t first glance, it might not be obvious why I'm so mad about meeting them. You might dismiss them as just unbelievably misogynist and aggressive, and it is true that their lyrics are so incredibly offensive. Take, for instance, at random:I'm hating slutsShoot them in the face, step backward and scratch my nutsUnless I'm in the sackCos I fuck so hard it'll break their back.ICP have been leaving for 20 years, always wearing clown make-up, which looks slightly lumpy because it's painted over their goatees. They've been prohibited from performing in various cities where juggalos have been concerned in murders and mob violence. ICP have a terrible reputation, fostered by news reports showing teenagers in juggalo T-shirts arrested for stabbing strangers and lyrics like "Barrels in your mouth/bullets to your head/The back of your neck's all over the shed/Boomshacka boom chop chop bang."All of which makes Violent J's recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this full time secretly been evangelical Christians. They've just been pretending to be cruel and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God. They released a song, Thy Unveiling, that spelt out the revelation beyond all doubt:Fuck it, we got to tell.All secrets will now be toldNo more hidden messages_Truth is we follow GOD!We've always been behind himThe carnival is GODAnd may all juggalos find himWe're not bad if we tricked you.The news shook the juggalo community to its core. While some fans claimed they'd actually had an inkling, having deciphered some of the secret messages in various songs, others said they felt deeply betrayed and outraged: they'd been innocently enjoying all those songs about chopping people up and shooting women, and it was Christian rock?Violent J explained himself unapologetically to a New Jersey newspaper: "You give to address their language. You get to occupy them, gain their trust, talk to them and read you're one of them. You're a soul from the street and you talk of your experiences. Then at the end you can say them: God has helped me."Of course, one might argue that 20 years was, under the circumstances, an incredibly long time for them to have assumed to be unholy, and that, from a Christian perspective, the injury they did while feigning unholiness may even have outweighed the greater good.I've come to Milwaukee because ICP have only released their most audacious Christian song to date: Miracles. In it, they list God's wonders that delight them each day:Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogsFuckin' rainbows after it rainsThere's enough miracles here toblow your brains.The song climaxes with them railing against the real conception of science:Fuckin' magnets, how do they work?And I don't wanna talk to a scientistY'all motherfuckers lying andgetting me pissed.10pm. Upstairs, thousands of juggalos are getting drunk in preparation for the show. The air is fast and exciting. ICP have a twist of throwing gallons of cheap fizzy soda into the crowd, and many juggalos are broken into the barrier in the prospect of getting wet and sticky. Backstage, ICP arrive to see me. They're wearing their full clown make-up - they decline to meet journalists without it - and are immediately delightful. They smoke, but considerately blow the pot out from my face. "Oh, I'm sorry, let me put that out. That's some bullshit on my part," says Shaggy 2 Dope when he sees me flinch slightly away from it.But they also seem melancholy and obsessed with the negative critical reaction to Miracles. Saturday Night Live just parodied it("Fuckin' blankets, how do they work?") and the internet is filled with amused and sometimes outraged science bloggers dissecting the lyrics. Violent J and Shaggy have been watching them, they say me, feeling increasingly saddened and irate."A college professor took two years out of her fucking life to specifically attack us," says Violent J. "Oh yeah, she had it all figured out."One of the ICP road crew locates the picture 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 simply be described as militant. The full song is practically a testimonial to not knowing things.""Fuck you, man," says Violent J. "Shut the bed up.""Did you expect this form 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 rich like that.' But rather it's, 'ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a lot 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 adjacent 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 follow the picture for another few seconds: "It becomes evident that Shaggy and J consider any apprehension of the actual workings of these 'miracles' to be corrosive. To them, knowledge is seen as a scourge_ For ICP a reliable reason of 'fucking rainbows' would cut them to, as Keats put it, 'the dull catalogue of common things'."Violent J shakes his head sorrowfully. "Who looks at the stars at dark and says, 'Oh, those are gaseous forms of plutonium'?" he says. "No! You see at the stars and you think, 'Those are beautiful.'"Suddenly he glances at me. The woman in the picture is bespectacled and nerdy. I am bespectacled and nerdy. Might I make a similar motive?"I don't recognize how magnets work," I say, to put him at his ease."Nobody does, man!" he replies, relieved. "Magnetic force, man. What else is like to that on this Earth? Nothing! Magnetic pressure is enthralling to us. It's right there, in your fucking face. You can look them pulling. You