Clowns & Cornstalks Pt. 1
Lessons on Middle America from the Gathering of the Juggalos
This article first appeared in MOOF Issue no. 12. You can purchase a copy here.
Illustrations by Joey Flores.
My partner is groggy as he stuffs his bags into the crevices of our 2009 Dodge journey. This silver bullet will be our ticket through the weakened arteries of America’s post-industrial heartland, and eventually our haven from the valley where we are about to moor ourselves for four days. I whoop whoop at Joey — the rallying cry of the Juggalo — who joins me with some reluctance. A prolific digital artist, Joey is no Juggalo. His connection to Insane Clown Posse comes from some design work for SuperHumman, a backyard stuntman beloved in the Juggalo community. Like me, Joey is still unconvinced by the music of Insane Clown Posse, but curious enough that he has agreed to tag along.
“You’re energetic this morning,” he greets warily.
Ours is a mission of discovery. Juggalos — the clown-faced devotees of Insane Clown Posse — are a mystery to us. Though we’re from a part of America where you might run into a Juggalo out on the street (like say, a guido in New Jersey), we’ve never dipped our toes in the scene. We’re both ambivalent to the corny hip-hop that brings Juggalos together. We agree that we’re drawn to the Gathering of the Juggalos not as fans of ICP, but as fans of Juggalos. This festival itself has its own allure — an infamous four-day bacchanale that defies what anyone knows about counterculture. A chance to delve into the substratum of one of the largest independent music festivals in the world. The closest thing to a safari we have in the Midwest.
Thick tufts of pine and cedar give way to stilly cornfields as we cross the Ottawa River south into Toledo. Insane Clown Posse’s “Chicken Huntin” blares as we try to get down the audience-participation bits, rusting fences and neat rows of soybean flashing by as we roll down I-23. Two Dantes pass Acheron into the underworld.
Red Blinking Lights
Nestled between radio towers and whispering corn is Legend Valley, home to five life-size dinosaur statues and, for one weekend in July, thousands of Juggalos.
Juggalos are typically non-landowning white Americans. They are aggressively tattooed, if not on the arms or legs then on foreheads or knuckles or neck. From their heads sprout gaudy dyed dreads, flat twists, cornrows. Many Juggalos feel like they don’t fit in with society writ large. They tend to broadcast themselves through their wardrobe, sporting last decade’s streetwear, trashy jewelry, mismatched OSIRIS shoes, and metric tons of neon-puke ICP merch. Middle-aged Juggalos are endearingly misshapen in a way that suggests years of poor diets and low-wage labor. A not insignificant amount of them are disabled. They overwhelmingly hail from the rugged wastelands of America’s Midwest, the birthplace of ICP.
In vast swaths of this flat country the tallest object for miles is likely to be a radio tower encrusted with satellite dishes and steady, pulsating lights. As a kid I would think about what would happen if one of those lights went out. Would anybody notice? Would anyone care? I used to think that sleeping within eyesight of those towers was good luck, and seeing them still brings me comfort. These are places touched by humanity. A connection to an outside world that has not entirely forgotten rural America.
What I believe about the Juggalos has a lot to do with this sense of place. Living in small town America can be an alienating experience for many. Absent any community structures, many men will turn their transgression toward the confederate flag, asserting their machismo with guns and oakleys and lifted trucks big enough to erase a school bus worth of kids. Others will start families before they’re legally allowed to rent a car. Those lucky enough to leave will do so as soon as they pass grade school, myself included. Juggalos are the impoverished outcasts of these places. The kind of person who learns to confront their alienation in the private comfort of music.
The Juggalo’s ballad is one of community and triumph despite isolation from the outside world. But in musical terms, a Juggalo is simply a diehard fan of Wicked Shit. On the deep end of underground rap sits horrocore, a style built on gratuitous violence and moody hardcore beats. On the deep end of horrorcore you’ll find Wicked Shit, an immovable aesthetic genre created by Detroit rapper Esham and popularized by ICP, which features laid-back old school beats, electric guitar, and a Cypress Hill-style vocal affect. Deeper than horrocore, Wicked Shit is careful to include the ever-relatable underdog’s tale, which connects all Juggalos like a web. Not all disenfranchised midwestoids become Juggalos, but those who do come first for this music.
ICP musicological origination is this: two kids from suburban Detroit, Joey Utsler and Joe Bruce, known on stage as Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J respectively, became a regional phenomenon with their 1991 trap EP Dog Beats under the name Inner City Posse. Without context this EP reads like authentic trap, only the duo had no connections to gangland Detroit — simply two pissed off kids trying to find a voice.
