A couple years ago I infiltrated the Juggalo Family in an event called “The Gathering of the Juggalos”, where 20,000 followers of the Insane Clown Possee congregate, dress up in outfits and act, basically, depraved. The Juggalos are followers of ICP, Psychopathic Records and a genre of music called “Wicked Shit”. Wicked Shit uses violent, gory and excremental lyrics to teach the message of the Dark Carnival, a Judeo-Christian type of faith that came to Insane Clown Posse member Violent J in a vision that consisted of evil clowns leading the path to Shangri-La as the earth went down in flames. Besides having their own religion and lexicon, the Juggalo Family also paint their faces to look like Wicked Clowns in reverence to their prophets, rappers Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. The following excerpt is from the forthcoming book: Days and Nights In A Dark Carnival, slated in May to be published by Mend My Dress Press. 

–Craven Rock

The Love Wagon, basically a hayride without the hay, drives by slowly.

“FUCK YOUR WALKIN’! FUCK YOUR WALKING’! FUCK YOUR WALKIN’!” The Juggalos chant from the wagon.

I grab some of the ever-present trash on the ground and whip it at the young ‘los.

“Let’s get on!” Damon shouts and starts limp-jogging, his left leg stiff. We climb on in spite of the rule that you can’t get on when it’s moving. Like all the rules at the Gathering, it’s just there to be broken. It’s mostly a younger group of ‘los on the hard wooden wagon and it’s complete chaos, apart from the unison of their chanting.

The wagon turns a corner passing the Bomb House where a ‘lo and his ‘lette have set up a table with probably around fifty assorted sizes and colors of plastic bottles filled with water, all for the sole purpose of chucking them at the Love Wagon. The Love Wagon riders take this barrage like soldiers, but me and Damon duck and cover our heads as the young ‘los smile and flip off the offense. The Love Wagon continues on as the Juggalos chant in unison.

“FUCK YOUR WALKIN’!” they chant to ‘los walking.

“FUCK YOUR CAMPIN’!” they chant to ‘los camping.

“FUCK YOUR CORN DOG!” they chant to a corn dog.

And of course, their wild, primal call of “SHOW YOUR TITS!” when there are tits around.

“THAT SMELLS GOOD! THAT SMELLS GOOD! THAT SMELLS GOOD! They chant to a grill full of wieners.

“OLD SCHOOL TITTIES! OLD SCHOOL TITTIES! OLD SCHOOL TITTIES!” They chant as we pass a completely naked 60+ displaced hippie and her fully clothed partner.

When we round the curve, the second stage comes into view. A huge flank of ‘los and ‘lettes emerge from behind a staggered row of tents and we are hit with countless water balloons. It’s comparable to one of those old medieval movies where a phalanx of archers shoot a ton of arrows all at once blackening the sky. We’re getting hit with four or five balloons at once and they just keep coming. We’re getting soaked and laughing hysterically at the Love Wagon’s honorable defeat. Then we jump off the Love Wagon and get down to business.

“TITTIES! TITTIES!” We hear as it fades into the distance.

What was it I was wondering? Oh yeah, what is Shangri-La? I take out the tape recorder and start asking questions.

“Shangri-La and what it means to me is all about Karma, you know?” a Juggalo named Jason, 21, says, “Violent J… He wanted to show two different afterlives and, personally, I really don’t believe in an afterlife. But Shangri-La is, like, a paradise where you can be at Hakuna Matata, a good state of mind. No worries. You know, you’re just there, kickin’ it. You’ve got Hell’s Pit and you’ve got Shangri-La and you didn’t want any of the Juggalos to go to Hell’s Pit, ’cause if you listen to the CD’s, Shangri-La is all about the Juggalos. ALL about the Juggalos. And then Hell’s Pit’s just all dark and evil.”

Many of the Juggalos repeat this “just kickin’” it phrase, or else they say “just chillin’” when they refer to what Shangri-La is or will be to them. Some of them believe it’s something in the future and others, like Jason, believe it’s in the present, but they all throw these two phrases around as if they see Shangri-La as a place of respite and peace, a place where they can be themselves in a world where they feel like outcasts.

“I believe that this world will end. It will be destroyed, taking all the people who aren’t followers of the Dark Carnival,” Bloodrain, age unknown, says as he sips on my whiskey bottle, “then a new world will be made here which will be Shangri-La for Juggalos.”

I ask him about good people who aren’t Juggalos, if they’ll be saved and allowed entry into this post-earth afterlife. I have a feeling that he thinks I’m referring to myself, but I’m actually referring to someone more like his grandma, who I’m assuming isn’t a Juggalo. I find this aspect of any faith to be interesting. Coming from a Pentecostal background, I know full well the weight having all the truth can have on the believer. The weight of having to survive in their own heads, knowing that their family and friends are going to be eternally damned for not getting behind what they believe.

