MY LIFE IN HORROR: KING KILLER BIG WHEELER CAT PEELER

Whereas Limp Bizkit feel like something the record industry dreamed up - ‘what if Rage Against The Machine but without all the messy politics?’ - ICP have remained absolutely committed to a bit that has been mercilessly mocked from the moment of inception onward

My Life In Horror


Every month, I will write about a film, album, book or event that I consider horror, and that had a warping effect on my young mind. You will discover my definition of what constitutes horror is both eclectic and elastic. Don’t write in. Also, of necessity, much of this will be bullshit – as in, my best recollection of things that happened anywhere from 15 – 40 years ago. Sometimes I will revisit the source material contemporaneously, further compounding the potential bullshit factor. Finally, intimate familiarity with the text is assumed – to put it bluntly, here be gigantic and comprehensive spoilers. Though in the vast majority of cases, I’d recommend doing yourself a favour and checking out the original material first anyway.


This is not history. This is not journalism. This is not a review.


This is my life in horror.


King Killer Big Wheeler Cat Peeler

So. The ghost is all over this one like a bad smell. It came out in ‘97, and I have no idea how he came by it - must have been through his Uni connections, I suppose - and I must have made a cassette copy, because I can picture the CD he had, and I didn’t have a CD player back then.


Anyway.


As previously discussed, ‘97 wasn’t a good year for me. ‘98 was worse; that was when the wheels actually fell off. But ‘97 was the guy with no chute halfway between the plane and the ground, saying ‘so far, so good’. My friend group and I are in the death trap house where we will play many hours of Werewolf (and I will play many hours of X-Com) and I aggressively ignore the fact that I'm failing college, and that merely having some level of talent at acting isn’t going to mean shit in a world where I simply can not get my arse out of bed with anything resembling a regular pattern.


So there’s a good chance that this was the first outright hip-hop album I ever owned. Rage Against The Machine had forcibly disabused me of the notion that rapping was a somehow inferior form of expression (‘they only talk because they can’t sing’ is something I almost certainly said at some point, because, yeah, I was that kind of ignorant dumbshit kid) but I still needed loud guitars to engage my gut before the rest of me would be willing to come along for the ride. And, sure, the Judgement Night soundtrack punched another hole in the armour; still, tho, we’re pairing hip-hop artists off with metal acts, so it’s not exactly taking me over the cliff. And, look, true, this record features Alice Cooper, Slash and (I literally learned ten minutes ago, thanks to a Google search) Steve fucking Jones guesting on various tracks. So maybe that makes it the perfect bridge.


Regardless, the fact remains; looking at the Public Enemy, NWA, Ghostface Killah, and yes, sure, Eminem CDs on my shelf, there’s a non-trivial chance none of them end up there if I hadn’t first been exposed to The Insane Clown Posse’s The Great Milenko.


How did it appeal to me? Let me count the ways. Let’s start with the intro - a skit that starts with rednecks in a bar, putting on a country record for ‘a shindig’, only for the record to slow, before bleeding into an Alice Cooper monologue that sets out the stall of who - what - The Great Milenko is. It’s pure horror hype bullshit (‘The unleashing of the fourth joker’s card! The Necromaster!’), and it might as well have been precision engineered for my late teen brain.


See, as we’ll probably cover in greater detail later as this series comes to a close, I was at this point notionally still in training as a student of magic. And an album that set up its protagonists as magicians (albeit clearly cartoonish, carney magicians) had a deep appeal. One phrase I’d been given to conjure with at this point (yeah, sorry about that) was ‘hiding in plain sight’, and I think it’s possible teenage me half-believed ICP might just be doing something like that; setting up the exaggerated sense of magical carnage to hide a kernel of Actual Real Shit. Which, not to jump ahead, but of course they were, though their particular kernel - Born Again Christianity - was something I’d already found wanting (if you want to know what was going on for me on that subject, I have to recommend my debut novel, honestly).