They quickly drew flak from actual inner city posses and were forced to reconsider their direction as a loyal fan base metabolized. Following a drug-filled hallucination of righteous clowns righting the wrongs of civilization, Violent J had the answer. They rebranded as Insane Clown Posse, the now cult-famous duo who raps about killing confederates, slashing rapist priests, and murdering prostitutes.
ICP’s mid-tempo rap is couched in carnival iconography and base depictions of violence, with obvious recurring motifs: family, rejection of societal norms, moral absolutism, and reclaiming the outcast status which they see as forced on them by the world. A sub-genre of a sub-genre, the magic of Wicked Shit is its accessibility. Juggalos appreciate these tunes for acknowledging the plight of the outsider, and for the silly sadism it comes packaged in. The lyrics act as a salve, and ICP’s prolific output ensures loyal fans have an endless supply of albums to rotate between.
A lot of Juggalos we talk to first came into Wicked Shit as kids. Maligned youth in rural places have very few options. The transgressive havens typical of most cities are inaccessible thanks to the car-centric nature of middle America. The closest mall is an hour away, the park is really just a plot of grass by the library, the houses too far apart to walk to a friend’s basement hang. If an adolescent community forms at all, it does so in spite of these defects.
Typically downtrodden kids won’t become punks, liberated and weaponizing their disenfranchisement. They won’t hear much trap or hip hop beyond what plays over the radio, idolizing far-off ideas of inner city glory. Maybe they find themselves chatting up the stock guy at Dollar General, the one food store in town. He could have a hatchetman on his arm, the ichthys symbol of the Juggalo and logo of ICP’s flagship label Psychopathic Records.
If they were interested he would probably rip a CD of The Great Melinko, ICP’s ‘97 platinum record, or a mixtape with Santa’s a Fat Bitch, their Christmas song which charted #67 for weeks. Then they would listen to their lyrics:
I was born, first, they threw me in a shit pile
I dealt with it, and lived there for a while
I got dissed on, pissed on, and beat down
Mutilated, and tossed out, a dead clown
Next thing ya know, I'm chillin' at the big top
Free money, and mad bitches non-stop
No water, it's Faygo on tap
I wash my hair, and my face, and my butt-crack with it
The redemptive message of Wicked Shit is what brings most Juggalos to the bigtop. ICP fans scrimp and save for a $250 ticket to the infamous Gathering. Then they become united with the Family — what they call the Juggalo collective — through a shared sense of safety, tough love, and community. From there a Juggalo emerges, anointed in the Faygo spray of the Wicked Clown.
Joey and I amble up the gentle hill before Legend Valley’s main entrance. With no particular urgency, the lone security guard asks if we have any glass bottles in our cart full of tent poles and cheap hot dogs.
“Nah just camping stuff.” He doesn’t seem interested in checking so we stumble on.
After passing the main gate we enter the halls of power. Seasoned Juggalos gathered in large groups have set up mega camps flanking this clogged artery which leads from the parking lot to the greater festival grounds. They hawk drugs: weed, LSD, nitrous balloons, DMT. And they heckle newcomers. Within seconds of passing the main gate, a bullhorn from the gallery challenges us to “show us your butthole!”
We decline.
“First Gathering, huh! Yeah we can tell!” comes the amplified response.
We ramble on, and ten seconds later someone answers the call. “Hell yeah I’ll show you my butthole!” We turn for a moment and take in our first of many assholes — an eloquent portent of things to come.
Transgressive art, at least since the ‘90s, is known to revel in the childish. See South park, Beavis & Butthead, Brion Gysin, Dorothea Tanning, the Butthole Surfers, Eric Medine. ICP is no different.
The gratuitous violence of ICP belies a very cogent power of music: the Juggalo finds respite in songs like “Chop Chop Slide”, a constructive way to vent anger that could very easily go unaddressed in their corner of America. Wicked Shit couches this message in clown paint and over the top gore, inviting confrontation and adding a raw power factor that other genres lack. It centers this aggression in childlike motifs: Faygo, a bottom-shelf pop from Michigan with dozens of wacky flavors, the carnival and all of its deep-fried indulgence, prepubescent sexual innuendos and the debaucherous liberation of adolescence.
It might be difficult for outsiders to understand, but that’s part of the point; the Dark Carnival reaches those willing to listen. If Wicked Shit turns you off, the Gathering doesn’t want you. It certainly doesn’t need you. Whether they know it or not, Juggalos instinctively revel in this baked-in defense mechanism, protecting the Gathering as the gobie defends the pistol shrimp.
