Tuesday 13 September 2011

I was a teenage juggalo

I have a confession to make.

This is a secret I have kept from most of my adult aquaintances, friends and colleagues, and only a select few close friends have ever known this. But, in the interests of full disclosure and to set me on a true path of recovery, I have decided to come clean.

I was a fan of the Insane Clown Posse, or I.C.P., otherwise known as a juggalo. To the uninitiated, a juggalo is the term for a fan of this band, and possibly some surrounding acts such as Twiztid, Marz or Rob Van Winkle (the artist formerly known as "Vanilla Ice").

I.C.P., as their name suggests are a white rap duo from Detroit, who started off relatively normally as "Inner City Posse" in the early 90s. At some point, I guess they decided that simply being a couple of white dudes wasn't quite gimmicky enough, so they changed their name to Insane Clown Posse and painted their faces up to look like spooky clowns. To this day, I remember the style of facepaint on both Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. Oh, and I remember their names as well.

Their albums, at least as far as when I used to listen to them, were based on a dream or a "vision", or a "made up thing to sell records to idiot teenagers" that the fat one (Violent J) had at some point. In this vision, he apparently saw the Dark Carnival, this being a carnival (obviously) with a few different circus archetypes imagined in a horror-esque way. For example, there was the fortune teller The Great Milenko, a RiddleBox, a pair of jugglers known as The Amazing Jeckel Brothers, etc. These characters then became the theme for a set of albums known as the Joker's Cards, and it was around the release of The Great Milenko when I first started getting in to the band. But hey, you're on the Internet, you can look this shit up if you didn't know already.

I think my retarded infatuation with this band first started when someone made me a mix tape. At the time, I was pretty much exclusively listening to The Offspring, with maybe a bit of Lit if I was in an exotic mood. So when I was skateboarding around, hearing some hip-hop (however awful they are, ICP are still technically hip-hop) was like experiencing an entirely new genre to me. I'm sure things would have been very different if the first hip-hop I had heard was Run-DMC or Grandmaster Flash, but the way fate dictated it, it was I.C.P. And you know what - I liked it. I wasn't ashamed at that time. My first email address was even "juggalojack", and I bought T-shirts proudly bearing their logo, all in ignorance of any quality hip-hop.

And this was an arrogant ignorance too - I only listened to artists on the same band-run record label as I.C.P. (Psychopathic Records) and learnt to draw the little hatchet man label logo freehand and covered my school exercise books with that shit. I hated Eminem, for no good reason other than the fact he had a feud with I.C.P. at some point, little realising the futility of this. I mean, it wasn't like Eminem was going to get all upset because some middle class kind in suburban England doesn't like him. For Halloween 2001, I went to a local rock nightclub dressed in baggy cargo shorts, an oversize I.C.P. ice-hockey top and full face make-up in the style of Violent J. Amazingly, I didn't get laid that night.

Around the summer of 2003, like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in They Live, I woke up. I had no super-powered sunglasses, but I did have a copy of the latest (and last in the "joker" series) I.C.P. album, entitled "The Wraith -Shangri-La". The last song on this album was called The Unveiling, and promised to clear up any mysteries surrounding the preceding six albums, all dealing with this deeply interesting (to a teenage me) Dark Carnival mythos. This song, this last song, had a lyric which in just a few short seconds changed my perception of I.C.P. forever. This lyric was: "When we speak of Shangri-La, what you think we mean? Truth is we follow GOD, we`ve always been behind him, The Dark Carnival is GOD and may all Juggalos find him!"


Fuck that.


After all this time, after all the carefully built-up mystery and cult-like encouraging of fans, after all the cool demonic imagery, it was all just a bloody evangelical project? In 30 seconds, all the fanboyism I had built up was shattered and replaced by a cynical mindset. That same day, I had also bought the infinitely better Beastie Boys album "Ill Communication", and I haven't listened to I.C.P. since then.

I do regret the time I spent as a juggalo, and I have never experienced those levels of fandom in anything, which may be interpreted as kind of sad. However, I'm happy just enjoying different types of music now without also being infatuated with the people that make it. I am through the darkness and can now appreciate good things, which don't have quite the same embarassment levels.

My name is Jackson, and I used to be a juggalo. But I'm alright now.

Sunday 4 September 2011

It would be nice if the film Inner Space became true. Just having the ability to employ a little man to fly around your insides and figure out what the hell is going on with yourself would be fantastically useful, I'm sure.

Although, for me, I guess I would employ a shrunken psychologist who can work out what bits of memories or chunks of brain matter are causing me to act in certain ways or say the wrong thing in different contexts. Or, to use a different metaphor, at least a team of Numskulls who you could question to find out how your brain is running, and what problem areas need to be sorted out.

Y'know, not just like tumors, but things like confirming what you're feeling about certain matters, or even just figuring out what the fuck I do feel about some things. I need a tiny Jack Bauer synapse beating the shit out of an especially reticent memory bank to find out what it knows, and then decide what to do about it. It would be even better if you could somehow transport that mini-Bauer in to other people's heads, just to see if their mind and their mouths match up to what's being said.

Instead, were all left to fend for ourselves, and for those of us who don't know what their own brain is trying to tell them, how the fuck are you supposed to know how to help anyone else? The system just doesn't seem fair.