That same year, the duo presented a second feature-length film. This time exploring a western motif, Big Money Rustlas featured the clowns in gunslinger garb and was again released outside of theaters. Featuring Freshness , a two-disc collection of the group's work with other artists, arrived in A year later, the conceptual The Mighty Death Pop focused on their detractors and other "certified hoes," with Clark returning as producer.
In , while recording the next joker card, the duo released a pair of solo albums, with Shaggy 2 Dope 's F. In mid, the group announced that their 15th studio album, Fearless Fred Fury , would be released in October of that year, but it was ultimately pushed back until February An eight-song EP, Flip the Rat, was scheduled for release on the same day.
AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age. Aggressive Bittersweet Druggy. Energetic Happy Hypnotic. We did a song with their lead singer. As the track plays, Bruce's musical partner and childhood friend, Joey Utsler aka Shaggy 2 Dope , sits quietly to the side, nodding and rubbing the gothic D tattooed on the back of his shaved head.
Utsler is 36 and lean, with talon-sharp fingernails and the sandpapery voice of a lifelong smoker. The two men have even been talking about signing Abrams to ICP's Psychopathic Records , a label better known for makeup-wearing, murder-obsessed rappers than for preening lovermen. The song ends, and Bruce beams in his chair. For an ode to hygienic necrophilia, "Truth Dare" is surprisingly hummable.
It might even be one of Insane Clown Posse's best songs. Of course, that's not saying much, seeing how ICP's discography comprises some of the most profoundly vile music ever made. In the two decades since Bruce and Utsler formed the group, they've churned out more than a dozen albums' worth of gleefully misogynist, cartoonishly violent songs.
In ICP's world, rednecks are carved up and eaten "Chicken Huntin'" , pedophiles are stabbed in the colon "To Catch a Predator" , and STDs get their own anthems "Bugz on My Nugz," which is performed, in part, in the imagined style of high-pitched venereal crabs.
It's most proudly displayed during the group's live act, in which Bruce and Utsler—both of whom hail from the suburbs—disguise themselves with black and white clown makeup and throw gangsta leans while dousing their audiences with sticky geysers of Faygo, a midwestern econo-buy soda. Not surprisingly, the music industry has long treated ICP with the sort of wary contempt with which one would eye a Chinese battery landfill.
Radio stations and MTV mostly refuse to play the band, while critics have declared ICP the worst act in music Blender and dismissed the group as a modern-day minstrel act Spin. And though ICP has been signed to major labels several times, each deal has collapsed.
For years, ICP operated on the fringes of the record business, selling just enough discs to get the media's attention, however unfavorable. For a good decade or so, most of the mainstream world basically stopped paying attention to Insane Clown Posse, and the group went underground. That is, until last spring, when the men behind ICP did something so strange, so offensive, the rest of the world couldn't help but take notice: They got deep.
In April, the group released a music video for a piano-plinking, synth-heavy song called " Miracles. Lyrically, there's not a single chopped-up hillbilly or chatty STD to be found; instead, the group praises the mysteries of earth, from the sun to Niagara Falls to giraffes.
Though Bruce and Utsler had conceived "Miracles" as an earnest and fairly straightforward ode to the natural world, blog commentators and YouTube pundits were unsure of the song's meaning: Did these guys really not know how magnetism works?
Answer: They do. Why do they view rivers and giraffes with such f-bombing fascination? Because giraffes are cool. And, most important: Is this all one big joke? Definitely not. The attention lavished on "Miracles" was largely negative, but it was enough to propel ICP up from the underground—and the duo didn't come alone.
Over the past decade, Bruce and Utsler have quietly built a massive pop-culture sleeper cell of fans, who call themselves the Juggalos so named for a ICP song, "The Juggla". While most of us happily ignored ICP, the Juggalos embraced the band's outsider status, helping albums like 's Bang! Over the years, in fact, ICP has sold a respectable 7 million albums. And that's just the beginning. Juggalos also flock to ICP's long-running online store, which sells everything from action figures to baby gear to an energy drink, Spazmatic.
There are ICP movies, radio shows, and an annual music-festival-slash-brand-enhancer, the Gathering of the Juggalos.
The uproar over "Miracles" only increased the devotion of ICP's fans. The group long ago developed a sort of symbiotic relationship with the outside world: The more Bruce and Utsler are shunted to the margins—whether by critics, labels, or kvetchy bloggers—the more their outcast fans love them.
While the record industry has haplessly searched for a new business model, Insane Clown Posse has built a veritable empire. Many of ICP's wisest moves were things that once looked like career killers: hanging out with fans while snubbing industry types, starting a niche music festival in the middle of nowhere, and, in Bruce's case, writing a lengthy, soul-baring memoir filled with unpleasant details called Behind the Paint.
Long before MySpace and Twitter allowed artists to communicate quasi intimately with their fan base and "transparency" had become a marketing strategy, ICP had already erased the barrier between performer and audience. The Juggalo culture originated from Insane Clown Posse's fanbase and was further developed by other music acts on their record label, Psychopathic Records.
ICP originated as the gangsta rap group Inner City Posse , which was active under this name from to ICP debuted their new name and image in The act was originally a group of four members, but quickly became a 3-piece act when Kid Villain John Rode left and eventually became a duo in , after original member John Kickjazz John Utsler left the group in and his replacement, Gummy-E Erik Olson , quit the music industry after leaving the group.
ICP's debut concept album Carnival of Exciting Events marked the debut of the act's Dark Carnival mythology, which carried over a series of three decks of "Joker's cards," the first deck being produced from to , and the second deck starting in with Bang!
The first two decks consist of six cards each, while the third deck will consist of five cards. In recent years, ICP has walked through doors that were previously closed to them. And we can go pretty much wherever we want. That makeup never gets old. Still, not all is rosy in the world of ICP. The departure came after J found out Garcia was secretly dating his niece.
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