It’s midway through camp-setup on a 90°F day and we’re giddy with low blood sugar. A sooty carnie gazes down at his frying fare. He breaks his contemplation and turns toward us to hand me the lemonade we ordered. As he does, I can’t help but notice a swastika inked just right of his nape.
“Wuz it two carhn-dawgs ‘er three,” he asks gruffly, extending one to whoever wants it first. “Uh, two,” I say, noticing also the Waffen-SS bolts on his left wrist. He turns again and I spy another pair of bolts, these ones bigger. We’ve met a Juggalo nazi, something I didn’t anticipate. As far as I was aware, Juggalos hate racists, confederates, priests, all of history’s cookie-cutter villains. They constantly talk about The Family — of inclusivity and endless clown love. Surely that can’t include neo-nazis?
“Dahn ther’,” he points to a water-fill station at the bottom of a minor hill, “that’s wher’ sum’n was just goin’ to town on one’athem blow up dolls.” His grin was broad like a proud father, his mouth mottled with burnt-corn teeth.
Asked if he’d seen the nazi, one Juggalo later told me, “I know it seems weird, but at the Gathering, everyone is welcome.”
Joey and I suckle our disgusting powdered lemonade and trudge back up the hill in exhausted silence.
Family Values
The Ohio sun sags listlessly over the valley, turning our worn-out tent into an industrial furnace. Joey cools himself off while I run to grab more junk from the car.
The buzz of a security guard’s radio catches my attention on the trek back, something something pregnant woman, EMS transporting to the hospital.
“Woah. Did you hear that?” a nearby Juggalo asks me as we trudge back up the hill in unison. “A gathering baby!”
We never find out what happened to that woman, but we did read after the last day that a different Juggalette had left in an ambulance after going into labor during the last ICP set. Keyan Kossmann, the world’s newest Juggalo, was born shortly after.
But just as the Gathering gives, so too does it take.
Derek Brown, known at the Gathering as Juggalo Jesus, had achieved minor celebrity status in the community for his antics and cheery personality following his crowning at the first ever Mr. Juggalo Pageant, glory which would elude him this year. But he wasn’t stressed. Brown had just driven 12 hours from Westfield, Massachusetts with his roommate Jacqueline in a beat-up 2001 grand marquis. Now he was with the Family, enjoying all the fucked up libations the Gathering had to offer.
Along with friends Josie and Samantha, Derek and Jacqueline enjoyed the mainstage festivities well into the first morning. Soon after 4am, a reportedly sober Derek slipped into his small tent near merch row, the bizzar-like stretch of festival where the few official vendors hawked band merch and Psychopathic-sanctioned drugs.
Jacqueline, Josie, and Samantha would find Derek facedown and lifeless in his tent seven hours later, blood and vomit collated in a pool under his head. A vendor later told me that she saw three people rolling a stiff body toward the main road, calling for help. A number of bystanders rushed to find EMS but they were hours too late. Juggalo Jesus was dead.
The death of Derek Brown hung over the Gathering like the sinewy fingers of pot-smoke in a poorly ventilated tent. Juggalos peddle rumors in hushed tones between musical acts. A volunteer group quietly establishes extra harm reduction sites. Late on Thursday, Korihor takes the mainstage to ask for a moment of silence in Brown’s honor. It then becomes a mainstream storyline at the festival. Posts demanding information and redress flood Facebook groups dedicated to the Gathering. Juggalos stand by coin buckets collecting donations for Brown’s family.
According to Licking County Sheriff's Office Captain Jay Cook, Derek was the only narcotics related death at this year’s Gathering: “There is [sic] no other deaths to my knowledge involving the concert.” The toxicity report is still being drafted at the time of this writing, but the overwhelming narrative is that Derek Brown overdosed on bunk drugs. Whether the drugs in question were coke, percocets, molly, or even synthetic weed (one friend of Derek’s insisted he smoked K2 which had been coated in fentanyl) remains a mystery.
Ever on the repose, Juggalos waste no time scouring the grounds for anyone with drugs to test for fentanyl. One video sent to me shows eight deputies taking a man into custody as a crowd of angry Juggalos hurl shit at him, the implication here that his drugs were laced with fentanyl.
Drugs at the Gathering are more prevalent than water. I counted at least 32 separate non-mobile vendors who pedaled everything from mushrooms to nitrous tanks to crack pipes. More still advertised their wares on flimsy cardboard signs from boxes of Faygo: LSD $20 a tab. Wanna try PCP? K2 preroll $1 each. Mr. Snowman’s magic cocaine.
