Lost at Sea
Authors: Jon Ronson
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Sociology, #Psychology, #Humour, #Science, #Writing, #Azizex666, #History
ALSO BY JON RONSON
Them: Adventures with Extremists
The Men Who Stare at Goats
The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2012 by Jon Ronson, Ltd.
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Previously published pieces: “Have You Ever Stood Next to an Elephant, My Friend?” (
Guardian
, October 9, 2010); “Doesn’t Everyone Have a Solar?” (
US GQ
, March 2011); “The Chosen Ones” (
Guardian
, August 5, 2006); “A Message from God” (
Guardian
, October 21, 2000); “The Name’s Ronson, Jon Ronson” (
Guardian
, May 10, 2008); “I Looked into That Camera. And I Just Said It” (
Guardian
, October 2, 2010); “I’m Loving Aliens Instead” (
Guardian
, April 19, 2008); “First Contact” (
Guardian
, March 6, 2010); “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes” (
Guardian
, March 27, 2004); “Santa’s Little Conspirators” (
Guardian
, December 23, 2006); “Phoning a Friend” (
Guardian
, April 19, 2003); “Who Killed Richard Cullen?” (
Guardian
, July 16, 2005); “The Sociopath Mind Guru and the TV Hypnotist” (
Guardian
, May 20, 2006); “Death at the Château” (
Guardian
, January 8, 2011); “I’ve Thought About Doing Myself in Loads of Times . . .” (
Guardian
, November 22, 2008); “Blood Sacrifice” (
Guardian
, April 6, 2002); “I Make It Look Like They Died in Their Sleep” (
Guardian
, May 12, 2008); “Is She for Real?” (
Guardian
, October 27, 2007); “The Fall of a Pop Impresario” (
Guardian
, December 1, 2001); “Amber Waves of Green” (
US GQ
, July 2012); “The Man Who Tried to Split the Atom in His Kitchen” (
Guardian
, February 3, 2012); “Lost at Sea” (
Guardian
, November 11, 2011)
ISBN 978-1-101-61242-2
To Sarah Vowell
Contents
THE STRANGE THINGS WE’RE WILLING TO BELIEVE
Have You Ever Stood Next to an Elephant, My Friend?
Doesn’t Everyone Have a Solar?
I Looked into That Camera. And I Just Said It
The Sociopath Mind Guru and the TV Hypnotist
“I’ve Thought About Doing Myself in Loads of Times . . .”
“I Make It Look Like They Died in Their Sleep”
The Man Who Tried to Split the Atom in His Kitchen
PART ONE
THE STRANGE THINGS WE’RE WILLING TO BELIEVE
“Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?”
—Violent J, Insane Clown Posse
Have You Ever Stood Next to an Elephant, My Friend?
M
ilwaukee. A bad part of town. From all around, thousands of young men and women, wearing clown face paint, are descending upon a disused indoor swimming pool that has been transformed into a music venue. They are juggalos, fans of Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, the rap duo known as Insane Clown Posse.
At first glance, it might not be obvious why I’m so excited about meeting them. You might dismiss them as just unbelievably misogynist and aggressive, and it is true that their lyrics are indeed incredibly offensive. Take, for instance, at random:
I’m hating sluts
Shoot them in the face, step back and itch my nuts
Unless I’m in the sack
Cos I fuck so hard it’ll break their back.
ICP have been going for twenty years, always wearing clown makeup, which looks slightly lumpy because it’s painted over their goatees. They’ve been banned from performing in various cities where juggalos have been implicated in murders and gang violence. ICP have a fearsome reputation, fostered by news reports showing teenagers in juggalo T-shirts arrested for stabbing strangers and lyrics like “Barrels in your mouth, bullets to your head / The back of your neck’s all over the shed / Boomshacka boom chop chop bang.”
All of which made Violent J’s announcement a few years ago really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical spiritualists. They’ve only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God. They released a song, “Thy Unveiling,” that spelt out the revelation beyond all doubt:
Fuck it, we got to tell.
All secrets will now be told
No more hidden messages
. . . Truth is we follow GOD!!!
We’ve always been behind him
The carnival is GOD
And may all juggalos find him
We’re not sorry if we tricked you.
The news shook the juggalo community to its core. While some fans claimed they’d actually had an inkling, having deciphered some of the hidden messages in several songs, others said they felt deeply betrayed and outraged: They’d been innocently enjoying all those songs about chopping people up and shooting women, and it was Christian rock?
Violent J explained himself unapologetically to a New Jersey newspaper: “You have to speak their language. You have to interest them, gain their trust, talk to them, and show you’re one of them. You’re a person from the street and you speak of your experiences. Then at the end you can tell them: God has helped me.”
Of course, one might argue that twenty years was, under the circumstances, an incredibly long time for them to have pretended to be unholy, and that, from a religious perspective, the harm they did while feigning unholiness may even have outweighed the greater good.
I’ve come to Milwaukee because ICP have just released their most audacious spiritualist song to date: “Miracles.” In it, they list God’s wonders that delight them each day:
Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,
Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogs
. . . Fuckin’ rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to
blow your brains.