If fact, fuck it, let’s deal with this now; how on earth did nobody notice ICP were Born Again? Viewed through the lens of hindsight, it’s kind of embarrassingly obvious; for all that they dress the idea up in terms of Shangri La and Juggalos at a never-ending live show/party, it’s clear that the final song is about heaven and hell. ICP and everyone else with ‘clown love’ (carefully described as multiracial, plus redneck truck drivers, implying an interesting class distinction we may return to) having a good old post-death time, while the ‘greedy skank motherfuckers’ burn forever. Sure, ‘free money, and mad bitches non-stop’ doesn’t sound exactly Biblical… but for white trash hip hop heaven? Sure, why not?


And when you start looking at some of the other songs, it’s striking how many of them run as pretty straight-up morality plays. The obvious ground zero for this is Halls Of Illusions, where a Cypress Hill tinged beat bleeds into a shredding chorus from Slash, as a series of men are shown visions of their families living happy, pleasant lives, only to be dropped back into a violent, squalid reality, created by their misdeeds (before being slaughtered by our faithful narrator). But elsewhere, How Many Times? lays out a litany of modern misery about the human condition (with an admittedly off-beam dig at being taught science in school that feels like a precursor to their infamous ‘magnets? Fuckin how do they work?’ moment), and Under The Moon feels like an Old Testament rumination on the hollowness of violent revenge. Now, with that last, you might fairly ask how that squares with the rest of the gleeful horrorcore slaughter of nasty people; I’d answer that Under The Moon doesn’t feature any supernatural elements or characters, so it feels like a slice of ‘realism’, dropped in an album that is constantly swinging between genuine portrayals of deprivation and desperation alongside EC Comics level blood, guts, and humour. In other words, vengeance belongs to God (or at least, in the case of this album, God’s agent, The Great Milenko), not man. And Piggie Pie has a vengeful wolf taking out a series of worthy targets - a racist redneck, a sadistic judge, and in the final verse a very, very rich man. Yes, the album does equate obscene wealth with The Devil.


And I think that last begins to signpost how they got away with it.


Because I did find myself wondering, as a kid. The final one-two of Just Like That and Pass Me By clearly pointed at a belief in an afterlife predicated on your behaviour when alive. And though some of the subject matter of Pass Me By fits the same mold as their earlier celebrations of The (Juggalo) Life - Faygo root beer, women with a bit of meat on their bones who like shagging Clowns, hip-hop being awesome and Elvis sucking - there’s a shift in tone, both in the beat (which samples an evangelical preacher talking about ‘mansions above’ over an insistent piano) and in the voices of the performers. Throughout the album, Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J (yes, really, that’s what they’re called) have yelled, shrieked, snarled, voices constantly under some physical or emotional strain, an audible representation of Insane Clown energy… and in the last song, it all shifts, their tones lower, become calmer, working in an entirely human register. There’s a sincerity that comes from letting the act go… and sure, it’s in part an energy juxtaposition with the penultimate track, a man so frantically engaged in the concerns of the present that he doesn’t realise he’s hurtling towards his own end until it’s past him. But it felt like there was something more at play; like this was something that actually meant something to them, some deeper truth they actually believed in.


So, sure, I picked at it. But they disguised themselves so well.


Not so much with the misogyny or violence; even at that age, I’d known enough born agians to understand neither of those particular issues were seen as in any way a barrier to entry; especially as the violence was always either directed at ‘worthy’ targets, or presented as a symptom of poverty (though I remember having doubts even back then about the random claims that ICP had ever been involved in armed robbery - it seemed a bit ‘stolen valour’ then and seems even more so now). No, it was partly the class dimension, I think; the constant identification with the suffering of poverty, alongside a surprising willingness to blame rich people for the suffering, that felt very at odds with the materialism present so often elsewhere in Hip Hop. And the constant positive references to voodoo and ‘dark magic’ felt hard to square with even a relatively mild Christian doctrine.


But it was mainly because they seemed to hate evangelical preachers.


The track Hellaluja is a shotgun aimed right at the heart of prosperity gospel preaching. And throughout the song ICP aim, reload and fire over and over again. And they do not miss.


