This Insane Clown Posse band is a weird one, I have never heard much of their hardcore hip hop also called horror core (which doesn’t sound like an invitation for listening) but they are very successful (6 million copies sold for their 2009 album ‘Bang! Pow! Boom!), very productive (11 studio albums in 2 decades) and they have a large fan base apparently.06
The group is suing the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the basis that the US government had made the ‘unwarranted and unlawful decision’ to declare their fans as criminal gang members, causing to them ‘significant harm’. Four of their fans, who are joining them in the lawsuit, are effectively complaining that the police did harass and punish them due to their association with the band, but this didn’t even happen during a concert! One of the guys was detained by Tennessee state troopers just for a ICP insignia on his truck, and another one had to cover his ICP tattoos as he was told he couldn’t join the army with ‘gang related’ tattoos. And there are many other similar incidents, as it seems that the term ‘gang’ is written all over their fan base. One of the band’s concerts in Michigan was even canceled after the police called them Juggalo gang?
Juggalo is the name given to their fans and designs a ‘loosely organized hybrid gang’… Fans who hang around with clown-like painted faces and hatchet man accessories. According to Muckrock, the FBI file identifies Juggalos as a ‘violent street gang’ numbering in the thousands, whose members “sometimes paint their faces to look like wicked clowns’ and ‘continue the dress by carrying small axes’, concluding that ‘the Juggalos [are] a legitimate gang with a large following … [who] follow the ICP in almost a religious manner’. And that’s stupid! According to the NY Times, lawyer Jeff Engstrom said that the government’s actions were ‘laughably off base’ and ‘the equivalent of placing Phish fans on a terrorist watch list’. He added, ‘It elevates an Internet punch line into something even more absurd.’ ICP had already filed a lawsuit in 2012 against the FBI, asking for the documents used to qualify Juggalos as gang members.
Now, ICP is certainly not my cup of tea, but this harassment doesn’t seem justified. Are they any different from metal, hardcore, hippie bands’ fans? I actually watch this short documentary about Juggalos (below), and they don’t seem to be violent people although they are kind of a pain to watch, and tend to make you think about some strange deviant subculture. This is a crowd a face-painted people who get high (just probably from all that spray-paint), a crowd of boob-flashing chicks and beer-belly guys. Should I add that this camp looked a bit like Coachella for white trash? That sounds mean, as you could probably apply the same reasoning to fans of many other bands… and you know what? I had never heard so many times the word ‘family’ in 20 minutes… these people just want to belong!