I've been eternally amused since my fellow comrades at r/CTH expressed surprise learning about a subset of Juggalos abandoning the March on Washington (to protest and eventually overturn the FBI gang designation of our family) to march with the Black Lives Matter protestors. If that was you, you shouldn't have been surprised.
But it's not your fault, we're for everybody down and out, against everybody rich and cruel. But we're for each other first, it makes it hard to see past the culture, the language and the undeniably problematic misogyny in much of the first half of ICP's body of work. Most of us were outcasts before we found each other so we embraced the abrasive and so we tend to embody the concept of "fuck your optics."
I've collected a few lil links here in case you don't remember or were never aware of the event I'm talking about. I recommend you read them and look for the inherent class consciousness in our subculture. Read the reportage of the testimony of a woman who had her children taken away by the state simply for being a fan of a band. Read about the difficulty in keeping our scene alive and appreciate the work that our people put in to keep us together. Juggalos practically have their own economy now, there are people who survive entirely off serving up fresh shit to each other within the culture. It might not be a classic dual power structure but it's pretty fucking nice.
Unfortunately, we've entered an era where all the old subcultures are picked over like corpses under vultures. There continue to be foul human beings passing themselves off as Juggalos and predators in the scene (like any music scene) with narcissistic and sociopathic tendancies to seek and find small pockets of power for themselves to predate within. Family remains the best analogy for what we are. You can probably relate, most families have creepy uncles and ignorant cousins and yes, sadly, narcissistic parent figures.
Younger Juggalo-identifying-people now (and forever, I suppose) are often "trying on the costume" while they figure out their identities. Where people used to phase in and out of a scene, often now people are picking and choosing pieces of their identities from the limited selection of organic subcultures that formed before we reached the later stages of capitalism, alienation goes further than just that of the worker and their labor's value.
The internet has been an accelerant poured on this situation, both driving us further away from organic human connection and making it easier to pick and choose what you take from each scene as a whole, equally it promotes self-promotion and the creation new "unique" personas often created like a patchwork quilt from the most convenient, low effort and high-vibe bits and pieces of something that used to promote solidarity and a degree of conformity that enabled a group to self-police.
A quote from the second article above, reminds me of this state of affairs:
I asked her why Juggalos shock people if they actually operate as a friendly community. She exhaled. “People don’t do that anymore,” she lamented. “There’s no human connection in people anymore.”
If you're a Juggalo reading this, hell even if you're not, let me politely remind you of the rant in Jumpsteady's track Mad Mad World, which I've just posted in the music community w/ lyrics:
Yo Juggalos
It's a mad, mad world out there, ya'll
We gotta stick together cause we family
You see a fellow juggalo out there about to throw down or fight or something?
That's you
That's your fight
Cause we like that, yo
We together
Unity means strength
We can handle anything in this fucked up world
Anything at all, ya'll
Squall
We Juggalos
I think we can all benefit from this message.
I suppose I wrote this because I'm not going to make excuses for the shitty behaviour from some people calling themselves juggalos. I don't claim them even if I recognise them.
And I posted it here because I've lost a lot of my juggalo fam connections due to some straight up snake behaviour in the spaces that helped keep me from offing myself. So instead you guys get to read about it. Thank you for your time.
And for the few of you juggalos, struggalos and thuggalos reading this, whoop whoop MMFWCL stay up. Stay fucking cool. Be ready. If you have a crew you have an affinity group: get to work.
