A(nother) Year Without a Gathering of the Juggalos
For several exceedingly strange years I was professionally and morally obligated to attend the Gathering of the Juggalos, Insane Clown Posse’s notorious annual festival of arts and culture.
That’s because I was researching Insane Clown Posse, its elaborately wrought mythology and the Gathering of the Juggalos for my 2013 book You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me.
At that point I could have retired from the Juggalo world with what little was left of my dignity. But I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Juggalos or Insane Clown Posse. I was hooked. I wasn’t just a journalist anymore. I’m not sure I was ever REALLY a journalist in the first place, rather than just a lost soul in desperate need of escape, belonging and a sense of community.
So in the DECADE following the release of You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me I’ve tried to get back to the Gathering as often as I can. I’d love to go every year but life, that awful, awful existence-ruiner, has repeatedly and frustratingly gotten in the way.
As one of the world’s preeminent experts on Juggalos and the author of a book about Insane Clown Posse’s fans that got four stars in Rolling Stone and made the magazine’s list of the top 20 best music books of the year you might think it would be easy for me to snag a lucrative, high-profile assignment to cover the Gathering of the Juggalos every year.
You would be wrong! You would be EXTREMELY wrong! For over a decade and I have had to scramble madly to try to interest people in me writing up the Gathering of the Juggalos with only scattered success.
I get the sense that the big publications of the world are interested in Juggalos and Insane Clown Posse in theory, and that they like outrageous photographs of Juggalos being Juggalos but they do not want to pay someone to write a three thousand word article about the Gathering that takes it and its inhabitants seriously.
The public is curious about Juggalos but that curiosity is not insatiable or limitless. I have discovered the limits of that curiosity over and over again when I would pitch the Gathering to places I freelanced for, or wanted to freelance for, and get chilly, brief emails explaining that ICP coverage was just not right for them.
Truth be told, there aren’t a lot of places for whom Gathering of the Juggalos coverage does make sense. Also, Insane Clown Posse have been together for over three decades so they and much of their fanbase are old and familiar and pop culture media loves the shock of the new. In 2023, however Insane Clown Posse are no longer considered new OR shocking.
I covered the 20th Gathering of the Juggalos for this site in 2019 and while I enjoyed the experience it was also exhausting and expensive and I can’t afford that kind of cost at this point in my life.
It takes a lot of energy, ambition and resilience to make it to the Gathering of the Juggalos every year when the world no longer seems particularly interested in the clowns or their antics.
I don’t have that energy, ambition or resilience right now. The prospect of lugging my aging, depressed, lethargic and anemic (it’s true! I don’t just SEEM anemic in my writing, I literally have the medical condition as well!) to a small town in Ohio and spending a fortune on Lyfts or Uber rides so I can see a bunch of rappers that peaked during Clinton’s first term is not as appealing as it once was.
It’s funny, I launched a Substack with the only half-ironic title Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas earlier this year but going to the Gathering as a broke, depressed, exhausted and dispirited middle aged man seems like too bad of an idea even for a newsletter with Bad Idea in its title.
I could very well have attended my final Gathering of the Juggalos. There’s something unmistakably melancholy about that, because I used to look forward to the Gathering of the Juggalos every year. It used to be my happy place but it’s increasingly something that I used to do and a world that I used to know.
That said, if someone wanted to pay me to cover the Gathering and I could make a solid profit in the process I would do so in a heartbeat but I just don’t have the moxie left to try to make it happen all on my own anymore.
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