For Reasons, I did some reading on ICP over the last day or so. I knew they did a big "reveal" a couple years ago and unveiled the secret message behind their last dozen albums was "god." This was moderately surprising from a band that uses a maniac with an axe and a gun as their logo, and released tracks like "Chicken Huntin", "Bugz on my Nuts", "Dead body man", and "Murder Go-Round".
Full disclosure; I did, briefly, own copies of The Great Milenko, Riddle Box and Ringmaster. This was before YouTube or Pandora, so the only way to find out about new music was to get a CD or know a friend who had a copy.
The thing on my mind is what happened afterwards. Over the course of a couple interviews and since-deleted tweets, Mssrs. J and 2-Dope explicitly stated that they don't go to church, and "We weren't taught about the [Ten] Commandments [... or] what's in the Bible and all that. We just [...] want to see good people hopefully go to heaven, which we refer to as Shangri-La"
Well OK then. They're not claiming to be some type of Christian. I doubt very much that they're secretly Jewish, Muslim, or Scientologists, so now I'm trying to figure out what the fuck they're trying to say here. To me, it looks like we've got two scenarios:
1) ICP are actually new age hippy types with a dream of a happy afterlife available to anyone who "lives right" (whatever the fuck that means, the duo haven't clarified what their deity might require or deem worthy)
or
2) ICP have unintentionally created a new religion. Which their thousands of fans tacitly subscribe to. I'm pretty sure this is the correct interpretation, based on what I've read.
Bear with me. The Wiccan new-age people that I know tend to believe in the threefold law, which basically says that whatever intent you put out into the world will come back on your head three times. Help your cousin move - get rewarded, act like a greedy violent dick and you get colon cancer. ICP seem to live profoundly unexamined lives, thinking about repercussions, or indeed anything at all is antithetical towards being a Juggalo. Here's an excerpt from an interview in the Guardian:
"One of the ICP road crew locates the video on his iPhone, and it is indeed withering: "The [Miracles] video is not only dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things."
"Fuck you, man," says Violent J. "Shut the fuck up."
"Did you anticipate this kind of reaction?" I ask them.
"No," sighs Violent J. "I figured most people would say, 'Wow, I didn't know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.' But instead it's, 'ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.'" He pauses, then adds defiantly, "A giraffe is a fucking miracle. It has a dinosaur-like neck. It's yellow. Yeah, technically an elephant is not a miracle. Technically. They've been here for hundreds of years…"
"Thousands," murmurs Shaggy.
"Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?" asks Violent J. "A fucking elephant is a miracle. If people can't see a fucking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fucking miracle. So is a giraffe."
We watch the video for another few seconds: "It becomes apparent that Shaggy and J consider any understanding of the actual workings of these 'miracles' to be corrosive. To them, knowledge is seen as a threat… For ICP a true understanding of 'fucking rainbows' would reduce them to, as Keats put it, 'the dull catalogue of common things'.""
For them, the song Miracles was deep. And they don't know why other people laugh at this. They want an afterlife without the burden of figuring out Ethics, or they think that writing songs about murdering rednecks and beating women is a positive thing to do. Or they're making shit up as they go, and their fans come along for the ride without requiring any explanation. This last bit is all too similar to how various cults, gangs, and fringe groups work, which I find depressing. If you're going to find yourself with the ability to shape the goals and actions of a large population, try to have something with more of an impact in mind than "smoke weed every day."
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