SPIKE MAGAZINE

Eric Saeger

Try as you might, you may not have the right stuff to become a Juggalo, ie a card-carrying Insane Clown Posse fan capable of displaying the proper head-trauma behavior. ICP connoisseurs won’t give this best-of the time of day because it’s comprised only of songs featured in the three Island Records releases, and in fact “real” Juggalos smell a corporate conspiracy – The Man is trying to hijack ICP – but seeing anti-rebel conspiracy in something as corporate as ICP is what Juggalos do. It’s like saying the Big n Tasty is a plot by McDonalds to swindle people who like the taste of real hamburgers.

If you like your rap served metallic and underdone-Beastie Boys style, the poor, downtrodden ICP is for you. In a warped way they’re the Kiss of rap – simple, stupid, constantly complaining about not getting on the cover of Rolling Stone even while racking up gold record awards, stuff like that. “F— the World” is a good case in point. Everything can just eff off, man, okay, except of course for repetitive, one-idea emcees (who are sort of corporate, if my Hipness Cabal subscription is still current) and any repetitive gangsta-rapper who might have actually held a firearm once.

Meantime, if you want misogyny on the level of River’s Edge, try “B*tches” (guest-babbled by Ol’ Dirty Bastard). Somewhere out there is a badly wired jumbo-sized nimrod who got cut from the football team, and he has a skinny little girlfriend cowering next to him in the cab of his truck. When the inevitable happens, there will be a brief public outcry that will end abruptly when a sober-faced ICP guy blames it on steroids in milk.

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