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An Obligatory and Pointless Debate About Juggalos

Ban these clown scum now?

Are you aware of a shy and secretive group of people who love the rap-rock band Insane Clown Posse and call themselves the Juggalos? You may have seen them on the internet at some stage. Well, the other day the FBI decided that they qualified as a fully-fledged, criminal American street gang – just like the Bloods, the Crips, the Latin Kings and all those other guys. This, of course, stoked fires in the bellies of the British press. Everyone has had an opinion on it. But are the Juggalos a brainwashed army of devil-devotees who'll shit all over our societal order until it resembles something more akin to chaos? Or are they just the latest group of kids to be misunderstood by a Western World run by people who can't remember what it felt like to be teenage any more? We invented two journalists to add their insignificant voices to an insignificant argument about something that, in the long run, probably doesn't really matter.

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JUGGALOS? MORE LIKE GANGALOS
by Melanie Hitchens Where I come from, we have a saying: if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, bangs gangs like a duck, then it is a gangbanging duck. Case closed. Well, as should be clear to everyone by now, Juggalos are that gangbanging duck. No one can dispute what the FBI have finally made official. The face paint, the shared rituals, the spraying of soda-pop: this group of degenerates displays all the telltale insignia of a violent gang hellbent on overturning the rule of law. Worse, they have spawned their own franchises in countries all across the world – including ours. Yes: as you may have read in the press recently, the Juggalos – fans of the hip-hop circus group Insane Clown Posse – are now classified as a bona fide criminal street gang by the FBI. Their ugly mugs obscured with face paint, these moral bankrupts have banded together to let loose carnage on some of America's largest cities. What sort of thing? Well let's just say not all they're murdering is donuts, these days… Crime is at the heart of the Juggalo lifestyle. Look at the fucking state of them. Not one of them is fit for gainful employment. Juggalos vie for each other's respect through complex killing rituals known as 'Joker Cards', and annually attend 'the Conference of the Juggalos', a drug distribution hub. Still not convinced? One of the Juggalos' heroes has the word 'violent' in his name. Another member of Insane Clown Posse is named after a black rapper who sings about having sex in the bathroom – that is surely all you need to know about these two deviants. The Juggalo menace is spreading, and it's up to us to protect our children from the most dangerous youth fad since the druggie suicide-maniacs of My Chemical Romance finally ceased recruiting to their own cult. Now, I'm all for letting young people have the freedom to do whatever they like while they are studying for respectable jobs. But not if it means children being encouraged to hang themselves in their bedrooms in games of autoerotic asphyxiation. Yet again, we have to wonder why society lets our nation's impressionable youth plaster their bedroom walls with posters of these deranged men; private shrines erected in honour of the rape clowns. Our youth need to catch a wake-up. Yeah, I've been young – I've taken a walk on the wild side in my time, I'll tell you that for nothing – but I know there is nothing "fun" about throwing your life away on an illusion. There is nothing "fun" about being sprayed with fizzy drinks. And there is nothing "fun" about mass murder. Instead of Jugg-hello, we should be saying Jugg-goodbye to these chunky monkeys and all who follow them. Ban these clown scum now, before it's too late.

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DON'T BE A DICKALO – GIVE A JUGGALO A HUGGALO
by Jerry Uggalo Violent J. Shaggy. What do these names mean to you? Well, if you were a Juggalo like me, they'd probably mean quite a lot. You'd probably have spent most of your life in your bedroom, comfort-eating while you listened to these two geniuses espouse their skewed, but brutally truthful, wisdom across a series of high quality rap-rock records. To a generation of social outcasts, the Insane Clown Posse represent a beacon of hope amidst the darkness. They come bearing a message saying: "Yes, let's have a good time. Yes, let's go mad, and while we're at it we'll all come together and just have a good old chinwag about beating bitches." Their message is essentially positive – innocent, even – and it is nothing short of tragic that they have been characterised as a gang, because Juggalos are the opposite of a gang: they're a support group. We have to stick together, because no one else is going to stick up for us. We're exactly the sort of people who ought to be offered your sympathy, not be lampooned as ridiculous clowns, just because we dress up as ridiculous clowns. Unfortunately, what we're seeing played out here is just the same pattern played out over and over again since time began. Whether it was the 60s, 70s or 80s, society has always demonised certain artists, making them out to be bad people who would come to sticky ends. They said the same thing about The Charles Manson Band. They said that about Sid Vicious.They said the same thing about Norwegian Black Metal. In every case, they couldn't have been more wrong. What we the fans want is just the freedom to be Juggalo. To express ourselves in Juggalo ways, like by going to the annual meeting of the Juggalos. If only I could show you what happens at these meetings – how great it is to just hang out with fellow Juggalos, cheerfully blowback each other's farts, and hurl rocks at Tila Tequila? All good, harmless fun. It's a place where we can spend our time figuring out how the fuck magnets work. And how other stuff works too – shoes, jugs, toothpaste, cuckoo clocks… the list is frankly endless. I mean, how the fuck does toothpaste work – it starts off as what I guess you'd call a paste, then it becomes a sort of foam, and BAM – your teeth are clean. Just like that. Un-be-fucking-lie-vable. To those haters who spend all their time ripping on the Juggalo crew, I'd say: remember that there's a Juggalo in all of us. You can hate us, you can bruise us, but if Jesus was alive today, I like to think he would be juggalo too. Imagine a Juggalo on a cross, and you have the position we now find ourselves in: strung up in nothing but a loincloth, our sides speared with the lances tossed by music critics, our painted faces bloodied by the crown of thorns placed on our heads by right-wing newspaper columnists. It's enough to make a grown man cry. And believe me, brother, you don't want to see the tears of a clown. C'mon peeps. Give a motherfucking juggalo a motherfucking huggalo.

Previously: An Obligatory and Pointless Debate About John Peel Day

An Obligatory and Pointless Debate About the Stone Roses