP’s on-stage clown assistants for an hour and a half straight like those in the front rows.
The crowd was wild. Unless you stood in the back, there was little regard for personal space; the little notebook immediately became soaked in sweat and Faygo and disappeared. But it was alright — there I was, amongst Juggalos — real ones! — in their element, able to tell people for the rest of my life that I had once attended an Insane Clown Posse concert, to hear their gasps and hums of interest and to answer the inevitable “...Well? What was it like?”
There are countless articles out there with titles like: “The 5 Unavoidable Things You’ll Experience at an ICP Show.” People on long Reddit threads warn you to come in your least valuable clothes and shoes, cover the inside of your car in plastic for the ride back, and avoid the rowdiest parts of the crowd if you value your life. Others promise that Juggalos are kind, welcoming people who just get a little enthusiastic sometimes, and to keep your wits about you. Some complain about what they see as maligning of their behavior, pointing out that you’re welcome to stand in the back and watch if you don’t want to participate, but not to harsh the vibe for everybody else.
Though the Juggalos themselves don’t particularly seem to care what I did. I don’t think there’s much in this world that can stop them from doing what they’re gonna do.
Everyone has their own perception of ICP and Juggalos. For plenty of writers, photographers, and other documentarians, playing off the fear and apprehension that many people feel towards ICP is a great way to get attention for your work, and the absurdity of Juggalo getup & antics is undeniably eye-catching. Others seem to approach it with an attitude of not wanting to “sensationalize” the culture. What feels relevant here is that I am not the first, tenth, or hundredth person to document attending a Juggalo event as a non-Juggalo. Those of us who don’t belong to this world remain incurably fascinated by what it entails.
What draws people with no connection to anything remotely Juggalo to perform these cultural studies in the form of books, articles, and documentaries? What entices modern-day YouTube creators to the front lines of Gatherings to brave the mud and Faygo and interview the wildest, most drugged-out weirdos they can find for millions of views on videos called things like “Spent 24 Hours At the Gathering of the Juggalos,” and “Inside the Gathering of the Juggalos”? What makes people watch these videos and read these books?
What exactly is the relationship between interest in the other vs disconnection, and positive appreciation vs judgment or misunderstanding? I posed some questions like this to Josh Taylor, who ran the beloved Denver venue Monkey Mania until 2005, worked at Wax Trax, and who has been interested in Juggalo culture for decades. Josh attributes the fascination with Juggalos to their behavior being so unique, so attention-grabbing, so genuine and uninhibited, and so thoroughly un-corporate.
“If you had the chance, would you rather go to Burning Man or the Gathering of the Juggalos?” Josh asked me. “Nothing like it’s been started before or since. The other stuff out there is mainly just general interest culture. Coachella and such.”
Thumbing through used electronic 12”s, Josh told me about how Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope continue to pour their own money into the yearly Gatherings despite such an endeavour not being remotely profitable (the Gatherings are sponsored by Psychopathic Records, the label co-founded by the duo that has released most of their music). “They’re true to their word.”
It should be noted that not all of the documentation of Juggalo culture has come from the outside. The physical release of 2009’s Bang! Pow! Boom! (the record that includes ‘Miracles’) came with a 90-minute documentary called A Family Underground filmed at the 2008 Gathering. Josh described watching the documentary as a joke sometime around its release, enjoying watching Juggalos “taking as many drugs as they can, running around naked, hitting each other with fluorescent lightbulbs…” But by the time he finished watching, he had found an interest in and respect for the group. “It’s all super goofy and dumb lyrics, but the whole thing is so genuine.” He recommended Violent J’s autobiography, ICP: Behind the Paint for insights into how “they’re both nerds who figured out how to DIY the whole thing, got signed and dropped more than once, and used the money to support the subculture they’d started. They’re geniuses,” Josh said.
ICP also made a documentary following their 2012 “American Psycho Tour” that included a visit to Wax Trax; former owner Duane Davis describes them as “louts” who “lived up to their reputation.”
Like many people, Josh wasn’t drawn to ICP by a personal connection, but by a general love of music, interest in what was being said about the bizarre subculture, and encouragement from his coworker Mike Buckley, who has quietly followed the emergence of ICP since the beginning. Josh described feeling a lot of sympathy for kids growing up in the context of events like Columbine who’d been “picked on to extremes” and found a home in the Juggalo family, even those who connected more to the culture than the music. Asking people in my life about Juggalos they had known, most described a few oddballs on the periphery of high school or childhood. One coworker described a Juggalo who’d attended her high school as “not somebody we really respected.”
The idea is that in the Family, these misfits were able to celebrate their weirdness instead of being ostracized for it. Josh stopped flipping through records and looked me in the eye: “ICP stopped thousands of school shooters. I’m not kidding, like, they definitely did.”
Josh also clued me into some aspects of ICP’s artistry (yeah, I know) that I wasn’t familiar with — the six-album Joker’s Card concept series, which revealed, piece by piece, a world called the Dark Carnival with a secret at its center, revealed in the sixth album to be — get ready for it — God.
Some, like Josh, have pointed out what they see as a moralistic streak in Juggalos that they partly attribute to the religious underpinning. He says it isn’t really “about the specifics of God, but just the most pure idea of a good society.” Juggalos for the most part seem pretty solidly anti-racist, anti-cop, and anti-pedophilia with many ICP songs reveling in goofy fantasies about killing racists, cops, pedophiles, etc. Fans in the Gathering videos I watched sported shirts inspired by the ICP song about burning the Confederate flag.
The final opening band at the Denver show chanted that if you’re a pedophile, you ain’t a fuckin Juggalo, get out. However, it’s also worth mentioning that when the second opener, Denver’s Hoodie Hilltop (a regular at the store who I recognized from his DAVID LYNCH knuckle tattoos, Black Lodge forehead tattoo, and distinctive blue face paint), delivered the line “fuck Donald Trump, fuck the police, and fuck ICE,” a good-sized section of the crowd started booing.
Hoodie Hilltop stood his ground, reminding the crowd “They’re coming for you next.”
Another coworker told tales about getting into fights with a group of Juggalos who used to gather around the Roxy Theatre and chant things that I wouldn’t include in this article.
The point is, morals and political affiliations clearly vary widely within Juggalo life, but the principles laid out by Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J seem fairly well-established and respected by the majority of the community. The more I learn about Juggalos, the less I feel I know. Attending a show and doing a little research feels like I’m barely scratching the surface. I should admit that over the course of this, I’ve developed some of the same curiosity that inspired the article in the first place. How would you, dear reader, answer Josh’s question: would you rather go to Burning Man or the Gathering of the Juggalos?
I did also ask Josh one last question, “Would you consider yourself a Juggalo?”
“Sure, yeah. Why not? My cat is named Whoop-Whoop.”
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