2009: THE YEAR JUGGALO BROKE

I’m not really one to talk, having openly referred to the Gathering as ‘a mungfest,’ ‘dumbapalooza,’ and ‘the nation’s premiere congress of submongoloid shit-rap enthusiasts’ to numerous friends and family before my own attendance. I believe I even pitched my original Vice story as something to the effect of ‘a three-day slog through the fetid, grease-paint-besmeared scrotum fold of America’s most disfavorable subculture.’ I feel bad for these slurs now, but it took a lot of learning about Juggalodom and myself in order to get past my shitty sense of false-superiority and see Juggalo culture for what it really is: Fun and more or less awesome.

It’s possible that some of those who embark on the trek this year will undertake a similarly fruity-sounding voyage of discovery, but I’m not banking on it.

As I was getting educated on all the ways and means of those down with the clown, one particularly invidious element of ninjaphobia I just couldn’t shake was fear of falling prey to Juggalo violence. They’ve massaged it into the rest of the text since, but back when I was gearing up to go, the wikipedia page for the Gathering had a distinct section cataloguing the assorted riots, cliff-deaths, and other ‘incidents’ that have plagued the festival since its inception. It in turn was linked to a separate page listing various Juggalo-related crimes of aggression over the last ten years. After reading one too many ‘wilding’ story from one too many national park, I sent my Juggalo host an email very cautiously asking him whether there was anything I could do, wear, not-do, or not-wear to avoid having my skull caved in with a length of pipe, to which he responded “Dude, you’ll be fine. It’s only going to be fun.”

He was right. The only violence I saw at the Gathering was either staged, soda-oriented, or directed at garbage cans and non-functioning camping accoutrements. During my late-night wanders I did hear an occasional ruckus coming from the druggier part of the woods, but suffice it to say nobody’s body showed up the next morning with its face burnt off by nitrous.

Not only was I never subjected to having my body hurt by Juggalos, they didn’t even bother with my feelings. If you air-lifted a solitary Juggalo into the middle of one of those Pitchfork festivals and hit ‘invert image,’ that was basically my situation at the Gathering. I was begging for it. At the very least a ‘nerd’ or ‘fag’. And yet the only time which came even close was when some kid yelled out ‘Hey that guy looks like Radar,’ which was not only a totally fair assessment but also said in more a tone of ’Isn’t it interesting that that guy looks like Radar,’ versus ‘We should go punch that guy who looks like Radar.’

The “they’re violent” criticism is probably the most widespread knock on Juggalos, but that hasn’t stopped folks from whipping out the old ‘misogyny’ card from time to time. Like when Douglas Rushkoff decided to take potshots at them in his documentary Merchants of Cool. Skip ahead to 43 minutes where he claims ICP’s music centers on ‘the ridicule of women and gays’ then goes out of his way not to film or interview any of the women in line for the concert. From my own listening, the most common targets of ridicule in the ICP ouvre are rednecks, rich people, child molesters, news anchors, juggalos, and ICP themselves. (PS: I only saw one or two visibly ‘out’ gay dudes while I was at the Gathering, but I challenge you to do the same at the Warped Tour or Ozzfest)(PPS: ‘rage rock’?). This is the same crap as when people claim things like the ‘disco sucks’ movement was a ‘white, hetero-normative bulwark against the perceived encroachment gay and black liberation’ or metal/punk bands betray a ‘troubling flirtation with fascist tendencies.’ As far as the fact that ‘fag’ and ‘bitch’ persist as part of the middle school lingua franca indicates some general systemic problems with gender and identity, fine. But if you actually believe that singing ’Who’s going tittie huntin’?’ with a bunch of guys in line for a horror-rap show means that you’re actually a closet tit-rapist, I’d recommend you take a few days off of class and spend the night with your average British bachelorette party.

By the way, if you keep watching that doc through the Limp Bizkit shit, Rushkoff eventually calls ICP sellouts for appearing on a pro-wrestling show, which neatly sidesteps the fact that Violent J is by his own account a lifelong pro-wrestling aficionado, chairs a Juggalo wrestling league, and even spent a good portion of his time pre-clown rap on the Midwestern amateur wrestling circuit. Way to do your homework, Dougo.

Anyways, before the hatchet pieces on GOTJX start rolling in, here are a few more things I learned about Juggalism that I wish I’d been able to tell you earlier.