The song climaxes with them railing against the very concept of science:
Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying and
getting me pissed.
Ten p.m. Upstairs, thousands of juggalos are getting drunk in readiness for the show. The atmosphere is riotous and exciting. ICP have a gimmick of throwing gallons of cheap fizzy soda into the crowd, and many juggalos are crushed into the barrier in the expectation of getting soaked and sticky. Backstage, ICP arrive to meet me. They’re wearing their full clown makeup—they refuse to meet journalists without it—and are immediately delightful. They smoke, but considerately blow the smoke away from my face. “Oh, I’m sorry, let me put that out. That’s some bullshit on my part,” says Shaggy 2 Dope when he sees me flinch slightly away from it.
But they also seem melancholy and preoccupied with the negative critical response to “Miracles.”
Saturday Night Live
just parodied it (“Fuckin’ blankets, how do they work?”), and the Internet is filled with amused and sometimes outraged science bloggers dissecting the lyrics. Violent J and Shaggy have been watching them, they tell me, feeling increasingly saddened and irate.
“A college professor took two days out of her fucking life to specifically attack us,” says Violent J. “Oh yeah, she had it all figured out.”
One of the ICP road crew locates the video on his iPhone, and it is indeed withering: “The [‘Miracles’] video is not only dumb, but enthusiastically dumb, endorsing a ferocious breed of ignorance that can only be described as militant. The entire song is practically a tribute to not knowing things.”
“Fuck you, man,” says Violent J. “Shut the fuck up.”
“Did you anticipate this kind of reaction?” I ask them.
“No,” sighs Violent J. “I figured most people would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Insane Clown Posse could be deep like that.’ But instead it’s ‘ICP said a giraffe is a miracle. Ha ha ha! What a bunch of idiots.’” He pauses, then adds defiantly, “A giraffe is a
fucking miracle
. It has a dinosaur-like neck. It’s yellow. Yeah, technically an elephant is not a miracle. Technically. They’ve been here for hundreds of years. . . .”
“Thousands,” murmurs Shaggy.
“Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend?” asks Violent J. “A fucking elephant is a miracle. If people can’t see a fucking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fucking miracle. So is a giraffe.”
We watch the video for another few seconds: “It becomes apparent that Shaggy and J consider any understanding of the actual workings of these ‘miracles’ to be corrosive. To them, knowledge is seen as a threat. . . . For ICP a true understanding of ‘fucking rainbows’ would reduce them to, as Keats put it, ‘the dull catalogue of common things.’”
Violent J shakes his head sorrowfully. “Who looks at the stars at night and says, ‘Oh, those are gaseous forms of plutonium?’” he says. “No! You look at the stars and you think, ‘Those are beautiful.’”
Suddenly he glances at me. The woman in the video is bespectacled and nerdy. I am bespectacled and nerdy. Might I have a similar motive?
“I don’t know how magnets work,” I say, to put him at his ease.
“Nobody does, man!” he replies, relieved. “Magnetic force, man. What else is similar to that on this earth? Nothing! Magnetic force is fascinating to us. It’s right there, in your fucking face. You can feel it pulling. You can’t see it. You can’t smell it. You can’t touch it. But there’s a fucking force there. That’s cool!”
Shaggy says the idea for the lyrics came when one of the ICP road crew brought some magnets into the recording studio one day and they spent ages playing with them in wonderment.
“Gravity’s cool,” Violent J says, “but not as cool as magnets.”
“I did think,” I admit, “that fog constitutes quite a low threshold for miracles.”
“Fog?” Violent J says, surprised.
“Well,” I clarify, “I’ve lived around fog my whole life, so maybe I’m blasé.”
“Fog, to me, is awesome,” he replies. “Do you know why? Because I look at my five-year-old son and I’m explaining to him what fog is and he thinks it’s incredible.”
“Ah!” I gesticulate. “If you’re explaining to your five-year-old son what fog is, then why do you not want to meet scientists? Because they’re just like you, explaining things to people. . . .”
“Well,” Violent J says, “science is . . . we don’t really . . . that’s like . . .” He pauses. Then he waves his hands as if to say, “OK, an analogy: If you’re trying to fuck a girl, but her mom’s home, fuck her mom! You understand? You want to fuck the girl, but her mom’s home?
Fuck the mom.
See?”
I look blankly at him. “You mean . . .”
“Now, you don’t really feel that way,” Violent J says. “You don’t really hate her mom. But for this moment when you’re trying to fuck this girl, fuck her! And that’s what we mean when we say fuck scientists. Sometimes they kill all the cool mysteries away. When I was a kid, they couldn’t tell you how pyramids were made. . . .”
“Like Stonehenge and Easter Island,” says Shaggy. “Nobody knows how that shit got there.”
“But since then, scientists go, ‘I’ve got an explanation for that.’ It’s, like,
fuck you
! I like to believe it was something out of this world.”
