I think Carnival of Carnage is still interesting in 2018.

The Detroit Metro Times thinks so, too. Last year they published an article comparing Eminem, Kid Rock, and Insane Clown Posse’s divergent political stances in the Trump era, despite their shared musical and geographical origins.[28] Kid Rock, who has guest verses on ICP’s “Is That You?”, has recently drifted towards the right politically, and vocally supported Trump’s election. Eminem, meanwhile, has dropped several well-publicized freestyles against the president. As for ICP, the group’s direct response to Trump has been fairly muted, though observers couldn’t help drawing #resistance comparisons during the 2017 Juggalo March (which was planned during Obama’s presidency).

ICP, to the extent that they’ve been ‘political,’ have always been difficult to label. They write songs about urban decay and industrial pollution. They expose the ugly dependencies between city and suburb — a step beyond the toothless “cities are cool, suburbs boring” characterizations that dominate the discourse. Six of their albums were released during the Clinton administration’s so-called Pax Americana. The Juggalo March was planned against FBI’s decision to classify them as a gang. Yet for every interesting song with urbanist themes, there’s another with casual misogyny and homophobia (see “Blacken Your Eyes”). All this, plus the notoriety of Gathering and the crimes committed by actual gang-affiliated Juggalos make it difficult to call ICP ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ The closest label I can think of is “principled contrarian.”

Contrarianism, because it’s such a negative outlook, has only limited political value. However, when deployed thoughtfully, Carnival’s contrarianism highlights deep structural problems in metropolitan Detroit. In the 1990s, it provided an alternative to the dominant law-and-order ideology. During this decade of stunning economic growth, Carnival’s lurid tales of urban revenge countered the national sense of optimism.[29] It will serve the same purpose now, to remind us that not everything is okay just because unemployment went down to 3.7%, inner cities are still struggling, and there’s still a ton of fear and discrimination to overcome.

The Dark Carnival stands against the established political order, threatening a bloody and violent chaos. I think the first part — dangling prospects of chaos when the existing order is so damn rotten — will keep Insane Clown Posse’s Carnival of Carnage relevant for a long time.

Notes

Insane Clown Posse, formerly known as Inner City Posse, is a horrorcore group from metropolitan Detroit, Michigan. The group currently consists of Violent J (Joseph Bruce) and Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Utsler). Former members include Jumpsteady (Robert Bruce), Kickjazz (John Utsler), and Rudy Hill.

Carnival of Carnage is ICP’s first album. It was released in 1992. Previously, ICP released several albums as Inner City Posse.

ICP fans are called Juggalos. There is an annual festival called “Gathering of the Juggalos” featuring ICP, other musical acts, and various bacchanalia. VICE loves to cover it, for some reason.

All ICP records are self-released on Psychopathic Records.

My main biographical source is Violent J’s memoir Behind the Paint. Anecdotes of life in Oakland County and downriver can’t be directly verified, but they are consistent with the historical record. D-Lyrical’s interview with The Juggalo Show and the documentary Shockumentary, though not quoted here, were useful for establishing context. Special thanks to Urban Nightmares author Steve Macek for answering my email and giving book recommendations.

Works Cited

Austin, Dan. “How metro Detroit transit went from best to worst.” Detroit Free Press, February 6, 2015. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/2015/02/06/michigan-detroit-public-transit/22926133/

Bruce, Joseph and Hobey Echlin. Behind the Paint. Royal Oak, Michigan: Psychopathic Records, 2003.

Chafets, Ze’ev. “The Tragedy of Detroit.” New York Times, July 29, 1990. https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/magazine/the-tragedy-of-detroit.html

Kurashige, Scott. The Fifty-year Rebellion: How the U.S. Political Crisis Began in Detroit. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017.

Macek, Steve. Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

McCann, Bryan J. The Mark of Criminality: Rhetoric, Race, and Gangsta Rap in the War-on-crime Era. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2017.

McCollum, Brian. “20 years in, Kid Rock, Eminem and ICP are politically relevant — and culturally divided.” Detroit Free Press, September 16 2017. https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/2017/09/16/eminem-kid-rock-icp-detroit-white-rap-1997-2017-politics/671643001/

Murray, Nick. “Violent J Breaks Down Insane Clown Posse’s ‘Joker’s Card’ Box Set.” Rolling Stone, February 13, 2015,

Rose, Tricia. The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop — and Why It Matters. New York: BasicCivitas, 2008.