can't see it. You can't feel it. You can't reach it. But there's a fucking force there. That's cool!"Shaggy says the estimate for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment."Gravity's cool," Violent J says, "but not as chill as magnets.""I did think," I admit, "that fog constitutes quite a low threshold for miracles.""Fog?" Violent J says, surprised."Well," I clarify, "I've lived around fog my whole life, so perhaps I'm blas.""Fog, to me, is awesome," he replies. "Do you know why? Because I feel at my five-year-old son and I'm explaining to him what fog is and he thinks it's incredible.""Ah!" I gesticulate. "If you're explaining to yourfive-year-old son what fog is, then why do you not wish to meet scientists? Because they're just wish you, explaining things to people_""Well," Violent J says, "science is_ we don't really_ that's like_" He pauses. Then he waves his men as if to say, "OK, an analogy": "If you're trying to know a girl, but her mom's home, fuck her mom! You realize? You need to know the girl, but her mom's home? Fuck the mom. See?"I look blankly at him. "You mean_""Now, you don't really find that way," Violent J says. "You don't really hate her mom. But for this moment when you're trying to fuck this girl, fuck her! And that's what we think when we say fuck scientists. Sometimes they kill all the cool mysteries away. When I was a kid, they couldn't tell you how pyramids were made_""Like Stonehenge and Easter Island," says Shaggy. "Nobody knows how that jack got there.""But since then, scientists go, 'I've got an account for that.' It's like, fuck you! I wish to consider it was something out of this world."Violent J's real key is Joseph Bruce, Shaggy's is Joseph Utsler. They're in their late 30s. Their career, while at times truly glittering, is cluttered with inadvertent mistakes. Born and elevated in Christian homes in Detroit, they've known each other since high school. "We were dirt poor," Shaggy says. "You can't get no poorer. Fighting, food stamps, I was a fucking thief for a living, hustling, getting money, we were balls deep in that shit."Their first band, Inner City Posse, was without clown make-up. They were gangsta rappers, and consequently found themselves behaving in a gangster-like manner. In 1989, Violent J was imprisoned for 90 days for death threats, robbery and violating probation. When he got out, he and Shaggy made some life-defining decisions. How could they maintain their rap career going but go out from the destructive gang lifestyle? How could they switch the band's name but maintain the initials ICP? People liked the initials ICP.And so it came to them in a flash: Insane Clown Posse! Killer clown rap! It was the perfect outlet for their emotions. Write near the painfulness and the anger through the prism of horror-movie imagery. A completely new genre."We had to make our ass off from the earth up," Violent J says. "We don't get radio play. We don't get video play. We get nothing. This is our video play_" He indicates the dressing room. "Being on the road. We didn't make no Jay-Z telling everyone, 'Hey, look at these guys, we're friends with them, listen to them.' To this day, we don't get that."This aspect of things might have turned out rather differently had Violent J not made their first big error. It was 1997. Insane Clown Posse were enjoying an early bloom of success - their albums Riddle Box and The Great Milenko had sold a gazillion copies. One night they were in a society when a new man handed them a flyer inviting them to a party. The handbill read: "Featuring appearances by Esham, Kid Rock, and ICP (maybe).""Why are you saying we're passing to be performing at your company when you haven't asked us?" Violent J yelled at the boy."It says 'maybe'," he said. "Maybe you will be there. I don't know. That's why I'm asking you right now. Are you guys coming to my company or what?""Fuck no," Violent J replied. "We might have, if you'd asked us first, before putting us on the fucking flyer."That boy grew up to be Eminem and, incensed, he's been publicly deriding ICP ever since in lyrics such as, "ICP are overrated and hated because of their false identities".An observation that turned out to be prophetic. "From the real start of our music, God is in there," Violent J says, "in hidden messages.""Can you make me some examples?" I ask.There's a little silence. He looks torn between revealing them or maintaining the mystery. He shoots Shaggy a glance."The Riddle Box," he finally says.Hey, what's up, motherfuckerThis is Shaggs 2 DopeCongratulating you on openingthe RiddleboxIt looks like you received your prizeThe cost, what it cost, was your ASS,bitchboy!Hahahahah!The Riddle Box, 1995)"If you died today, God forbid, if you were hit by a car and you had to go the crank to your own riddle box, what would pop out?" Violent J peers at me. "Would it be God, or would it be the monster? Only you really recognize the solution to your own riddle box. We're asking the listener, what is in your own riddle box if you were to die today?""Cos you can't lie to yourself, man," says Shaggy."Only you love the solution to that riddle," Violent J says. "And so there's The Ringmaster. In The Ringmaster, we say when you die you make to present your own beast. Somebody who has lived a biography of religion, they present a really low and weak beast when they die. But somebody who's an evil bastard will have to look a monster. The query