And, quoted directly from
Memepool: "They have their own
personals [edit:
and many others], their own
slang, their own
philosophy, and a combined IQ of about 85. Oh, and their own
porn, too."
They've also got
weblog rings,
online communities,
meetups, all that jazz. Not that any of that is surprising.
Someone should market some kind of ICP-themed stuffed toys, like those
Grateful Dead beanie babies from some years back. How many juggalos (or maybe it's -oes (spelling isn't particularly popular with this crowd)) are maladjusted tweens and teenagers, overflowing with hormone-fueled, facile emotion? How many ICP fans are in the kind of doomed relationship that's sustained mainly by the flow of gifts? How many ICP fans like having a bunch of stupid shit on the dashboard of their car? These no-talent troglodytes are more successful salesmen than anyone this side of
Kiss (uh, I mean, KISS)--people like
Eminem,
Outkast and
Jay-Z could learn something about marketing from the Insane Clown Posse, just like ICP could... well, you see where I'm going with this.
All this juggalo talk reminds me of at least two things--first, of this
Douglas Rushkoff-hosted documentary, '
The Merchants of Cool.' The clowns (or is it 'klowns'? Nah, fuck that. I only spell K-words with K.) make a brief appearance in a documentary that's largely about the
mook, the
midriff and the
feedback loop, but Rushkoff comes off downright fascinated by the world of ICP. He theorizes that the only way teenagers can resist having their fandom corrupted by big business is by attaching themselves to something utterly, repellently unmarketable. Later, he notes that the Clowns, at the time of filming, were wrapping up an MTV-style video (after signing to
Island--the same people that
sued Negativland over '
U2') and preparing some kind of
pro wrestling joint venture with the wild and woolly
ECW, (which has itself since been subsumed into the
WWE (WWF before a
World Wildlife Federation lawsuit), though ECW survived long enough to make some fairly awful
video games).
And also, years ago, a then-pal (who shall remain nameless) and I (we'd met in
Women's Studies courses) rented and watched (albeit with a lot of fast-forwarding) some clown-themed pornography. It was quite a letdown--very standard stuff, except that, say, dude would be wearing a red nose, like that. We were expecting the establishing scenes to be both longer and more bizarre. No dice.
What is it with people and clowns? A book I enjoyed, not long ago,
Mark Dery's '
The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink,' treats the issue. It seems like the kind of thing that should have been covered in
Daniel Harris' '
Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic: The Aesthetics of Consumerism,' too, though it's never addressed directly. Serial killers aren't a trendy hipster interest any more, having gone the way of grunge rock and zines, but
coulrophobia (yeah, that's what it's called) continues to run rampant. It's like near-death experiences or astrology or something, by which I mean that it sometimes irritates me in a similar way.
Clowns also pop up briefly in
Chuck Klosterman's essay collection '
Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs,' where he mentions that his pal
Eric Nuzum (a
WKSU staffer whose '
Parental Advisory,' about music censorship, is pretty good in its own right) owns one of
John Wayne Gacy's paintings. Tidbit about Gacy's
paintings from Dery's book: although Gacy prefers to paint happy clowns, he does a lot more of the tragic
Emmett Kelly variety, because that's what sells.