Richard Rothstein, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, May 3, 2017. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=526655831

The Detroit News. “Orville Hubbard — the ghost who still haunts Dearborn.” The Detroit News, July 17, 2000, http://blogs.detroitnews.com/history/2000/07/17/orville-hubbard-the-ghost-who-still-haunts-dearborn/

[1] Nick Murray. “Violent J Breaks Down Insane Clown Posse’s ‘Joker’s Card’ Box Set,” Rolling Stone, February 13, 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-lists/violent-j-breaks-down-insane-clown-posses-jokers-card-box-set-144502/

[2] Bruce and Echlin, Behind the Paint, 178.

[3] Besides Delray, there is also Zug Island in “Toxic Love”, Military Street in “Halloween on Military Street”, and Clark Park in “I Found A Body.”

[4] Ibid, 43–47.

Described as right off Greenfield Road, between Eleven and Twelve Mile Road. Interstate 696 runs through it today. The only references to “Picker Forest” online are on ICP fan pages, so I assume it was called something else by locals.

[5] Devil’s Night is October 30. Notorious in 1990s Detroit for the number of arsons committed on that day.

The SMART bus is mentioned in “Guts on the Ceiling.” “She noticed that I ain’t got no head / Shh, I think I hear my heart / But damn, it got hit by a SMART Bus / And landed in Pontiac.”

[6] This characterization of suburbia is similar to the one made by sociologist Richard Sennett, in his 1970 book The Use of Disorder. Sennett argued that postwar suburbanization was a means of constructing a purified identity. It was defined by “a common determination to remain inviolate, to ensure the family’s security and sanctity through exclusionary measures on race, religion, class, or other intrusions on a nice community of homes.”

Macek, Urban Nightmares, 29.

[7] Macek traces this form of representation back to its roots in Victorian-era social reform literature. “The working-class neighborhoods of London and England’s big cities, in the British reformers’ texts, appear as the locus of all manner of filth, scum, and contagion (which, in turn, were associated metaphorically with immorality, crime, vice, and working-class insurgency)… as Stallybrass and White have demonstrated, in the discourse of the social reformers, the metonymic chain by which the urban poor are associated — for a variety of contingent, sociological reasons — with squalor is forever “elided and displaced by a metaphoric language in which filth stands in for the slum-dweller: the poor are pigs.”

“in the discourse of the social reformers, the metonymic chain by which the urban poor are associated — for a variety of contingent, sociological reasons — with squalor is forever ‘elided with and displaced by a metaphoric language in which filth stands in for the slum-dweller: the poor are pigs.”

Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares, 44.

[8] Kurashige, The Thirty Year Rebellion, 35.

[9] Detroit News, “Orville Hubbard — the ghost who still haunts Dearborn,” The Detroit News, July 17, 2000, http://blogs.detroitnews.com/history/2000/07/17/orville-hubbard-the-ghost-who-still-haunts-dearborn/

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ze’ev Chafets, “The Tragedy of Detroit,” New York Times, July 29, 1990, https://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/29/magazine/the-tragedy-of-detroit.html

[12] Bruce and Echlin, Behind the Paint, 239.

[13] Ibid, 38.

[14] Referring to Royal Oak Township, which bordered Detroit.

Ibid, 70.

[15] Ibid, 52.

[16] Behind the Paint, 108

[17] FHA ‘redlined’ urban minority neighborhoods, and refused to insure mortgages in these redlined areas. In the suburbs, developers got bank loans with the condition that they not sell to black buyers. This policy effectively accelerated white flight to the suburbs. At the same time, it created major barriers to black homeownership and geographic mobility, the effects of which are still visible today.

After WW2, the Veterans Administration insured mortgages to returning veterans, following FHA’s guidelines.

Richard Rothstein, interview by Terry Gross, Fresh Air, National Public Radio, May 3, 2017. https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=526655831

[18] Dan Austin, “How metro Detroit transit went from best to worst,”Detroit Free Press, February 6, 2015. https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/2015/02/06/michigan-detroit-public-transit/22926133/

[19] Ibid.

[20] Steve Macek, Urban Nightmares, 31.

[21] Ibid, xii-xvi.

[22] Tricia Rose, The Hip Hop Wars, 41

[23] Ibid, 42

[24] Bryan McCann, The Mark of Criminality, Chapter 2.

[25] Probably not what Coleman Young was referring to in his 1974 inaugural address, when he told criminals, “It’s time to leave Detroit. Hit Eight Mile Road.”

[26] Bruce and Echlin, Behind the Paint.

[27] Note: the first verse was actually done by Kickjazz, second was by Bruce.

[28] Brian McCollum, “20 years in, Kid Rock, Eminem and ICP are politically relevant — and culturally divided”, Detroit Free Press, September 16 2017. https://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/2017/09/16/eminem-kid-rock-icp-detroit-white-rap-1997-2017-politics/671643001/

[29] Median American household incomes grew by 10 percent from 1990 to 1999.