is, how big is your ringmaster? If, God forbid, you were hit by a car. Ask yourself, Jon." Violent J looks me in the eye. "How big is your ringmaster?""How come it took you so yearn to build the declaration?" I ask."You had to gain everybody's attention," says Violent J. "You had to advance the entire world's trust and attention.""So all those unpleasant characters in the songs," I ask, "like the teller in I Stuck Her With My Wang, they're examples of people you shouldn't be?""Huh?" Violent J says."Well, it's very unpleasant," I say. "'I stuck her with my wang. She hit me in the balls. I grabbed her by her neck. And I bounced her off the walls. She said it was an accident and then apologised. But I even took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.' That's clearly a call about domestic violence. So your Christian message is. don't be like that man?""Huh?" Violent J repeats, mystified.There's a silence."I Stuck Her With My Wang is funny," Violent J says. "Jokes. Jokes, man. Jokes. Jokes. Jokes. It's only a ridiculous scenario. Silly stories, man. Silly stories. What's she doing kicking him in the balls? We feel it funny. But we're saying, while we're close, while we're hanging, hey, man, do you always ask yourself what's in your riddle box? If you had to play the crank today?""But still, given that you were secretly Christian, are there any lyrics you now regret?"There's a silence. "Yeah," Violent J says quietly."Which ones?""Dumb, stupid, idiotic lyrics that I said without knowing any better. Back in the day.""Like what?""I really don't need to say. There's one lyric_" He trails off, suddenly looking very sad beneath the clown make-up. "Just dumb lyrics. I said one lyric one sentence that I hate. I may have been feeling really down that day. I said something, I go with that every day. I don't need to head it out."I later do a hunt and get it hard to pinpoint exactly which words he may be referring to. It just might, I suppose, be, "I took aim at a vagabond dog, and I blew out its brains, it was sweet as hell, no feelings for others, you gotta be cold."'Violent J says releasing Thy Unveiling, coming out as a Christian, was the most exciting bit of his life. "It felt so good, brother. I was blinking in heaven. Let me say you something: I would go running at night, and my feet wouldn't even meet the ground. I had my headphones on, I'd be listening to Thy Unveiling, and I'd be in such azone that my feet wouldn't still be affecting the ground. I'd be literally levitating."He was worried, of course, about the response from the juggalos and, sure enough, "The emotional impact shook the whole juggalo foundation, for well and for ill.""What did the juggalos who were opposed to it say?" I ask."They said, 'Fuck that'," says Shaggy."But the juggalos and juggalettes who were for it were so touched," Violent J says. "They said they loved us."And so the reviews came in.Blender magazine, in its number of the 50 worst artists in music history, call ICP the real worst of all: "Insane Clown Posse sound even stupider than they look. Two trailer-trash types who wear face paint, pretend to be a street gang and drench cult devotees in cheap soda called Faygo, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are more infamous for their beef with Eminem than their ham-fisted rap-rock music." And their nadir, Blender said, the worst musical moment from the worst band ever, is The Wraith: Shangri-La, the album that climaxes with Thy Unveiling.I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown make-up who are suffering from depression. I cautiously ask them this and Violent J immediately replies. "I'm medicated," he says. "I get a lot of medicine that I take. For depression. Panic attacks are actually a good character of my life." He points at Shaggy. "He's gone through some things as well.""You do a point in presence of how many hundreds or thousands of people." Shaggy nods. "You're giving your entire being, your soul, to every individual in that crowd, every rivet in your consistency is sweating, you're fighting consciousness, just to get it out of you, and afterwards the picture all your fans are partying, 'Yeah! Rock and roll!' And you're just here." He glances round the dressing room. "You're just fucking sitting here."Violent J turns to him and says, softly, "If we moved furniture for a living we'd take a bad back or bad knees. We conceive for a living. We try to create. We try to always think of cool ideas. And every once in a while there's a breakdown in the engine_ I think that's the terms you pay."Shaggy nods quietly. "I get anxiety and make a lot," he says. "And interpretation that block people write about us_ It hurts.""Least talented band in the world," Violent J says. "No talent. When I see that I think, 'Damn. Are we that different from people?'"He looks as if he means it - as if he sometimes feels hopelessly stuck being him.It's only a wicked twist of luck for Insane Clown Posse that theirs is a variety of creative expression that millions of people find ridiculous. But so suddenly, palpably, Violent J pulls himself out of his introspection. They're about to go on phase and he doesn't need to be maudlin. He wants to be on the offensive. He shoots me a defiant look and says, "You know Miracles? Let me tell you, if Alanis Morissette had done that fucking song everyone would have called it fucking genius."
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