And may all juggalos find him

We’re not sorry if we tricked you.

The news shook the juggalo community to its core. While some fans claimed they’d actually had an inkling, having deciphered some of the hidden messages in several songs, others said they felt deeply betrayed and outraged: They’d been innocently enjoying all those songs about chopping people up and shooting women, and it was Christian rock?

Violent J explained himself unapologetically to a New Jersey newspaper: “You have to speak their language. You have to interest them, gain their trust, talk to them, and show you’re one of them. You’re a person from the street and you speak of your experiences. Then at the end you can tell them: God has helped me.”

Of course, one might argue that twenty years was, under the circumstances, an incredibly long time for them to have pretended to be unholy, and that, from a religious perspective, the harm they did while feigning unholiness may even have outweighed the greater good.

I’ve come to Milwaukee because ICP have just released their most audacious spiritualist song to date: “Miracles.” In it, they list God’s wonders that delight them each day:

Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,

Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogs

. . . Fuckin’ rainbows after it rains

There’s enough miracles here to

blow your brains.

The song climaxes with them railing against the very concept of science:

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?

And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist

Y’all motherfuckers lying and

getting me pissed.

Ten p.m. Upstairs, thousands of juggalos are getting drunk in readiness for the show. The atmosphere is riotous and exciting. ICP have a gimmick of throwing gallons of cheap fizzy soda into the crowd, and many juggalos are crushed into the barrier in the expectation of getting soaked and sticky. Backstage, ICP arrive to meet me. They’re wearing their full clown makeup—they refuse to meet journalists without it—and are immediately delightful. They smoke, but considerately blow the smoke away from my face. “Oh, I’m sorry, let me put that out. That’s some bullshit on my part,” says Shaggy 2 Dope when he sees me flinch slightly away from it.

But they also seem melancholy and preoccupied with the negative critical response to “Miracles.” Saturday Night Live just parodied it (“Fuckin’ blankets, how do they work?”), and the Internet is filled with amused and sometimes outraged science bloggers dissecting the lyrics. Violent J and Shaggy have been watching them, they tell me, feeling increasingly saddened and irate.

“A college professor took two days out of her fucking life to specifically attack us,” says Violent J. “Oh yeah, she had it all figured out.”

One of the ICP road crew locates the video on his iPhone, and it is indeed withering: “The [‘Miracles’] video is not only dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things.”

“Fuck you, man,” says Violent J. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Did you anticipate this kind of reaction?” I ask them.

“No,” sighs Violent J. “I figured most people would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.’ But instead it’s ‘ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.’” He pauses, then adds defiantly, “A giraffe is a fucking miracle. It has a dinosaur-like neck. It’s yellow. Yeah, technically an elephant is not a miracle. Technically. They’ve been here for hundreds of years. . . .”

“Thousands,” murmurs Shaggy.

“Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?” asks Violent J. “A fucking elephant is a miracle. If people can’t see a fucking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fucking miracle. So is a giraffe.”

We watch the video for another few seconds: “It becomes apparent that Shaggy and J consider any understanding of the actual workings of these ‘miracles’ to be corrosive. To them, knowledge is seen as a threat. . . . For ICP a true understanding of ‘fucking rainbows’ would reduce them to, as Keats put it, ‘the dull catalogue of common things.’”

Violent J shakes his head sorrowfully. “Who looks at the stars at night and says, ‘Oh, those are gaseous forms of plutonium?’” he says. “No! You look at the stars and you think, ‘Those are beautiful.’”

Suddenly he glances at me. The woman in the video is bespectacled and nerdy. I am bespectacled and nerdy. Might I have a similar motive?

“I don’t know how magnets work,” I say, to put him at his ease.

“Nobody does, man!” he replies, relieved. “Magnetic force, man. What else is similar to that on this earth? Nothing! Magnetic force is fascinating to us. It’s right there, in your fucking face. You can feel it pulling. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t touch it. But there’s a fucking force there. That’s cool!”

Shaggy says the idea for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment.

“Gravity’s cool,” Violent J says, “but not as cool as magnets.”

“I did think,” I admit, “that fog constitutes quite a low threshold for miracles.”

“Fog?” Violent J says, surprised.

“Well,” I clarify, “I’ve lived around fog my whole life, so maybe I’m blasé.”

“Fog, to me, is awesome,” he replies. “Do you know why? Because I look at my five-year-old son and I’m explaining to him what fog is and he thinks it’s incredible.”

“Ah!” I gesticulate. “If you’re explaining to your five-year-old son what fog is, then why do you not want to meet scientists? Because they’re just like you, explaining things to people. . . .”

“Well,” Violent J says, “science is . . . we don’t really . . . that’s like . . .” He pauses. Then he waves his hands as if to say, “OK, an analogy: If you’re trying to fuck a girl, but her mom’s home, fuck her mom! You understand? You want to fuck the girl, but her mom’s home? Fuck the mom. See?”

I look blankly at him. “You mean . . .”

“Now, you don’t really feel that way,” Violent J says. “You don’t really hate her mom. But for this moment when you’re trying to fuck this girl, fuck her! And that’s what we mean when we say fuck scientists. Sometimes they kill all the cool mysteries away. When I was a kid, they couldn’t tell you how pyramids were made. . . .”

“Like Stonehenge and Easter Island,” says Shaggy. “Nobody knows how that shit got there.”

“But since then, scientists go, ‘I’ve got an explanation for that.’ It’s, like, fuck you! I like to believe it was something out of this world.”

Violent J’s real name is Joseph Bruce, Shaggy’s is Joseph Utsler. They’re in their late thirties. Their career, while at times truly glittering, is littered with inadvertent mistakes. Born and raised in Christian homes in Detroit, they’ve known each other since high school. “We were dirt poor,” Shaggy says. “You can’t get no poorer. Fighting, food stamps, I was a fucking thief for a living, hustling, getting money, we were balls-deep in that shit.”

Their first band, Inner City Posse, was without clown makeup. They were gangster rappers, and consequently found themselves behaving in a gangster-like manner. In 1989, Violent J was jailed for ninety days for death threats, robbery, and violating probation. When he got out, he and Shaggy made some life-defining decisions. How could they keep their rap career going but move away from the destructive gang lifestyle? How could they change the band’s name but keep the initials ICP? People liked the initials ICP.

And then it came to them in a flash: Insane Clown Posse! Killer clown rap! It was the perfect outlet for their emotions. Write about the pain and the anger through the prism of horror-movie imagery. A whole new genre.