True to festival form, hallucinogens were the most prevalent class of narcotic, but a nonzero amount of opiates and amphetamines ensured everyone would feel included.
Taking in the sites with a stroll across the grounds, Joey and I stumble onto a Humble Among set. Humble Among is a green-haired vocal fry rapper from Vermont. His deep stage voice pisses Joey off, but his “The Carnival” is an evocative score for our stroll through the hallucinatory maze of carnie food trucks and bombed-out porta potties. I dapple dirt-filled pores with my shirt and take in the low class Saturnalia.
Came up out the woods and found myself a carnival
Freaks from each hood rep their set at the carnival
Fun in the sun it’s a party at the carnival
We can be as one, speaking for the carnival
We can all get along, it can be as it should
We don't have to be mis-understood, if they could
They-can’t understand, that we’re sorta good
(we’re kinda good)
Ain’t all that bad celebrating we’re all weird
Aint’ no goin’ back, I’m just glad we made it here
Joey points out the mast of a sailboat poking out through rows of tents. We follow the thing to discover a parade-float style pirate ship on wheels. By night this is an after-hours stage, but during the day it’s Harm Reduction Site No. 3. Right now it’s one of seven, but after Brown it becomes one of nine. A volunteer cheerily hands us two baggies containing fentanyl test strips, a CPR mask, condoms, and myriad other paraphernalia for powdered drugs. “There’s no shame in needing help,” she tells us. I do wonder what kind of stigma that has here, where tough love competes with a Juggalo drug buffet for hearts and minds.
“We have Narcan here too if you or anyone you know needs it. But there’s no shame at all.” We thank her and head on our way.
Clown Love
Night one is our Ia Drang. Exhausted and overstimulated, Joey and I bed down in our listing green tent, enjoying the 10° differential offered by the vacant sun.
The deafening blast of a half-stick of flash powder less than a mile away rocks us awake. Somewhere within the only REM cycle I would complete at the Gathering I discovered one of the oldest and noblest Gathering traditions: fuck your sleep.
I fumble for my casio. It’s 4am. People are having a heated argument right outside our tent. As I come to I realize that two Juggalos, separated by our fucked up tent, are having a verbal dick-swinging competition through their megaphones.
“Fuck your sleep!”
“Fuck your sleep!”
“No, fuck your sleep!”
The megaphone is a prevalent piece of Gathering kit used for heckling, hawking, and carnie-style barking just for the fuck of it. It’s good for after-hours discussions as well.
I groggily jot in my notes app that it would be too easy to mythologize the Juggalo’s megaphone as an amplifying tool of the dispossessed, a way to assert your voice in a place where people might actually listen (in so many words). Mostly the things drive us up a fucking wall.
More than anything, fuck your sleep is an attitude. It’s both childish lampooning — evoking adolescent sleepovers and drunken high school parties — and communal bonding. Fuck your sleep connects the Juggalo to their first Gathering, when they discovered fuck your sleep. Now they’re in on the joke, fucking our sleep.
All Juggalos revel in tradition; this is one of the ties that bind the Family together. There is the infamous Legend of the Poop Dollar, a festival-wide prank where cash is soaked in a tub of shit and dropped innocuously around the Gathering. I’m pretty sure I told Joey to pick up a $20 poop dollar on our first day, which he immediately traded for weed. He denies it, says the dollar was too crisp. The little lies we tell ourselves in order to sleep at night.
There’s the aforementioned “show me your butthole,” and the Juggalette equivalent, “show me your tits” which is a surprisingly common call-out given the 90:10 split of men to women here. There’s Faygo spraying, a tradition dating back to an incident at an early ‘90s ICP live show. Some customs are intangible, random. There are fireworks, trash-fights, objects thrown at performers. There’s a particular affinity for wrastlin’ and backyard stunts which might show itself at any time.
Gathering iconography plays up the Midwest connection; the old English “D” of the Detroit Tigers adorns caps and camp flags, the blue-collar cousin of the evergreen Yankees logo. Though inner-city Detroiters might not intend it, the “D” pulls double-duty as the mark of a perpetual underdog (Detroit’s only won four World Series since the team’s founding in 1901, the last one coming in 1984). A handful of Juggalos proudly sling Little Cesar’s pizza, the low-cost Detroit based fast food chain. Spoof hockey jerseys are a common piece of ICP merch, connecting Juggalos to the sport popular among the midwest working class.
But for all the lampoonish communal rites, Joey and I find a gentleness ensconced at the individual level.