Their outrage is palpable, their fury audible with each spit lyric. The framing device for the song is a preacher delivering a cheesy healing ceremony, imploring the crowd to give ‘the first portion of their income’ before bringing on a disabled boy and promising that ‘for just $6000 we can heal this boy!’.  This skit interrupts the song at a couple of points, including at the end of the second verse with an absolutely outrageous phone call (‘people, that was the Lord! Today, he will heal this boy for just $5000!’) each interruption demonstrating the hypocrisy the verses excoriate. It’s the opposite of subtle, with ICP bringing a full-bore contempt for the subject that I found, and find, admirable.


We had a local born-again sect in the town I was living at the time, and they’d infrequently witnessed myself and my friends. I’d also had occasion while living in a halfway house for people at risk of homelessness to read some of their ‘literature’, left there by one of the residents, who was in a faith-based recovery from drugs and alcohol addiction. Of that read, I have retained only an emotional impression; a rising tide of incredulity and disgust, with an undercurrent of fear - just how crazy were these people, and how many of them were out there? The only concrete articles I can remember any detail of were both op-ed style pieces (though I suspect the whole magazine ran along similar lines), one explaining that capitalism could only work if it ran alongside a Christian society (which, erm, okay) and, I shit you not,  piece justifying private jets for preachers, on the basis that precious souls might be lost if said priest was too fatigued from an inferior form of travel to offer the correct words of spiritual comfort at the crucial moment.


Yeah, really.


So Hellaluja hit hard.


And, really, it kinda still does. It’s absolutely excoriating about spiritual conmen and the role they have to play in reinforcing poverty, by soliciting payments from those who can least afford it (the snarling bridge captures this best, with a menacing ‘pass the collection plate!’ cut alongside ‘Show me how you give, I’ll tell you how you live!’). And, knowing what I know now, it’s fascinating to revisit and realise the rage comes not from a generalised disdain for the religion as a whole, but rather the fury of a couple of believers at the commodification of faith for evil ends.


And look, here’s the thing; ICP are pretty much universally discussed and described in critical circles as a punchline. Sure, there was that moment of insanity when the FBI actually classified Juggalos as a criminal gang, but I think it’s telling that this was mainly met with howls of derision rather than outrage from the wider music community - because, seriously, ICP fans? Even before their spiritual coming out, the band was treated as a punchline; contemporary reviews of The Great Milenko were excoriating, and Eminem’s brutal, homophobic skit mocking them on one of the best-selling hip hop albums of all time, The Marshall Mathers LP (and, yeah, we’ll get to it, don’t worry) pretty much buried the band in terms of pop culture relevance (oddly, a fate not accorded to Kid Rock’s infinitely worse album from the same year, Devil Without A Cause, which is still inexplicably listed as ‘important’ somehow). Tellingly, that spreads even to your humble correspondent; despite loving The Great Milenko on release, and appreciating it a huge amount on a contemporary revisit, I can’t report any especial desire to engage with their more recent work. I remember playing MMLP to a friend of mine who’d encountered Milenko the same time as I did, and, despite that friend overall not being a hip hop fan, and certainly not being in any way as enamoured by Eminem as I was, nevertheless sadly concluded That Sketch was the most effective nail in the ICP coffin imaginable.  Not to jump ahead, but Slim Shady as a character shares enough characteristics with the ICP Juggalo aesthetic that the Wicked Clowns can’t help but be harmed by the comparison. It’s not that ICP are bad MCs; The Great Milenko is competent-to-good horrorcore hip hop, and it also has a genuine sense of humour, plus some class-based righteous anger that’s surprisingly well targeted. It’s just, you know, it’s Eminem; one of the finest natural talents hip-hop has ever produced. It’s not a remotely fair fight.


