When was icp popular

The departure came after J found out Garcia was secretly dating his niece. Like, hot tears shooting out of my eyes. The Fred Fury character is the personification of regret; fighting back and taking control of your destiny is a major theme of the album.

Violent J canceled a solo tour last month to continue to tinker with the album; Shaggy, born Joe Utsler, is currently on a solo tour. This is the best we got. But the hunger for new experiences, both career- and life-wise, continues to push ICP forward.

What we feared our whole life is actually the best," he says. AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age.

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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 ICP song, "The Juggla". While most of us happily ignored ICP, the Juggalos embraced the band's outsider status, helping albums like 's Bang! 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. The uproar over "Miracles" only increased the devotion of ICP's fans. The group long ago developed a sort of symbiotic relationship with the outside world: The more Bruce and Utsler are shunted to the margins—whether by critics, labels, or kvetchy bloggers—the more their outcast fans love them.

While the record industry has haplessly searched for a new business model, Insane Clown Posse has built a veritable empire. Many of ICP's wisest moves were things that once looked like career killers: hanging out with fans while snubbing industry types, starting a niche music festival in the middle of nowhere, and, in Bruce's case, writing a lengthy, soul-baring memoir filled with unpleasant details called Behind the Paint.

Long before MySpace and Twitter allowed artists to communicate quasi intimately with their fan base and "transparency" had become a marketing strategy, ICP had already erased the barrier between performer and audience.

In doing so, Bruce and Utsler discovered a formula for success in the Internet age that the larger music world is only now waking up to: Build close relationships with fans, develop ancillary profit streams, keep production and promotion costs down, turn every concert and album into an event even if that requires industrial soda sprayers , and, most of all, do everything yourself.

Bruce and Utsler, in other words, have become two bona fide 21st-century music magnates. Psychopathic Records' headquarters is located in an industrial suburban neighborhood just off Detroit's Nine Mile Road , surrounded by strip malls, warehouses, and a Montessori school. The interior looks like a late -'70s porn set—deep blue wall-to-wall carpeting, chocolate brown decor, a minimum of natural light—and the hallways are covered with posters and cardboard cutouts featuring other ICP acts, each with its own backstory and aesthetic, from serial-killer rap Twiztid to gangsta- zombie rap Blaze Ya Dead Homie to southern-gothic rap Boondox.

On the afternoon I arrive, Bruce gives me a tour of the facilities dressed in a red jersey, denim shorts, and a thick necklace featuring the Hatchetman, the group's cleaver-wielding logo.

Without the clown makeup, his facial scruff and sunken eyes are more pronounced. ICP has had little contact with the corporate music world since it set up this nerve center. With the exception of physical distribution, everything's done in-house by a staff of about 30 full-time employees. There's the 6,square-foot warehouse; an Internet-radio station, W-FUCKOFF; a recording studio; and a setup for video shoots and concert rehearsals all of the resources are shared by the Psychopathic roster, which consists of more than a dozen artists on two labels.

A second warehouse, located just a short drive away, manufactures hats, belts, shirts, stickers, onesies, and all manner of other gear, though half the building will soon be turned over to a new wrestling school Bruce and Utsler are cofounding. Perhaps the biggest surprise in Psychopathic HQ is the number of gold and platinum albums hanging on the walls. Even in the era of illegal downloads, ICP's fans still buy physical discs, which are stacked around the warehouse.

This is partly because the CD packages are jammed with swag, like 3-D glasses and decoding devices. But it's also because ICP has made its albums must-haves for fans by weaving everything from the lyrics to the liner notes into a sprawling, wiki-ready supernatural epic called the Dark Carnival.

It's like the Lost universe, only with organ music and evil jugglers. A convoluted morality tale that purports to document and punish mankind's basest desires, the Dark Carnival forms the crux of ICP's comic book mythology.

Its origins can be traced to an incident that befell Bruce in the early '90s, a story he relates in Behind the Paint. According to Bruce, who says he's experienced several otherworldly visions in his life, a "dark shadow" appeared in the hall outside his room one night.

After dropping a series of cards, the figure transported Bruce to a late-night carnival. Inspired by the encounter, ICP announced it would release six "Joker's Card" albums, each one spotlighting a different carnival character. For newcomers, divining the specifics of the Dark Carnival plot can be tricky: The music rarely strays from ICP's worn formula of righteous violence and sixth-grade sex brags, and whatever plot points these songs contain are either dog-whistle faint or nonexistent. Yet the Carnival's inscrutability has only drawn fans deeper, and its long-form arc was seemingly made for the Internet, where Juggalos devote entire websites to the Dark Carnival, looking for clues in ICP's steady stream of blog posts.

Whether one sees the Carnival as a feat of protost-century storytelling or simply a long-con gimmick—in truth it's probably both—it's proven to be an inexhaustible franchise. Not surprisingly, after the first series of cards was exhausted—a process that took six albums and 10 years—ICP announced the beginning of a second Joker's Deck.

For those who'd been paying attention to the Dark Carnival all along, the thinly veiled spirituality of "Miracles" made perfect sense.

What do we want to say? We wanna say, 'Go to heaven. Don't fuck up. The more Utsler left and Bruce are shunted to the margins, the more their misfit fans love them. Photo: Brent Humphreys.

To get an idea of what Juggalo heaven would look like, you must burrow through deep woods to an isolated campground at Cave-In Rock, an aptly named village near the Illinois-Kentucky border. After several long, desolate stretches of road, all tethers to the outside world start to break away: Cell phone bars shrivel to mere nubs, like an unfinished game of hangman.

Luckily, to find the Gathering of the Juggalos, all you need to do is listen for the whoops. They can be heard from the edges of the campsite and come in three varieties:. It usually denotes a special occasion, such as a Psychopathic artist walking through the crowd or a woman removing her top. Despite the constant auditory stimuli, the Gathering is, in some ways, aggressively mellow.