The Curious Anthropology of Insane Clown Posse

In case you haven't seen it yet, "Miracles," the new Insane Clown Posse video, is posted above. It's getting a serious amount of chatter from the lulz crowd, and deservedly so, because even when judged against the ridiculously low standards of the Insane Clown Posse oeuvre, it's laughably bad. It's basically a mishmash of curse words inserted into a list of things that ICP considers "miracles," none of which are actually miracles, similar to how nothing in Alanis Morissette's "Ironic" is actually ironic. There's also a part where one of the duo talks about hating scientists. Since the video came out a few days again, I'm sure that by now there's twenty thousand blog posts snarking on it, so in the interest of preventing redundancy, I'll forego commentary in lieu of encouraging you to read Daniel O'Brien's hilarious post.

Instead, I want to draw attention to the most fascinating thing about Insane Clown Posse besides the awesome badness of their music: the remarkably robust subculture that the group literally stands at the center of. Unless you know a fan of ICP personally or are atypically immersed in music culture, you've probably never heard any of their music before clicking on that video (or never at all if you didn't click on the video). Hell, I was part of ICP's strongest demographic (socially unpopular Midwestern male teenagers) during the group's brief period of mainstream semi-relevance in the late 90s, and counting "Miracles" I've heard maybe four of their songs in my entire life. ICP is not a major mainstream phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination, and they're one of the most critically reviled musical acts in recent memory, if not of all time.

Despite all this, Insane Clown Posse runs a vertically-integrated media enterprise that between music, concerts, and licensed merchandise, grosses somewhere around 10 million dollars per year. Given the current climate in the music industry, that's an amazing accomplishment. Considering that ICP are regarded as a punchline by the vast majority of people who are even aware of their existence, it's downright miraculous.

Except it's not, because ICP have made their bones the old-fashioned way: by cultivating an intense and personal relationship with their fanbase. If you ever encounter an ICP fan (or a "Juggalo" as they refer to themselves), you'll know it, because they'll probably be wearing an ICP T-shirt. In fact they'll probably have one for every day of the week. Not only that, they'll have a surprisingly large vocabulary of ICP-centric slang words and rituals (should you dare to click through to it, this dictionary website somehow manages to convey all of the irritating, ridiculous, and ignorant aspects of Juggalo mentality within the first 30 seconds of loading it up).

Pretty much every last dollar if ICP's lucrative enterprise comes from this guy and the thousands of other diehards just like him. One of ICP's ventures is "The Gathering of Juggalos," a multi-day yearly music festival headlined by the band and affiliated acts held in a remote state park in Southern Illinois not terribly far from where I went to graduate school. It draws up to 20,000 fans. In 2007, writer Thomas Morton went to the festival and wrote up his experience as an article for Vice, a bit of work which probably stands as the definitive anthropological study of Insane Clown Posse fans to date, not that I have a comprehensive grasp of the alternatives. Anyhow, last fall, Morton wrote a stunning rant decrying the practice of smirking at ICP fans from a great height. In the process, he openly admits how writing the article challenged his preconceptions of his subject, makes a (convincing) case that ICP is the new Grateful Dead, and most importantly, nails down the essence of Insane Clown Posse fandom. Here's the key paragraph of his argument:

As for the big one, the joke about who would voluntarily be into this music and save up to go to this festival and be excited about the helicopter rides and Rowdy Roddy Piper and cheeseburgers, here’s your punchline: Poor midwestern kids from mostly broken homes with absolutely no prospects of material success who even goth and punk kids make fun of.

And that's pretty much the crux of it. ICP built an empire by embracing with both arms the exact segment of society that everyone else goes out of their way to avoid or ignore. Think about Abercrombie and Fitch forcing a (very attractive) female employee to sort hangars in the back where customers couldn't see her because she had a prosthetic arm and you get a fairly decent idea of the extremes modern consumer society goes to reinforce prevailing ideas of desirability and success, both as a goal to be achieved and an illusion to be created. The people who wind up in ICP fandom don't have a prayer of fulfilling anyone's conventional idea of those notions, or even making a convincing pretense at it, and they know it. In a lot of cases, they've been told it their entire lives.

And then along comes Insane Clown Posse, themselves none-too-bright burnouts from a city that itself has become a sort of American shorthand for failure (Detroit, if you're wondering) with music that combines the sort of barely articulated rage common to every teenage outcast since time immemorial with a goofy aesthetic that screams "I'm not even trying to impress the cool kids." See, the stupidity of Insane Clown Posse is a feature, not a bug; it means that only the people who see themselves as having nothing to lose in the eyes of society will embrace it. Imagine you fell into that category: would you rather go to a show put on by an up and coming buzz band and stand in a crowd of sneering poseurs who'll go out of their way to find fault with you, or would you rather go to a raucous and profane ICP show filled with people who are just happy to have a place to be accepted? Fuck Bruce Springsteen. Insane Clown Posse are the torchbearers of the real American underclass.

I'm a big, big music fan. I could rattle off a list of dozens of albums that have touched me greatly and, I believe, impacted the course of my life in a tangible way. But truthfully, I don't think any musical artist will ever mean as much to me as Insane Clown Posse does to its ardent fans. So by all means, laugh and gape at the video for "Miracles" (I watched it twice, just to make sure it was real) and any of the other dumbass ICP-related stuff you come across, because there sure as hell isn't any shortage of that.

Just don't wonder so hard about what type of person would like this kind of thing.