Violent J’s real name is Joseph Bruce, Shaggy’s is Joseph Utsler. They’re in their late thirties. Their career, while at times truly glittering, is littered with inadvertent mistakes. Born and raised in Christian homes in Detroit, they’ve known each other since high school. “We were dirt poor,” Shaggy says. “You can’t get no poorer. Fighting, food stamps, I was a fucking thief for a living, hustling, getting money, we were balls-deep in that shit.”
Their first band, Inner City Posse, was without clown makeup. They were gangster rappers, and consequently found themselves behaving in a gangster-like manner. In 1989, Violent J was jailed for ninety days for death threats, robbery, and violating probation. When he got out, he and Shaggy made some life-defining decisions. How could they keep their rap career going but move away from the destructive gang lifestyle? How could they change the band’s name but keep the initials ICP? People liked the initials ICP.
And then it came to them in a flash: Insane Clown Posse! Killer clown rap! It was the perfect outlet for their emotions. Write about the pain and the anger through the prism of horror-movie imagery. A whole new genre.
“We had to work our ass off from the ground up,” Violent J says. “We don’t get radio play. We don’t get video play. We get nothing. This is our video play. . . .” He indicates the dressing room. “Being on the road. We didn’t have no Jay-Z telling everyone, ‘Hey, look at these guys, we’re friends with them, listen to them.’ To this day, we don’t get that.”
This aspect of things might have turned out rather differently had Violent J not made their first big error. It was 1997. Insane Clown Posse were enjoying an early flush of success—their albums
Riddle Box
and
The Great Milenko
had sold a million copies. One night they were in a club when a young man handed them a flyer inviting them to a party. The flyer read: “Featuring appearances by Esham, Kid Rock, and ICP (maybe).”
“What are you saying? We’re going to be playing at your party when you haven’t asked us?” Violent J yelled at the boy.
“It says ‘maybe,’” he said. “Maybe you will be there. I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you right now. Are you guys coming to my party or what?”
“Fuck
no
,” Violent J replied. “We might have, if you’d asked us first, before putting us on the fucking flyer.”
That boy grew up to be Eminem and, incensed, he’s been publicly deriding ICP ever since in lyrics such as “ICP are overrated and hated because of their false identities.”
An observation that turned out to be prophetic.
“From the very beginning of our music, God is in there,” Violent J says, “in hidden messages.”
“Can you give me some examples?” I ask.
There’s a small silence. He looks torn between revealing them and maintaining the mystery. He shoots Shaggy a glance.
“The ‘Riddle Box,’” he finally says.
“Hey, what’s up, motherfucker
This is Shaggs 2 Dope
Congratulating you on opening the box
The Riddlebox
It looks like you received your prize
The cost, what it cost, was your ASS,
bitchboy!
Hahahahah!”
(“Riddle Box,” 1995)
“If you died today, God forbid, if you were hit by a car and you had to turn the crank to your own riddle box, what would pop out?” Violent J peers at me. “Would it be God, or would it be the Devil? Only you truly know the answer to your own riddle box. We’re asking the listener, what is in your own riddle box if you were to die today?”
“Cos you can’t lie to yourself, man,” says Shaggy.
“Only you know the answer to that riddle,” Violent J says. “And then there’s the
Ringmaster
. In the
Ringmaster
, we say when you die you have to face your own beast. Somebody who has lived a life of religion, they face a very small and weak beast when they die. But somebody who’s an evil bastard will have to face a monster. The question is, how big is
your
ringmaster? If, God forbid, you were hit by a car. Ask yourself, Jon.” Violent J looks me in the eye. “How big is your ringmaster?”
“How come it took you so long to make the announcement?” I ask.
“You had to gain everybody’s attention,” says Violent J. “You had to gain the entire world’s trust and attention.”
“So all those unpleasant characters in the songs,” I ask, “like the narrator in ‘I Stuck Her With My Wang,’ they’re examples of people you shouldn’t be?”
“Huh?” Violent J says.
“Well, it’s very unpleasant,” I say. “‘I stuck her with my wang. / She hit me in the balls. / I grabbed her by her neck. / And I bounced her off the walls. / She said it was an accident and then apologized. / But I still took my elbow and blackened both her eyes.’ That’s clearly a song about domestic violence. So your Christian message is . . . don’t be like that man?”
“Huh?” Violent J repeats, mystified.
There’s a silence.
“‘I Stuck Her With My Wang’ is funny,” Violent J says. “Jokes. Jokes, man. Jokes. Jokes. Jokes. It’s just a ridiculous scenario. Silly stories, man. Silly stories. What’s she doing kicking him in the balls? We find it funny. But we’re saying, while we’re close, while we’re hanging, hey, man, do you ever ask yourself what’s in your riddle box? If you had to turn the crank today?”
“But still, given that you were secretly Christian, are there any lyrics you now regret?”
There’s a silence. “Yeah,” Violent J says quietly.
“Which ones?”
“Dumb, stupid, idiotic lyrics that I said without knowing any better. Back in the day.”
“Like what?”
“I really don’t want to say. There’s one lyric . . .” He trails off, suddenly looking really sad beneath the clown makeup. “Just dumb lyrics. I said one lyric one time that I hate. I may have been feeling really down that day. I said something, I live with that every day. I don’t want to point it out.”