- Morton’s List is this game that’s kind of quasi-Juggalo related (I think it was invented by one of the guys’ brothers). It is basically a spiral-bound notebook filled with suggested things for you and your friends to do, but the thing that separates it from Elmo’s Rainy Day JUMBO Coloring & Activity Book is you have to roll one of those Dungeons & Dragons dice and whatever activity it matches, you’ve got one hour to get it done. Or else… you lose, I guess. The penalty phase was not made clear to me. BUT, once you’ve done a couple activities – sorry quests – you graduate to new sections of quests, sections with questy names like ‘Dimension Flux’ and ‘Seek the Holy Grail,’ and the quests get questier, like you have to travel to Japan and the like (this was toward the end I think). On top of that, if you complete enough quests, you get inducted into a secret society called something like the Brotherhood of the Twilight Scroll or something with all these different degrees like in Freemasonry and you get to hang out with other Juggalos in the brotherhood or maybe something better? I’m sorry, I thought I remembered this a little better when I started the section. One thing I DO remember though is being fucking pumped to learn about it.

Here’s a picture of the ninja who taught me about it (I want to say Scott? Again, sorry, it’s been a couple years) and his tattoos of the degrees he’s ascended to.

- Juggalos are the current Deadheads. Not just as some hackneyed metaphor either – of all the over-40 juggs I ran into at the Gathering, the majority copped to following the Dead at some point before Jerry died. The first person to clue me into this was Bill, an ex-Deadhead who founded a Juggalo car club in Michigan (Hatchet Rydaz) and builds weird custom bicycles based on ICP albums.

Bill in front of The Amazing Jeckel Brothers

The way he explained it to me, after the Dead broke up the only options for the diehards were hanging out in the parking lots of frat acts like Phish and DMB, settling down, or becoming sort of loose mentors to the new crop of druggish band-following people.

(By the way, this is the same reason that acid dried up at the end of the 90s – all the major distribution networks were tied up with the Dead’s tour schedule/route. That shit about Leonard Pickard making the entire country’s supply in an abandoned missile silo was cooked up by the DEA to make itself look good. )

- They’re better than you. That’s right. JUGGALOS are better people than you. It’s completely, 100% true. While you’re sitting at your desk, snickering into your palms about meth-use and incest, they’re packing their bags and spraypainting hatchet men on the side of their cars in preparation for the best weekend of their entire year, completely oblivious to you and your entire world.

Granted, some of them are dumb. Some of them are really really really really fucking really really really fucking dumb. Some of them it would be apt to describe as “simple.” But the vast majority of them fall well inside the bell. All the jokes you think you’re making about them, they’re in on. Oh, the writing on that Gathering promo video goes from jokingly well-spoken to really vulgar and back a bunch? Putting on a fake Bobby Bouchet voice and claiming there’s “sex in the air” is goofy? Oh, evil clown makeup looks stupid? It doesn’t take a masters degree in semiotics to figure out this shit.

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.

If you ever take a chance on Violent J’s biography (it’s 600 pages, but a good deal of that is pictures, ‘visual discographies,’ and text that forms weird shapes like curvy triangles and spirals) it will make you want to bow down before your parents and tongue the dried dogshit out of their waffle soles for raising you with whatever semblance of a decent childhood you were lucky enough to get from them. The thing reads like a multi-fontic Roald Dahl novel. Basically, any childhood trauma you can come up with, hell pretty much anything BAD you can think of, it was visited upon J and his family. His elementary school held a canned food drive specifically for him and his siblings. His neighborhood babysitter fenced him and his brother in the backyard like dogs. At one point he was chased by a monster. I don’t know if having one of the most horrifying upbringings of all times justifies forging a commercial empire on pornographic clown-rap, but it certainly beats the more probable outcomes.

One back-handed ‘defense’ of Juggalos I’ve seen a lot recently from guilty collegiate types is that instead of making fun of the ninjas for doing what they enjoy, we should be focusing our rage on ICP who exploit their fans’ shitty lives by giving them a false sense of community in return for buying acres of merch. There’s probably a hint of truth to that, but again it’s more of a critical-theory, all-work-is-bondage sort of ‘truth’ than Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are these calculating robber barons who sleep on piles of money. From what I gather, they are just reasonably hard-working guys from circumstances who got extremely lucky and haven’t been stupid enough to take it for granted yet.

Anywers, in lieu of a conclusion here’s a short list of people I think are uniformly more deserving of your derision than Juggalos:

- Boston sports fans
- Boston metal fans
- Boston punks
- people who maintain steady internet-commenting personalities
- non-sober people who are against drugs
- a lot of cops (not all)
- the guy who pissed in all the windshield washing tubs at the BP on McGuiness Blvd
- rapists
- people who run health insurance companies
- “the media”

By the by, if you’re looking for a more Juggalo-centric view of the Gathering, here’s a great documentary on it from last year that is completely FJBJ.

Addendum: I just realized that there is no Juggalo term for non-Juggalo. Chew on that one.