That said, this isn’t exactly Limp Bizkit Vs. Rage Against the Machine, either. For starters, ICP are legit contemporaries of Eminem, if not antecedents; the root of their entire beef was when a young Marshall Mathers added ICP as ‘possible’ guest stars at a party he was organizing, which unsurprisingly pissed off ICP, and there’s really no way to spin that to make Eminem the good guy in that situation (though it’s fair to say as the beef evolved that ICP probably took things a bit too far with the diss tracks).


Whereas Limp Bizkit feel like something the record industry dreamed up - ‘what if Rage Against The Machine but without all the messy politics?’ - ICP have remained absolutely committed to a bit that has been mercilessly mocked from the moment of inception onward, and it’s hard not to find that kind of admirable. Similarly, their relationship with their fan base remains strong; mutual solidarity of the mutually despised and mocked that, you guys, I just don’t have it in me to disrespect. I remember hearing some stand-up comedian laughing about Juggalos as ‘the “Uncle Harry ain’t going to bad-touch me no more!” gang’ and thinking, you know what, my smug dude, so fucking what if they are?


Because, not to jump ahead to the final essay I may or may not end up writing, but ICP, I have (re)discovered, actually meant a lot to me at the time they came along. The love affair may have been relatively short-lived, and their place supplanted by rappers with undeniably superior technical proficiency, but they spoke to me at a time I was sliding into a pretty dark place. They spoke with adolescent humour and rage about real-life concerns; there are differences between post-industrial collapse Detroit and North Devon… but there are similarities, too. This is an album written by men who understand the claustrophobia of poverty, and the crawling, sweaty feeling of shrinking horizons, door after door slamming shut. They understand dark humour as a response to horror, the powerless fantasy of supernatural retribution against the rich and powerful at whose whims we suffer, bleed, starve.


And here we are in 2022, and I am sad to report that doesn’t feel less relevant. My own personal circumstances may have improved almost beyond comprehension, but the big picture is bleaker than it’s ever been, the arc of descent clear and still accelerating, and for much the same reasons; an insane pursuit of wealth, a machine of appetite into which our bodies and the futures of our children are being fed, pulped, burned. We’re ruled by a tiny number of sociopaths with unimaginable power and influence, and they absolutely don’t consider anybody actually reading this as real, as you and I understand the term. And no, ICP’s The Great Milenko doesn’t exactly articulate that… but it doesn’t exactly not articulate it. The targets of the album's fury - racist rednecks, corrupt, evil judges, prosperity gospel grifters and, above all, very, very rich people - are all either the problem or enablers of the likely terminal cancer currently afflicting our species. And, I mean, I really, really love Eminem, I do, and we’ll get into it… but there’s really nothing in his body of work that comes close to this, in terms of identifying unapologetically with an underclass and against the oppressors. And let’s not forget that the reason this album obtained notoriety in the first place was because of a backlash from Christian groups that led to the label pulling release at the last minute. Unquestionably, that controversy helped sell more records, but that wasn’t inevitable. This is an album that spoke truth to power, and power hit back.


And while we’re on the subject; yes, it’s true that this album contains misogyny, of the type that appears as baked into Hip-Hop as it is Rock n Roll, but frankly it’s a lot less vicious than in many other artists. And unless I’ve missed something on my recent relistens, theres’ not a single even tacit bit of homophobia, which is, sad to say, itself kinda noticeable in the context of the general milieu. If that doesn’t strike you as anywhere near good enough, I’m not going to argue with you; but it’s not nothing, either.


You know, it’s genuinely gleeful to discover, after writing maybe sixty of these essays, that the process of My Life In Horror is still capable of surprising me. I knew I’d be writing about this album, and honestly, I was dreading it, certain that it’d be, at best, a Headless Children moment, and at worst, another Lost Boys disaster. Instead, I find myself, improbably, in the opposite position; not merely defending but damn near evangelising for a piece of work that was despised at the time, and has been basically reviled ever since, by a group that has near-universally become a synonym for embarrassingly bad music.


I knew The Great Milenko had been an important album for me when it came out. I could never have predicted that, in 2022, it would still be important.


But it is.


And it fucking rocks.


KP
4/7/22

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