It's easy to laugh, every white person
knows this. It's easy to pick one
of your number, fat, fag, or worse,
out in public with a hatchetman
on your chest. I had my own problems
and let yours go by unaddressed.
If the first religious experience I had
was in church, the second was listening
to music. You know that feeling, beat
thrumming through your chest the way
trumpets blasted Jericho, the wall crashing
to the base of your oversized speaker
the idea of yourself as a kid alone
in the world. You were right to build
surrogate families, to identify
as a unit unable to live without the love
of others in your unit. How else
can you survive, middle class gazing
at you like the mess a dog makes
on a white couch in a home
in a gated community? Nobody listens
to the music I liked anymore, except
to feel embarrassed about their past,
except to reassure themselves, yes,
the culture they like now is good. The culture          
you like is good. The culture you like
is driven into the woods and subject
to the documentarian's lens, the author's
book, this poem. O, poor white boys,
those now on meth and those radicalizing
while the kids who beat you cotton
to Mumford & Sons, the culture
you like is good. Fuck culture, you
are good, your wounds beautiful,
shouldered though few believe them
real. You are good. You are good.

__

As a working class kid living in what was still very much a factory town in the 1990s, I'm surprised I didn't know more Insane Clown Posse fans than the one or two I knew, but they wore the labels of their fandom with the kind of pride I find worrisome today and, back then, found embarrassing. White kids in Detroit had a lot going for them musically in the late 90s, as long as you didn't have taste, and while Eminem's self-martyrdom (have you ever been hated or discriminated against? I have), Kid Rock's lack of talent and questionable hillbilly pedigree, and Jack White's long metamorphosis into a living Tim Burton character have all embarrassed me to some degree as an adult, Juggalos have been living with that embarrassment for as long as there have been Juggalos.

Since ICP got dropped from Disney-subsidiary Hollywood Records in the early 90s, Juggalos have lived with an us versus the world mentality that the world has been extremely happy to meet them on.  The one Juggalo I was friends with got into more fights than anyone I knew, most of them on the defensive. As a queer kid who got pretty good at fighting as a result of being a queer kid, I saw a lot of myself in that—I just hated the music. It's been weird seeing a subculture I grew up around blow up into an internet meme, be labeled a gang by the FBI, and become a thing timid hipsters gawk at because they hear the words “drug bridge” and think they're going to white trash Cochella, but they've been in the back of my consciousness for awhile as a result, existing as a kind of proto-chosen family well before I built one of my own. So here they are.