“Do you know who Color Me Badd is?” he asks in his sleepy-bulldog voice, a lit blunt jutting from his mouth. “They were the shit. We did a song with their lead singer.” He cues up 2007’s “Truth Dare,” a thumping, midtempo number that sounds a bit like a nursery rhyme sing-along, complete with playground taunts:

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. He tends to be more voluble than Bruce, who’s pausing the song every few seconds, explaining how he paid Bryan Abrams—the R&B smoothie behind such ’90s hits as “I Wanna Sex You Up”—a mere $10,000 to guest on the track. 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). “Our shit is definitely male-oriented,” Bruce says.

The ICP aesthetic is a below-brow mix of Tales from the Crypt comics gore and puerile shock-jockery. 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. But by the early ’00s, with Eminem and Saw-style torture-porn movies making millions, ICP’s face-painted crudity no longer seemed outrè9. 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.” In the clip, Bruce and Utsler, dressed all in white, cavort in front of a series of epic, if poorly done greenscreen backdrops—the pyramids, outer space, a giant telescope. 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. The song’s best-known lines appear just shy of the two-minute mark: Water, fire, air, and dirt / Fuckin’ magnets—how do they work? The clip was an immediate web sensation, mocked on Videogum and Gawker, lampooned in The New York Times, and eventually spoofed on Saturday Night Live. 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 1992 ICP song, “The Juggla”). While most of us happily ignored ICP, the Juggalos embraced the band’s outsider status, helping albums like 2009’s Bang! Pow! Boom! debut at number four on the Billboard charts. 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. A recent Nightline segment estimated that Psychopathic has revenue of $10 million a year, and while Bruce disputes the figure, he owns four homes in Detroit and has already saved up enough to pay the college tabs for his two kids, ages 3 and 5.

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Authors: Brian Raftery

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