“Yeah, if they’re good people they’ll make it, too,” Bloodrain says, he points a thumb to his buddy. “Can he get a drink?”

“Sure,” I say and he passes it. His painted-up friend takes a humble swig and hands it back to me.

I think that the “good people” clause might have been what Insane Clown Possee co-founder Violent J was saying about how there are Juggalos who don’t rock the Hatchet Gear, and who never heard of ICP and even some Juggalos who don’t even know they’re Juggalos. I’ve heard several Juggalos repeat this saying that they know Juggalos that have never heard of ICP. I’m not really buying this, but I think what it’s getting at is that there’s some kind of Shangri-La pass for people like family and friends who aren’t willing participants in the Dark Carnival. Nevertheless, Bloodrain’s apocalyptic take on Shangri-La is controversial to a lot of the Juggalos that I talk to. Most Juggalos will be more flippant about it all.

“It’s a big-ass stepping stone,” Topher, a chubby and warm-hearted Juggalo from Cincinatti says. “It’s just like the dude who said we’re all gonna take over the world, blah, di, blah, blah… I really don’t think that’s what needs to happen, I just think it’s a whole mentality of freedom… Once everyone feels like they’re free, then they are. You don’t feel free, you’re not free. That’s what freedom’s about.”

“The happiest place on or off earth,” is how Dom from Milwaukee defines Shangri-La, “I don’t see it only as an afterlife. This [The Gathering] is Shangri-la because it’s the happiest place on earth. This could be Shangri-La. Heaven could be Shangri-La. Whatever keeps ’em out of my face could be Shangri-La.”

On a sensationalistic level, it’s disappointing that the Juggalo’s Dark Carnival is so simple to them. That, in spite of the Judeo-Christian overtones, Shangri-La is just kicking it with your homies at a place like The Gathering. Or “just people taking care of each other, like it should be,” like another ‘lo told me. But it is heartening that the Dark Carnival and the Juggalo Family stems from a basic human need. To most Juggalos the two are one and the same. They come to this understanding when they see an ICP show or attend the Gathering. Their faith and their Family are intertwined.

“We’re fuckin’ in Shangri-La right now. Juggalo Island all day,” Jame-o from Atlanta tells me. “This is what I fell into. I fell into something and finally felt like something accepted me. You know what I mean? I can’t imagine heaven being much better.”

“If you see anybody that’s too fucked up, please, get them some water, let them live,” he adds.

*** 

The truth is we follow God
We’ve always been behind Him
the Carnival is God and may all Juggalos find Him…
May the Juggalos find God
We’re not sorry that we tricked you
the Carnival will carry on
Suck my nuts, bitch, fuck you…

-Insane Clown Posse lyric
Insane Clown Posse disappointed a lot of Juggalos when they came out with the 6^th and final Joker’s Card album. This highly-anticipated album was supposed to drop the final message of the Dark Carnival, which they did on the song “Thy Unveiling”. The song starts with the sound of a thunderstorm and builds tension listing off the previous five Joker’s Cards:

Carnival of Carnage…
The Ringmaster…
The Riddlebox …
The Great Milenko…
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers…
And The Wraith…

“Looks like we’re all out of time, brother,” Violent J begins, “everybody’s out of time. Fuck it, we gots to tell em…”

Then they tell the Juggalo’s that “The Dark Carnival is God, not sorry that we tricked you. May the Juggalos find God.”

This caused quite a stir amongst the Juggalos. Some of them felt betrayed, fooled into Christianity, many converted, still others adapted their own personal philosophies and spirituality to fit the final message, but from my understanding few Juggalos were upset enough to just up and leave their Family.

Sid, a trans., African-American Juggalo from Ohio, says that he was raised in a Pentecostal family that was rigid and oppressive. He sees The Dark Carnival as a way to reconnect with his spirituality without all of the fear and hate that he was brought up in. It makes things more simple, he explains.

“Shangri-La to me is, basically… it’s like Heaven for people who are good people. You don’t have to be a Juggalo to go to Shangri-La, for me it seems like I can just be a good person and do good things and go there. The whole thing that pissed me off about Christianity is, you know, I mean there’s Christians who want to go to Shangri-La, obviously, but I’m just saying, how they think about Heaven, it’s like you gotta do all this perfect shit. If you’re not perfect you’re not gonna make it. Like if you don’t speak in tongues, if you don’t do this, this, this, this and this then you’re fuckin’ not gonna make it. And it’s just like, there are really good people out there who are not in Heaven – to their standards – because they’re not speaking a certain language? That doesn’t make any sense. So for Shangri-La, you can do, you know, whatever, just be a good fuckin’ person, help out people every once in a while or something and you’re gonna go up there, you know. It’s just another version of Heaven for people who aren’t accepted.”

