My Year As a Quasi-Juggalo: Part I
I've been listening to metal for well over a decade now, but since I've never really met anyone in real life who shared my specific tastes in heavy music (aside from the odd metalcore/deathcore kid and they certainly don't count) my relationship with metal has always been almost entirely musical. And while I treasure the relationships I've cultivated in the last two years or so on this site, our lack of "real life" face time has limited our effects on one another's lives. But though my flirtation with the juggalo world was relatively brief the intensity of my immersion into it has had a greater impact on my personal life than any other genre. Weird. Anyway, now that I've been submerging myself back into ICP and Twiztid and...others over the bast couple of weeks a lot of s
hit from that time period has been surfacing, and if you'll indugle me I'd like to take a little trip down memory lane...
Perhaps appropriately it all begins with Pizza Hut. After six months of sitting on my ass playing with myself after losing my job at Burger King I finally managed to drag my sadsack-ass out of my cave (mother's house) and get a f
ucking job and one of the places I applied was Pizza Slut. The manager I talked to when I walked through the door to pick up an application, let's just call him "Adam" (which isn't much of a stretch since his name was Adam), would end up becoming a good friend for almost two years and give me a crash course in the the juggalo world with his encyclopedic knowledge of all things Psychopathic. After I applied he's even the one who got my hired, thinking that my putting down "Fishburne Military School" as my high school meant that I'd actually been in the military. Score.
So pretty soon I was wearing a red shirt and black hat made of synthetic fibers and stealing pepperoni and flavorless sausage on the regular and had been introduced to the second member of what would become my little circle of juggalo friends, Billy. Over the next couple of weeks Adam, Billy, and another guy who we hung out with every once in a blue moon named Joe introduced me to the concepts of ICP, Twiztid, and juggalos, which I had been almost entirely ignorant of. At the time I couldn't have given less of a s
hit, but Adam was one of those rare juggalos who actually liked
real hip hop so we managed to bond a little bit over a shared musical obsession even if we were coming from two entirely different places. To this day he's probably the only one I've ever met in real life to spend as much as I do on CD's. Still, they were only coworkers and not much more.
Then one day Billy asks me if I wanna go for a drink at the bar across the street and next thing you know we were almost inseparable. Billy's one of the most socially awkward people I've ever met but is so self-absorbed that he either doesn't notice or doesn't care. So we had that in common. Now he'd just started hanging with Adam a little while before I'd met them and occasionally spent time at what I'll just call "The Compound" (though none of us ever had the presence of mind to come up with such a cool name). One half of The Compound was Adam's house where he lived with his mother. The other was the house of his neighbor Brandon, a big, thirty-year old, kid who was more than a little bit of a burnout and loved ICP, where he lived with his wife, daughter, and brother Gerald. At some point Billy ended up inviting me to chill over at Brandon's house (inviting me to someone else's house is just the kid of inconsiderate, clueless guy he is) and then it all started to snowball. Billy and I were hanging out, Adam, a career wigger with an elephant-size chip on his shoulder, and I started getting really tight with late night bouts of booze, music, and long conversations at his house, and occasionally we'd all head over to Brandon's. Times were good but s
hit was still pretty low key until
Bang, Pow, Boom dropped, ICP's newest album.
As a CD junkie, Adam immediately went out and got all three versions, red, blue, and green, and for god knows how many months I was subjected to them on a regular basis. At first I was indifferent but eventually "In Yo Face" and "Bang, Pow, Boom" and "Juggalo Island" started to get under my skin in a big way. That album sort of lit a fire under all of our asses. Adam and Brandon had been kind of slacking in their juggalocity (no that's not an actual thing but it is now so tell your friends) in recent years due to age, life, and a slump in the quality of recent Psychopathic albums, but the combination of the best album ICP had released in years and a group of people to get excited about it with rejuvenated their passion. Billy was sorta like I am now. He loved the things he loved about juggalo music but couldn't give less of a f
uck about the rest. But he loved
Bang, Pow, Boom. Then of course there was Brandon's longtime friend Mike, who was far too into his thirties to be nursing a grudge against Eminem for his beef with ICP, but I surely can't forget about him (f
uck the Stealers). Even Brandon's middle-age brother Gerald, who'd apparently never been much into the whole bag, was won over.
The watershed moment for me would have to have been the ICP show shortly after. We'd all been bumping the new album for around a month at the time, even I'd bought the green version, and I was pretty stoked to say the least. I don't remember the exact details of that night, but if it was anything like our usual routine then I imagine it went something like this: get off work, catch a ride with Billy over to Brandon's, drink beer, smoke bowl, drink beer, drink beer, drink beer, smoke bowl, go pee in the bushes by the screened-in porch where we're all hanging out, Brandon's wife makes passive aggressive remark about us peeing in her yard, drink beer, smoke bowl, get laughed at for lighting a cig when I've already got two still burning in the ash tray, everybody laughs at Brandon for same, drink one last beer, smoke one last bowl, drink one more one last beer, smoke one more one last bowl, pile into Billy's SUV and make the twenty-minute drive to the concert with a bowl on the way, park in garage next to venue, exchange "Whoop whoops!"'s with random juggalos on the street, and then we go in...
You douchenozzles can say what you like but an ICP show is an event not to be missed. Sure their fans are turds, but when you're waiting for the show to start, and the electricity is in the air, and some random dude in a backwards baseball cap shouts "Who's goin' chicken' huntin'?!" and every white trash motherf
ucker in earshot shouts back "WE'S GOIN' CHICKEN' HUNTIN'!" then you've gotta be sippin' on some serious Haterade to not feel like joining in. But their fans were the least of the spectacle. Even the two party girls making out right next to me paled into insignificance when Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope took the stage and "In Yo Face" hit me in the aforementioned face. Those middle-age f
ucks ran across that stage bouncing around with more energy than any band half their age with songs perfectly tailored to demolish a concert hall. And the Faygo? Oh man, the Faygo. Spraying, shooting, throwing, and pouring Faygo onto an audience has got to be one of the greatest ideas anyone's ever had and I say that with zero irony. Music already gives you auditory and emotional stimuli, and a live show adds a visual component, but spraying soda on the audience gives you a
physical connection to the music that is uniquely intense. When that Faygo hits you in the face and runs down your shirt, soaks your pants right down to your underwear, it's like all the energy of the band gets transferred right into you and a wave of pure euphoria washes over the entire audience. I don't even remember most of that show, and it wasn't because of the booze or the weed. It was an honest-to-god natural high that made time stand still, and yet it only felt like five minutes had past until confetti rained down from the ceiling, ICP played their last song, "Bang Pow Boom", and I was left standing there, soaked to the bone, wondering where the f
uck the last hour had gone. Afterwards I imagined we packed back up into Billy's truck, went back to Brandon's house, and got back to drinking and smoking and peeing. Unfortunately it was cold as f
uck that night and I didn't have a change of clothes until Gerald took pity on me and gave me some of his clothes so I was sick as a dog the next day.
But it was totally f
ucking worth it.
To Be Continued...