On the second day we’re approached by Stem, a 25 year old deli worker from Griggsville, Illinois. I offer him a hotdog so he hangs out while we shoot the shit.
This is Stem’s 4th Gathering. His first was the infamous Soopa Gathering in 2019, a festival which saw almost 80 arrests, 81 vehicular tickets, a go-kart lawsuit, and a city council vote to never allow the Gathering back to Springville, Indiana. He’s been hooked ever since.
It’s just before noon on Thursday. Stem runs unwashed fingers through dark tangled hair. “I'm so bummed. We’re already out,” he says nudging a 20 cu/ft tank with an untied shoe. “I thought it’d last us til’ at least Friday.”
Nitrous oxide, a popular festival inhalant everywhere, produces a euphoric out-of-body high that lasts minutes. A tank like Stem’s fills about 40 balloons, each balloon containing four to eight hits, depending on your lung capacity. Joey and I guess that a quarter of Gatherers are blasted out of their mind on nitrous.
Stem’s buddy Zach, who we later recognize as one of the megaphone guys from last night, is laid out unconscious in his teepee. Stem and Zach have gone to each of their Gatherings together, enticed first by the music and the community, but further sweetened by the Gathering drug market which offers many fine products not available in Griggsville.
Zach has burned himself out on LSD and a slurry of different liquors. Stem meanwhile spent his morning coming down from a mushroom trip and ‘nos hangover with the help of some valium. “I’m not a big fan of hallucinogens. I do some shrooms, maybe molly. But it’s nuts to fry your brain on three tabs of acid and prance around in the sun for ten hours.”
Zach and Stem quickly become the Virgil to our Dante. Stem is full of advice on drugs and music: if you like Nekrogoblicon you should check out Polterguts, a deathcore band from St. Louis. If you like Esham, check out FREEWILL for that old-school sound. He leads us to a drug tent that he trusts, where we buy a crisp pink pouch of psilocybin caps labeled “Texas Cubes.” Stem loads up on cheap weed before it's gone, which the vendor assures us will happen any minute now.
Zach is taller than Stem, sporting long jumbled braids and heavy trap pants. He offers us insight into the Juggalo community, and the history of the Gathering as the longest running independent music festivals in the United States.
“If you notice there are no like, bud lite ads. If there were sponsors they could say, ‘get rid of the drugs,’ or ‘tone down the violence’ and hold that over the Gathering. But it’s all done by ICP. That’s why it’s so free.”
The Gathering gives Zach a chance to relax from his job as a sound production worker.
“Mostly my company does new country acts,” he explains as he passes me a joint. A violent burst of rain has forced us to gather under their pop-up canvas. “That small town shit everyone loves. It’s all manufactured shit. I’d love to run something like this though.”
The rain is letting up so we trudge down the hill toward the carnival. At 5pm we can either join the Reno Rydaz Alien Probe Cornhole Tournament or see the Wet T-shirt contest. Like most Juggalos, we chose the latter.
In previous years the infamously depraved Wet T-shirt contest was hosted by Ron Jeremy, who would cajole amateur performers into intense sex acts before a frothing crowd. I can’t pretend to be above this — we picked the contest over the bean bag toss after all.
In his excellent Gonzo book about the 2010 Gathering, Punk author Craven Rock reflects on the Wet T-shirt Contest: “while The Gathering’s titty commodity is blatantly sexist — in sync with so much else that’s misogynistic about Wicked Shit and Juggalo Culture — the Juggalos, being the misfits they are, leave a backdoor open for body positivity … most of this sentiment comes from the ‘if you’re Fam, you’re Fam philosophy. So a Juggalette is attractive simply because they’re a Juggalette … underneath it all lies an honest resilience to unnatural and unfair beauty standards.”
In past times (what oldheads refer to as the “Family era”), sleaze was a core pillar of Gathering. Women sold boob flashes, ass grabs, panties, and spit for cash or drugs. Though some of this is present 13 years later, the sharp edges seem to have been smoothed down. Even the Wet T-shirt contest, which in prior years involved sucking dirty dollar bills off of random cocks, was mild in comparison. “Show me your butthole” got decent play, and a few Juggalos hollered tired innuendos. But aside from some ass licking and one errant finger, this was a non-penetrative event. Elements of it were even positive, constructive. Women of all body types performed, and the Juggalos cheered happily for a transgender contestant who made it to the second round.
When one fat performer, Margot, lost in the first round, the crowd protested. “I demand a recount!” one ‘lo hollers over shouts of “Margot! Margot! Margot!”
He kicks rocks as the judges vote her off the stage. “This thing is fuckin’ rigged man.”