So, first, I’m not a juggalo. I’m as proud not to be one as they are to be. I just want that on the record. I am fascinated by them, however. In some previous early-20th Century incarnation, I was an anthropologist. I studied the curious culture-ways of nearly extinct natives. Now, in my current life, I can satisfy that soul-bound ethnographic urge by watching videos on the Internet. Though juggalos are far from extinct, most of them hover perilously near death. So I think it counts.
In any case, I’ve always had the same question about juggalos that everyone else has had: What the fuck is this? As in, I get that it’s a sub-culture centered around the small media empire built by Violent J and Shaggy2Dope (Joseph Bruce and Joseph Utsler to their mothers) of Insane Clown Posse. But if that was the case, if the sub-culture of the juggalo is in fact only a large fan-club, then well, it’s just a large fan-club and not a sub-culture at all despite the juggalos’ own insistence. And yet this loose social category inspires a kind of devotion among its members that goes beyond mere fandom. There is something beneath the surface. It may not be anything particularly profound, but it’s there.
My guess really is that the juggalo phenomenon is a sort of after-the-fact justification or enabling of behavior the participants already exhibited. Cultural outsiders, mostly poor whites it seems, are drawn to the group of fellow others. They’re drawn to high-intensity music that carries a message validating their place in the world, their interests, and their feelings. However, certain signifiers in the culture (“Psycho Records,” the Hatchet Man logo) and the open endorsement of drug and alcohol abuse also lend validation of anti-social tendencies. See, for examples, the guy rapping to the camera about raping women at gunpoint and the guy who, when asked why he thinks he won’t get laid, says “I’m insane man! I like to stab people!”
Ultimately, those two are probably not representative of the whole (and neither is the girl standing in the nude, silently, in more than one shot). What is, I think, is the sense of belonging tainted with a bit of nihilism expressed by most of the subjects in the video. The demographic that comprises the majority of juggalos is at a nadir these days. Poor and working-class (and I’m going to go out on a limb and say rural/semi-rural) whites aren’t exactly disenfranchised compared to poor minorities, but their place of prominence in America has been eroded significantly in the past quarter-century. It’s the same death-throes that have kicked up the Tea Party and white religious fundamentalism in politics.
“Some old man told me there weren’t nothing good left in the world and I believed that shit. I believed that shit til I came here and saw all the titties, all the weed, all the fast food.”
In the same way that hip hop was by, for, and of urban African Americans (meaning, not by outright proscription, but in practice none the less) the juggalo thing speaks to that group: poor white youth who feel devalued and disillusioned. In that way, it’s much like punk rock, except that it seems to lack the conscience that was at least in the background in punk rock. And that the music sucks.
