American Juggalo

Last night, I couldn’t sleep due to all of the coughing, so I curled up in bed with my laptop and watched New York filmmaker Sean Dunne’s short documentary piece on Juggalo culture, entitled American Juggalo. As we’ve had several conversations here in the past on the clown-faced disciples of Detroit’s ICP, I thought that I’d share it. I wish I had some deep analysis to pass along with it, but, as of right now, I’m still wrestling with what I’d like to say. I think, if I’d stayed in academia, this is exactly the kind of thing I’d be researching. I find nihilistic end-time cults fascinating, but this one, I think, is particularly interesting for its emphasis on “family.” I know that in itself isn’t all that unique, as groups like this have always grown by taking in those who otherwise felt alone, friendless, and without the loving support of family, but something about this strikes me as different. Maybe it’s the fact that all of this “we love everyone for who they are” stuff coexists alongside the yelling of lyrics about stabbing a woman in the stomach that rhyme phrases like “now she’s screamin’ like I care” with “blood soaked hair.”

I’m not sure if the director had an agenda in mind when he made the film, but quite a few of the young people interviewed come across as fairly sympathetic. At least I found myself kind of liking a few of them, and wondering to myself what other realistic options there are out there for people who, for whatever reason, just didn’t fit into this increasingly complicated world we find ourselves in. I can definitely see how, for some people, the appeal of one week a year at The Gathering of Juggalos (where this documentary was filmed) could almost make all the other shit tolerable. I actually found myself more than once feeling happy for these people that they had this in their lives to look forward to, which I wasn’t expecting. I was expecting to be terrified from begging to end, as I was when I watched the post-apocolyptic footage that Tom Green shot there the night that reality television personality Tila Tequila was pelted with rocks, garbage and human waste.

I’m reminded of an American Studies professor I had at U-M about eighteen years ago, and his views on the degeneration of American culture. I remember in particular a certain lecture in which he referred to the pop icon Madonna as a “whore.” He’s probably in his 90’s now, but I’d love to ask him what he makes of things today. Actually, what I’d really love to do is to airlift him into the Gathering of the Juggalos inside a glass cube and have him offer running commentary though a loudspeaker system. His name, in case anyone would like to help me find him, is Stephen Tonsor. (He was incredibly conservative, and I’d always wanted to ask him whether that fact got him his job in the U-M History department in 1954, as McCarthyism was in full swing, and as other faculty were being driven out for fear that they might look too “red”.)

Speaking of the degeneration of culture, one of my favorite art exhibitions ever was a late-80’s recreation of a show first curated by the Nazis in 1937. The exhibition, entitled “Entartete Kunst,” or “Degenerate Art,” contained some 650 works removed from the museums of Germany by the Nazis once they came to power. The pieces, which were abstract and modern in nature, didn’t conform with their definition of beauty, or the ideology of blood and soil that they were so keen on at the time. Anyway, when I find myself wanting to condemn modern cultural trends, I try to keep in mind that I don’t want to sound like those fucking Nazis did when they condemned jazz music and abstract art. Then again, I think it’s pretty unlikely that Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope will fare as well as van Gogh and Picasso, historically speaking.

American Juggalo from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.

[Also, I don’t have the time to pursue it now, but I was thinking it might be interesting to do a print campaign encouraging people to treat Juggalos with respect. I’ve got a few ideas as to how to tackle it, but, as of right now, my favorite is to take photos of prominent community leaders made up in black and white face paint, and put them on posters with text reading, “We’re all Juggalos… please treat the Juggalos in our community as you would anyone else… according to scientists they are the same as we are in all significant ways.”}