My exposure to Insane Clown Posse came in or around the 6th grade through my best friend, Sam. We’d hang out in his room with candles and incense going, listening to ICP’s third album Riddle Box on repeat, and do whatever — look at baseball cards, draw, disarm shotgun shells and use the gunpowder to build tiny bombs in Tic-Tac boxes, plot a walk to Taco Bueno for a burrito or scheme to steal a cigarette from his dad. A lot of what we did was talk about Sam’s friends at school, girls he knew, his enemies, his allies, the shenanigans they’d get up to and the little nuggets of culture that, in that age before Facebook and Google, filtered from his friends to Sam, and from Sam to me. As far as I know, back then neither of us had ever used the Internet.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know Sam. We grew up together from infancy in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and we were thick as thieves before we could walk. But we never went to the same school and, though I was older than him by two months, Sam was a grade ahead of me. He was also braver, better looking, funnier and possessing of whatever that ineffable thing is that makes a kind and good-hearted pre-teen boy cool to his peers. I was awkward, anxious and, frankly, nerdier. And we both knew it. When I finally got out of my dorky super-tight jeans and into a baggy pair, Sam sang a little song, “You’re a wanna be…of meeee,” and I wasn’t even mad. He was right. When we’d go out for adventures in the neighborhood with his friends, who sometimes tried to push me around, Sam was my protector. By the time I transitioned from elementary to middle school, he was already established: a seventh grader with some experience under his belt. Sam had friends at school and he knew shit. I had Sam.

And through him I had Insane Clown Posse, two white, high school dropout, horrorcore rappers from Detroit named Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, whose lyrics were impossibly, deliciously profane to boys who only a handful of years earlier had been daring each other to say cuss words. ICP lyrics are unthinkably foul.

This seems like a good time to address just what, exactly, we’re dealing with here.

Here are lines from the song “Chicken Huntin’,” one of our favorites from Riddle Box.

Barrels in your mouth, bullets to your head The back of your neck’s all over the shed….. To cut a chicken, trigger’s clickin’ Blow off his head but his feet still kickin’

This is from “Cemetery Girl,” also off Riddle Box.

Girl that made me happy, a girl that made me cry A girl that passed away back in 1985 A girl I plan to marry, a girl I plan to wed A girl that I can choke because my baby is already dead

In case the meaning is lost on you, that describes an act of sadomasochistic necrophilia. He’s screwing and choking a corpse.

Eventually Sam got a CD of ICP’s 1997 album release, The Great Milenko. Here’s a verse from one of our favorite tracks, “Halls of Illusion.”

Back to reality, your son’s on crack And your daughter’s got nut stains on her back And they both fuckin’ smell like shit And live in the gutter And sell crack to each other When they were kids you’d beat ’em and leave ’em home And even whip ’em with the cord on the telephone And that reminds me man, hey ya gotta call Watch your step to Hell It’s a long fall

Lyrics like these have made Insane Clown Posse the target of censors, concerned parents and religious zealots for decades. In the 1990s, a Disney subsidiary signed the group to release The Great Milenko, then demanded changes to the lyrics of several songs, which ICP made, then, under pressure from the Southern Baptist Convention, pulled the album from the shelves anyway (the album was eventually released by a different label). In 2017, the Gathering of the Juggalos — a massive annual gathering of ICP fans — was held in Oklahoma City, where local media fanned hysteria and the local police were, to put it as charitably as possible, extremely exacting enforcers of the law.

Perhaps lyrics like the above greased the wheels when, in 2011, the FBI released its “National Gang Threat Assessment” labeling the Juggalos — that is to say, hardcore fans of Insane Clown Posse, many of whom have ICP tattoos, attend the Gathering, and engage in other behaviors associated with juggalo culture (like drinking a cheap soft drink called Faygo, for example) — “a loosely organized hybrid gang.” The FBI conceded that most juggalo crimes are “sporadic, disorganized, [and] individualistic” but, citing “open source reporting” (which usually amounts to what most people call “the news”), the FBI asserted that “a small number of Juggalos are forming more organized subsets and engaging in more gang-like criminal activity, such as felony assaults, thefts, robberies, and drug sales.”

That designation is what the juggalos who assembled at the Lincoln Memorial were protesting. As it turns out having tattoos, car decals, friends and hobbies associated with an FBI-designated gang has drawbacks. ICP fans say they’re being targeted and harassed by law enforcement, and speakers at the Juggalo March on Washington spoke of people being fired from jobs, disallowed from joining the military and losing custody of their kids for being juggalos and juggalettes.

Protestors at the march carried signs ridiculing and lambasting the designation:

“I am a Marine Veteran Not a Gang Member”

“Foolish Bunch of Inbreds”

“Clown Lives Matter”

“Family Saved Our Life. Not a Gang”

“Stop stereotyping juggalo’s (sic) as violent uneducated criminals. We are you, you are we, the same but different. Whoop WHOOP!”

The protesting juggalos broke out repeatedly into a chant of “Fa-mi-ly! Fa-mi-ly!” Speaker after speaker told stories of how the music of Insane Clown Posse, and the fellowship of other juggalos, came into their lives at a particularly dark time and, in some cases, saved their lives.

For a gang rally, the entire atmosphere was supremely festive. Some of the gangbangers looked to be about nine years old. Some were disabled. The closest thing to an act of violence I witnessed was one juggalo tackle another and start dry humping him with the ferocity of a tiny dog. The most menacing thing about the event was a group of black-masked non-juggalo Antifa people who showed up, ostensibly to provide security. From the juggalos themselves, on stage and in the crowd, I heard and saw only expressions of love (“I fuckin’ love you!”), silliness (“Are you guys here for the clown orgy?”), and the principle that seems to illuminate the innermost soul of juggaloness: radical self acceptance. In ways overt and subtle, juggalos seem always to be saying: “I’m doing me; you do you. This is me and if you don’t like it, I don’t even care enough to be mad at you. Let me be.”

I also heard a bunch of eerily familiar words and turns of phrase, such as juggalos — who are by and large white, like me — calling each other homie and ninja, chants of “Fuck-That-Shit! Fuck-that-shit!” and that “whoop WHOOP!” call that kept going around. Even little things, like the way Violent J and Shaggy drop the word “fuckin’” at odd places in a sentence and, out of apparent laziness, use words that do not exist but nonetheless make perfect sense, to wit, from Violent J’s speech at the rally in DC: “…governmently landscaped trees….” None of these alone would have registered as unusual, and I’m fully aware that there are plenty of white non-juggalos who call each other homie and say “fuckin’” a lot. But all slathered together it was weirdly reminiscent of something, like catching a delicate smell in the air that calls forth a powerful but hazy memory. The scene evoked a fierce upwelling of nostalgia in me and reminded me of the way I myself sometimes talk to my close friends. And all of it reminded me of Sam.