“We had to work our ass off from the ground up,” Violent J says. “We don’t get radio play. We don’t get video play. We get nothing. This is our video play. . . .” He indicates the dressing room. “Being on the road. We didn’t have no Jay-Z telling everyone, ‘Hey, look at these guys, we’re friends with them, listen to them.’ To this day, we don’t get that.”

This aspect of things might have turned out rather differently had Violent J not made their first big error. It was 1997. Insane Clown Posse were enjoying an early flush of success—their albums Riddle Box and The Great Milenko had sold a million copies. One night they were in a club when a young man handed them a flyer inviting them to a party. The flyer read: “Featuring appearances by Esham, Kid Rock, and ICP (maybe).”

“What are you saying? We’re going to be playing at your party when you haven’t asked us?” Violent J yelled at the boy.

“It says ‘maybe,’” he said. “Maybe you will be there. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you right now. Are you guys coming to my party or what?”

“Fuck no,” Violent J replied. “We might have, if you’d asked us first, before putting us on the fucking flyer.”

That boy grew up to be Eminem and, incensed, he’s been publicly deriding ICP ever since in lyrics such as “ICP are overrated and hated because of their false identities.”

An observation that turned out to be prophetic.

“From the very beginning of our music, God is in there,” Violent J says, “in hidden messages.”

“Can you give me some examples?” I ask.

There’s a small silence. He looks torn between revealing them and maintaining the mystery. He shoots Shaggy a glance.

“The ‘Riddle Box,’” he finally says.

“Hey, what’s up, motherfucker

This is Shaggs 2 Dope

Congratulating you on opening the box

The Riddlebox

It looks like you received your prize

The cost, what it cost, was your ASS,

bitchboy!

Hahahahah!”

(“Riddle Box,” 1995)

“If you died today, God forbid, if you were hit by a car and you had to turn the crank to your own riddle box, what would pop out?” Violent J peers at me. “Would it be God, or would it be the Devil? Only you truly know the answer to your own riddle box. We’re asking the listener, what is in your own riddle box if you were to die today?”

“Cos you can’t lie to yourself, man,” says Shaggy.

“Only you know the answer to that riddle,” Violent J says. “And then there’s the Ringmaster. In the Ringmaster, we say when you die you have to face your own beast. Somebody who has lived a life of religion, they face a very small and weak beast when they die. But somebody who’s an evil bastard will have to face a monster. The question is, how big is your ringmaster? If, God forbid, you were hit by a car. Ask yourself, Jon.” Violent J looks me in the eye. “How big is your ringmaster?”

“How come it took you so long to make the announcement?” I ask.

“You had to gain everybody’s attention,” says Violent J. “You had to gain the entire world’s trust and attention.”

“So all those unpleasant characters in the songs,” I ask, “like the narrator in ‘I Stuck Her With My Wang,’ they’re examples of people you shouldn’t be?”

“Huh?” Violent J says.

“Well, it’s very unpleasant,” I say. “‘I stuck her with my wang. / She hit me in the balls. / I grabbed her by her neck. / And I bounced her off the walls. / She said it was an accident and then apologized. / But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.’ That’s clearly a song about domestic violence. So your Christian message is . . . don’t be like that man?”

“Huh?” Violent J repeats, mystified.

There’s a silence.

“‘I Stuck Her With My Wang’ is funny,” Violent J says. “Jokes. Jokes, man. Jokes. Jokes. Jokes. It’s just a ridiculous scenario. Silly stories, man. Silly stories. What’s she doing kicking him in the balls? We find it funny. But we’re saying, while we’re close, while we’re hanging, hey, man, do you ever ask yourself what’s in your riddle box? If you had to turn the crank today?”

“But still, given that you were secretly Christian, are there any lyrics you now regret?”

There’s a silence. “Yeah,” Violent J says quietly.

“Which ones?”

“Dumb, stupid, idiotic lyrics that I said without knowing any better. Back in the day.”

“Like what?”

“I really don’t want to say. There’s one lyric . . .” He trails off, suddenly looking really sad beneath the clown makeup. “Just dumb lyrics. I said one lyric one time that I hate. I may have been feeling really down that day. I said something, I live with that every day. I don’t want to point it out.”

I later do a search and find it difficult to pinpoint exactly which lyric he may be referring to. It just might, I suppose, be “I took aim at a stray dog, / and I blew out its brains, it was fresh as hell . . . no feelings for others, you gotta be cold.”

Violent J says releasing “Thy Unveiling,” coming out as religious, was the most exciting moment of his life. “It felt so good, brother. I was fucking in heaven. Let me tell you something: I would go running at night, and my feet wouldn’t even touch the ground. I had my headphones on, I’d be listening to ‘Thy Unveiling,’ and I’d be in such a zone that my feet wouldn’t even be touching the ground. I’d be literally levitating.”

He was worried, of course, about the reaction from the juggalos, and, sure enough, “the emotional impact shook the whole juggalo foundation, for good and for ill,” Violent J says.

“What did the juggalos who were opposed to it say?” I ask.

“They said, ‘Fuck that,’” says Shaggy.

“But the juggalos and juggalettes who were for it were so touched,” Violent J says. “They said they loved us.”

And then the reviews came in.

Blender magazine, in its list of the fifty worst artists in music history, called ICP the very worst of all: “Insane Clown Posse sound even stupider than they look. Two trailer-trash types who wear face paint, pretend to be a street gang and drench cult devotees in cheap soda called Faygo, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are more notorious for their beef with Eminem than their ham-fisted rap-rock music.” And their nadir, Blender said, the worst musical moment from the worst band ever, is The Wraith: Shangri-La, the album that climaxes with “Thy Unveiling.”

I suddenly wonder, halfway through our interview, if I am looking at two men in clown makeup who are suffering from depression. I cautiously ask them this and Violent J immediately replies. “I’m medicated,” he says. “I have a lot of medicine that I take. For depression. Panic attacks are really a serious part of my life.” He points at Shaggy. “He’s gone through some things as well.”

“You do a show in front of how many hundreds or thousands of people.” Shaggy nods. “You’re giving your full being, your soul, to every person in that crowd, every pore in your body is sweating, you’re fighting consciousness, just to get it out of you, and after the show all your fans are partying, ‘Yeah! Rock and roll!’ And you’re just here.” He glances around the dressing room. “You’re just fucking sitting here.”

Violent J turns to him and says, softly, “If we moved furniture for a living, we’d have a bad back or bad knees. We think for a living. We try to create. We try to constantly think of cool ideas. And every once in a while there’s a breakdown in the engine. . . . I guess that’s the price you pay.”

Shaggy nods quietly. “I get anxiety and shit a lot,” he says. “And reading that stuff people write about us . . . It hurts.”

“Least talented band in the world,” Violent J says. “No talent. When I hear that, I think, ‘Damn. Are we that different from people?’”

He looks as if he means it—as if he sometimes feels hopelessly stuck being him.

It’s just a terrible twist of fate for Insane Clown Posse that theirs is a form of creative expression that millions of people find ridiculous. But then suddenly, palpably, Violent J pulls himself out of his introspection. They’re about to go onstage and he doesn’t want to be maudlin. He wants to be on the offensive. He shoots me a defiant look and says, “You know ‘Miracles’? Let me tell you, if Alanis Morissette had done that fucking song, everyone would have called it fucking genius.”