When I search YouTube to listen to “Tear It Up,” the 7th track on Macho Man Randy Savage’s debut rap album, the second option is an offering from user Brainsaw2000. It’s entitled, “Macho Man Randy Savage & ICP Insane Clown Posse - Tear It Up.” As you might expect, it inexpertly mashes “Tear It Up” with an unnamed ICP track.1
I briefly mentioned ICP in a footnote for a previous entry in this series as part of the strange white male rap/rock fusion artists coming out of Southeast Michigan in the late 90s/early 2000s. Since Macho’s “Tear It Up” opens with, “Wow, I like this, a little hip-hop mixed with a little bit of Rock n' Roll,” I thought we could dive back into this era to linger a moment on the phenomenon which is Insane Clown Posse.
I don’t know a ton about ICP, and frankly, I don’t want to spend several hours researching only to find there is way less to them than I thought. The point I think I want to make relies on how I remember them, their myth.
From what I remember, ICP’s musical chops are closer to Kid Rock than Eminem, but the leg they have up on both artists is their commitment to a world-building bit. ICP’s Dark Carnival aesthetic—the face paint, the midway tunes in their songs, their misogyny—was a perfect fit for the late 90s. The band’s surface-level rhetoric was tuned precisely to intimidate the olds and attract lonely, malleable preteens. I had no musical obsessions as a child, but if I did, ICP may have been the one.
Today, what interests me about ICP is that, like professional wrestling, there may be more to them than meets the eye. Their world-building is also community-building, and the thing you hear again and again about this community is how surprisingly inclusive and chill it is. You hear how ostracized, lonely people are welcomed, regardless of background or appearance. You hear how their yearly festival, The Gathering of The Juggalos, is much closer to the Woodstock archetype of peace and free love than the original ever was. Whether that’s reality or marketing matters less to my point than why I want it to be true.
I worry sometimes that I oversell the art in professional wrestling because my subconscious wants to justify the fact that I consider myself a good, smart person who nonetheless loves a thing that’s very obviously lowbrow, bad, and dangerous. I worry that the real reason I like it is because at the height of its popularity, I was a 10-year-old boy in the crosshairs of dick measuring contest between two media billionaires. I want pro wrestling to be deeper than that, and I truly believe it is, but am I fooling myself?
Right now, I can remember the lyrics to two Insane Clown Posse songs. One of them is “Miracles,” which achieved meme status in the early two thousand teens internet with the line, “Water, fire, air, and dirt. / Fucking magnets—how do they work?” The song isn’t good, and the line is silly, and made all the sillier with the screenshot of Shaggy 2 Dope from the music video throwing up his hands and looking truly baffled. I think this song became a meme not just because millennials who remembered the relevant episode of Bill Nye wanted to drag a couple of clowns. I think folks were amused, and maybe a little touched, by the track’s sincerity as delivered by two aging white rappers in ridiculous makeup. Violent J and Shaggy express authentic wonder and appreciation in the song. They marvel at nature’s miracles but also the miracle of their community and their success. And, I’m sorry, but there’s some truth to this. Science cannot explain why these two became famous.
Of course, “Miracles” hits different in 2024. The line directly after the famous meme goes, “And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist. / Y’all motherfuckers lyin’ and gettin’ me pissed.” Easy to laugh off as a 22-year-old in 2010. Not so much after negotiating friends and family’s vaccine skepticism during a pandemic.
The second ICP song I actually remember is “The Neden Game,” a take off “The Dating Game” done Juggalo style that includes the line, “I’m steady staring at your sister. I’ll tell you this. / You know for only thirteen she got some big tits.” Again, funny and edgy when listening as a 13-year-old boy…decidedly less so a couple of decades later.
For a long time, I’ve half-jokingly told friends that I’ve wanted to attend The Gathering. I think the people-watching would be out-of-the-world fantastic. I want to see this community for myself close-up and discover how it is and isn’t like its myth. I don’t go because these reasons feel exploitative and icky to me. I’m not a part of this community, and I have no intent to join. If there is any good to the Juggalos, my voyeurism isn’t going to help them. Of course, I type all that, but the real reason why I don’t go is the reason I don’t do so many of the things I think about doing. I’m a huge coward.
What’s the point in searching for an ICP silver lining? Why do I want to believe that a community anchored by this music could somehow be a not-so-terrible one for young people, for young women? Another thing I know about ICP without Googling is that they are deep into professional wrestling. Wrestling is a mainstay at The Gathering of the Juggalos. Violent J and Shaggy were all over WWE and WCW TV in the late-90s/early aughts heyday. They even had their own promotion, JCW, Juggalo Championship Wrestling. To most, the overlap is not all surprising. It’s not difficult to imagine the type of person who would have the time of his life during a long weekend in rural Ohio watching a JCW hardcore deathmatch on one stage followed by a Miss Juggalette wet t-shirt contest on another. I have to reckon with the fact that I may not be that guy, but like ICP and pro wrestling, there’s definitely an overlap.
Macho Man Randy Savage is probably one of the best wrestlers and one of the worst rappers of all time. Insane Clown Posse had far more success in the squared circle than Randy did in the studio. “Tear It Up” is a bad song and not worth talking about. But as YouTube user Brainsaw no doubt understands, gravity pulls these two together. I can’t pretend otherwise.
1 out of 5 psychopathic deranged crackhead freaks who work for the Dark Carnival
As I’m writing this, the video has 498 views in its 5 months on YouTube. As I’m editing this post some months later, the original video is no longer on Brainsaw2000’s channel, but they have reposted it. To hear it at press time, your best bet is to visit Brainsaw2000’s channel and see if it’s there.