Insane Clown Posse In Brooklyn – 10.23.17
Not sure if I have mentioned this yet, but my next book is going to be photos of juggalos. I have been talking about it forever but I think it’s finally time to do it. It’s not going to happen right away or anything, my living room is still filled with boxes of books, zines and shipping supplies from my last book, but it’s going to happen sooner or later. So when I saw that the Insane Clown Posse was playing walking distance from my apartment in Brooklyn clearly I had to go.
To be honest the show was exactly what you would expect an ICP show in Bushwick to look like. It was a bunch of juggalos being gawked at by a bunch of hipsters playing juggalos for halloween. My favorite game is trying to figure out who the actual juggalos were vs. the hipsters pretending to be juggalos and usually I am pretty good at that game as one of the handful of people on earth who is both an aging hipster and down with the clown. Amazingly enough a bunch of the people I thought were fake juggalos knew a bunch of lyrics. I wonder if they listened to em when they were kids or if maybe ICP has been hated long enough that people are ironically listening to them earnestly. Or is it earnestly listening to them ironically? I am not sure either makes sense but you are going to have to deal with that.
2017 is the 20th anniversary of the album The Great Milenko. It’s the album that put ICP on the map when Hollywood Records pulled it after just a few days on the shelves. Hollywood was owned by Disney and worried parents threatened a Disney boycott over the record. Remember when parents used to worry about lyrics before you could ask Siri to see prolapse porn? (Don’t do that.) I remember Kurt Loder talking about the album on MTV News and my punk friends would be rapping the lyrics on the Metro (that’s what they call the Subway in DC for whatever reason). I ended up getting the record and a bunch of us painted our faces and went to see the Milenko tour at the 9:30 Club in DC. Somewhere there is a picture of a bunch of mohawk sporting punk kids in clown make up in my parents suburban VA driveway and to be honest I would pay a lot of money to find that photo.
By the time I went to college I had stopped listening to ICP but 20 years later somehow my life has come back to this, one of the foremost experts of juggalo anthropology, surrounded by music bloggers, everyone who has ever worked for VICE, and three different girls I met on dating apps, singing my lungs out to every word of Great Milenko.
Other things of note… RA The Rugged Man opened for them and he is really good at rapping. I got hit in the face with a full bottle of Faygo which fucking hurts. I actually was knocked unconscious by one once. I didn’t take any photos of ICP because I actually wanted to enjoy the show and this book is about juggalos, not the band. This is not the first time I have seen ICP play an album back to front. Shout out to Ouija Macc from Swag Toof for putting my bag back stage during ICP’s set. I think he opened the show. He was the first person I saw at least. It’s possible Surfbort opened because they were on the bill and were giving people clown make up during the show. I actually really want to see them now because googled them about 10 minutes ago and I’ve been listening to them since. I’ve listened to their 7″ twice now and aside from the infinitely too long Hideaway with the Pixies outro it’s pretty much exactly what I want to be listening to.
I’ve rambled enough and these photos are a day late because my server was down yesterday. Time to look at juggalo hipsters.