Other Juggalos believe that the Dark Carnival is the only way and that you will spend an eternity in Hell’s Pit if you live in ways that aren’t moral and righteous, but this morality is a wider path than the narrow one of Fundamentalist Christianity, it’s based more off simple goodwill. Take Bubbles, a thin, female Juggalo with long dreads, adorned in countless glowsticks and a puffy day-glo dress. “Shangri-La really is a paradise to me,” she says. “Whenever your day comes, whenever the reaper is knocking on your door, The Wraith, as I like to call it, he’s gonna set you straight. If you steal, and you hate, and you have prejudice, all those things that cause horrible, horrible things, you will go to Hell’s Pit, and you will sit there with the demon and burn forever. And the afterlife, like, if you use your karma and you do your shit straight, you’ll end up in Shangi-La. Sippin’ on a Faygo and smokin a blunt all day long.”

What’s interesting is the fluidity of each Juggalo’s interpretation of the Joker’s Cards. Unlike Christianity, it seems every Juggalo respects his fellow ‘los perspective on the Cards. No one claims to have a monopoly on spiritual truth. And even though some of them, like Bubbles, might literally believe in Hell’s Pit, they aren’t high ‘n mighty enough to tell anyone they’re going to go there. Instead, they take the Six Cards as a warning against immoral action in their own lives. Unlike Christian beliefs the Dark Carnival is rooted in, there isn’t a universal truth. It’s up to the individual ‘lo to work out their own salvation. How a ‘lo chooses to view the Cards is respected as the truth for them. Juggalos don’t argue doctrine.

Maybe this goes back to what Violent J said about how some Juggalos don’t even know they’re Juggalos. If you have the truth, you have the truth for you and you’re saved. So while the Juggalos have many words for a fake Juggalo – a juffalo, a juggahoe – they generally don’t damn the non-Juggalos. Not to say that they don’t harbor some resentment for the rest of the world at times, but that seems based more around defensiveness than a spiritual elitism.

“They gave us some shit for it, but whatever, I like it,” a Juggalo named Neil from Massachusetts says to me when I ask him about the “Miracles” video. Neil is one of the rare Juggalos that I’ve spoken to who even knows how big the level of mockery the “Miracles” video reached. I’m surprised how unaware most Juggalos are of the sensation the video has become. If they do know, they can be pretty defensive. However, most of them are pretty light-minded about it. They are used to getting crap for following the “most hated band in the world” and they don’t expect anyone outside of the Dark Carnival to understand. They’ve been getting shit for so long that the “Miracles” hate is irrelevant to them.

“I love the ‘Miracles’ video,” a Juggalo named Fuckstick tells me, “their message is they’re trying to get to everybody [to have], like, pretty much, peace, love and harmony. They want everything to work, their song is about that message. So with ‘Miracles’ they quit hiding the message. All their older stuff they hid the message and a lot of people didn’t get it. Miracles… it’s out there. It’s like a slap in the face, you get the message. It’s about the world. Everything’s beautiful. They’re not really saying screw science or anything. Scientists just are oblivious and, well, not all scientists, but some of them are pretty cool about it but a lot of scientists are oblivious and naive to the fact that miracles exist. They want fact for everything and there isn’t fact for everything.”

Fuckstick also tells me that even when ICP was singing songs about more insidious things, the point was to push the message of peace and love. “Even the shit talking about killing, they’re not really talking about going out and killing someone. They’re rapping from someone else’s perspective,” he says. 

The duality of ICP’s violent and mean-spirited lyrics promoting faith and love is confusing to the outsider. When I tried to put myself in the mind of the Juggalo to figure it out, all I got was cognitive dissonance. Talking to them doesn’t make it any clearer, but it does illuminate why The Family doesn’t have this same struggle. It’s the very fact that it’s obtuse and untenable that makes it easy for Juggalos to piece it into something they can grasp. Add to that the “Clown Love” they get from the Juggalo Family and it’s hard for them to dismiss that there’s something sacred or spiritual about the Dark Carnival. They make it work. It’s hard for the outsider to understand because they seem to have gotten in through the backdoor on a lot of things. Through objectification the Juggalos have learned to appreciate different body types. Through materialism they found sacrament. Through violence they found love. And through don’t-give-a-fuck-nihilism they found faith. To put a finer point on it only takes you further away from it. I think that’s why so many Juggalos have told me that if I really wanted to know what the Dark Carnival or Shangrli-La was I’d have to ask every Juggalo, because it’s different for each one. However, the Juggalo doesn’t have to ask anyone.