Chris DeLine

In preparation for this year’s edition of the Gathering of the Juggalos, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope appeared on The Adam Carolla Show where the longtime radio personality went a little off-base in taking listeners through an in depth recap of the Insane Clown Posse‘s history. From the group’s birth in the suburbs of Detroit to their fallout with Disney to present day grinding, the interview offers some fantastic insight into the duo’s success and idiologies. They also discuss the Gathering of the Juggalos, which kicked off yesterday in Cave-in-Rock, Illinois. (For the brilliant two-part, hour-long 2011 Gathering of the Juggalos infomercial, click here.) Below is a selection of great quotes from the interview (the majority of which was led by Shaggy), which I’ve also transcribed for your reading pleasure.

On the group’s pro-wrestling aspirations:

“To be honest though, we kinda had a dream. I wish I could say it was to be rappers, but it wasn’t, we wanted to be pro-wrestlers. We had that dream, and it wasn’t just a dream, like, maybe. It was, like, that’s what we’re gonna do.”

On N.W.A.’s influence on their music and the birth of “I.C.P.”:

“When we started really getting into music, we started getting into N.W.A. and we heard Eazy-E with that high pitched voice, talking about Compton and blowing heads off and stuff like that. It was just more than awesome to us, it just overtook wrestling: we wanted that more. And one day we made the conscious decision that we were gonna now be rappers. We decided to go for that instead. And when that day came, first we were the Inner City Posse.”

How ICP first branched out from Detroit, and the key to creating a market outside your hometown:

“We knew we had Michigan on lock, so we threw a dart at a map and the dart landed on Dallas, Texas. So we drove – we spent our advanced money and we bought these three vans and we painted them up like our new album – and we drove to Dallas, Texas and we started promoting our assess off in Dallas, Texas. We didn’t know why we picked Dallas: that’s where the dart landed! But we started focusing on Dallas… Next thing we know we started putting the groundwork in Dallas, we lived there for three months. Every day, every high school in the city, at three o’clock we’d be at three different high schools – each van at a different high school. When the kids came out, hit em up with samplers… hittin’ up high schools, finding out where all the cars cruise up and down the strip, pull out our three vans and hand them out to all the cars cruising up and down the strip. Go to the titty bars, go in there and hand them to the DJs, whatever it took – three months of us and our whole crew bombarding Dallas – next thing we knew we had two cities: we had Detroit and we had Dallas.”

On fans and the importance of looking beyond criticism:

“…If you wanna review an ICP album: ask a Juggalo if it’s any good…”

After Adam Carolla discusses the similarities between a concert cellist and the Insane Clown Posse, Shaggy goes off on a tremendous speech about the importance of hustling and grinding in order to get what you want:

“You have to keep banging on these pots and pans. If you don’t, you won’t have their attention. They’ll stop lookin’ at you if you’re not makin’ no noise. If you’re not bangin’ on shit and sayin’: ‘Hey! We’re right here!’ There’s so much going on out there in the world that if you don’t bang on shit they’re gonna look away. They’re gonna look away, man. You better keep their attention. And then when you got their attention you better stand up and fuckin’ dance or do something that’s gonna keep their attention because, better believe that to the right of you and to the left of you there’s guys dancing all over the place doin’ impressive shit, man. You gotta hang with them…

You see that mountain out there? If you want to get to the top of that mountain you can sit here on the bottom and you can wait for a fuckin’ ski-lift that ain’t never comin’; you can wait for some superstar to come pick you up in a helicopter and fly you up to the top; you can wait for somebody to come lift you and carry you on their back, which ain’t ever gonna happen; or you can slowly but surely start walkin’ that muhfucker. It may be slow, it may hurt your feet, it may take forever, it may be not fun, it may suck! But eventually you will start to get up that muhfucker. Eventually you will turn around and say, ‘Wow! Look at how far we’ve came. We’ve been walkin’ so long that when I turn around and look behind me, we’ve made some groundwork!’… But that’s how you make it: You walk!… Think about it: Your destiny is in your hands. If you put it in your hands: How you gonna fuck up?”

A caller asks whether “Miracles” is comedy or serious; the answer is every bit as beautiful as you might expect it to be:

“I don’t see where the comedy would lie in there. It’s about things that are in this world, for deep thinkers, y’know, things that you live with every day that maybe you overlooked. Especially today with the Internet and shit. But, uh, things that are in this world, like, you know, I recently had kids and just seein’ things through their eyes for the first time you realize how cool some shit is, like lightning bugs: a fucking bug that lights its ass up like a light bulb. How can that not be cool?

The song ‘Miracles’ isn’t about religion or anything like that, it’s just about miracles that are on this Earth every day that maybe we forget to look at and realize how awesome they are. Like, fuckin’ fog. Like, come on man, you wake up one morning and you can’t even drive ’cause there’s a cloud in your city. This is pretty cool to me that that happens sometimes, it’s not the same fuckin’ thing every day. Sometimes it’s fuckin’ snow, sometimes it’s hot to death, sometimes it’s raining, sometimes there’s fog… just things like that, switchin’ things up on the Earth that are cool, that I think are miniature miracles.

When was the last time somebody went to the zoo and stood next to a fuckin’ giraffe? How you gonna tell me a giraffe ain’t a miracle? It’s got a fuckin’ dinosaur neck. (Carolla: Its tongue is insane.) Everything about a giraffe looks like a bad drawing, like a bad kid’s drawing. But it’s a real animal!

It’s kind of sad that we can make a song like that and have the whole nation make fun of us for it, or not get it. Y’know, it’s kind of sad that somehow that type of shit is so laughed at… To me if you can’t appreciate those miracles, that’s your bad. That sucks to be you. If you can stand at the beach in the middle of the night and look up and see all those stars with those waves rolling in over the ocean and not find that shit breathtaking, that sucks to be you, man.”

[This post was first published by Culture Bully.]