All right, Internet. Ready for the next Juggalo update? Over at the Onion A.V. Club, Nathan Rabin has done an exhaustive interview with Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J. Refreshingly, Rabin talks through everything from the controversial events of this year’s Gathering of the Juggalos to the duo’s widely ridiculed “Miracles” video without a hint of condescension. And while we admire his respectful coverage, we can’t help pointing out some wonderfully funny moments from the interview. Violent J’s top 10 quotes are after the jump.
10. On ICP’s disastrous Nightline interview: “They knew the picture they were painting before we even fucking did that interview. They knew exactly what they were going for. The one thing that really hurt me is that they said we make $10 million a year… Part of it’s cool, people thinking you make that much money. Part of that’s cool, I guess. But at the same time, who wouldn’t be a wicked clown for $10 million a year?”
9. On Michael Jackson and the justice system: “Michael Jackson is a lot of things, know what I’m saying? A lot of things, but he’s not a pedophile. I believe, believe it or not, in the American judicial system, if that’s what it’s called. In other words, I believe in the courts, when they get a long, drawn-out trial like that, they get to the nitty-gritty of things. I read enough books on it.”
8. On Juggalo criminals: “We made the point that millions of people bought our albums, and out of millions of people, there is going to be some bad apples. I’m sure Barbra Streisand fans have committed crimes as well…”
7. On how ICP is like professional wrestling: “We spent a lot of time in wrestling, and if you think about it, wrestling is a lot like ICP. It’s a gimmick deal where the crowd knows we’re not really axe murderers, and the crowd knows these wrestlers aren’t really whatever they’re doing. But they’re caught up in the entertainment, and they cheer the good guys, boo the bad guys, and they love it because it’s an escape from reality. And I think that when we became a band we took a lot of the general rules of wrestling and added it to our band.”
6. On Bill O’Reilly: “See, the thing was, when we did the Bill O’Reilly show, I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know anything about him. They kept saying to us, ‘You don’t know who Bill O’Reilly is?” And me and Shaggy both didn’t have a clue who he was. Looking at that also makes me sick, because I know we could have schooled his ass a lot better than we did.”
5. On why ICP declined to perform at Ozzfest: “It was probably something along the lines of you can’t throw Faygo or something. We might have been asked to perform on the tour, but we couldn’t bring our Faygo because of whatever the reason was. That’s always a deal breaker.”
4. On “Miracles”: “We’ve always had deeper songs and more emotional stuff on our music. The whole idea of what ‘Miracles’ is to me sums up the band. It’s like, of course these things we’re talking about aren’t real miracles, according to what a miracle is in Webster’s Dictionary or whatever. But anybody that can stand there, looking at a rain forest or something and not think that’s a miracle — I mean, that’s their loss. Anybody that can sit there and look at shooting stars or a fucking full moon when it’s red and hanging over the city and not sit there and think, ‘That looks awesome, and that’s a miracle that we get to see that and have that on this earth and all this shit,’ you know, that’s their loss. Instead, everybody just makes fun of us because we said it. It’s like, that’s fucked up. We will say it, and we’ll continue to say it, and think that.”
3. On the “Miracles” video: “What people have to realize about the ‘Miracles’ video is that that went out into the world, but that wasn’t for the world. That was for Juggalos. We had no idea that was going to go viral like that, and sometimes when we’re talking to the Juggalos, there’s no anger there. Especially this deep in our career, our music is for Juggalos. We have Juggalos in mind when we create an album. Some of these songs when we’re talking to this fan base that we’re in love with, that loves us, we’re hitting them with the entertainment and the fucking anger and the excitement. But other times we’re saying, ‘Hey man, I know everybody can get caught up in the mundane routine of life, but every once in a while, stop and look around and look at some of these amazing things that we’ve been given on this earth. Look at the stars at night and look at the mountains, look at the ocean. It’s some pretty cool shit here.'”
2. On the critical response to the “Miracles” video: “I honestly believe that all the people that hate that video so much and said so much shit about it, I believe it touched those people in some way. It might not be their favorite video, their favorite song, but they were taken by it. Because when you really hate something, when you really don’t like something, when something really doesn’t interest you, you don’t write about it.”
1. On deciding to book Tila Tequila for The Gathering of the Juggalos “So we looked at a clip of her video and her song was called ‘I Fucked The DJ’ so here we got this sex symbol, who’s going to get up onstage singing and rapping about fucking the DJ. It just seemed like it was going to work. You know what I mean?”