 By Dan Brooks |
“If magic is all we’ve ever known / then it’s easy to miss what really goes on.” So begins the Insane Clown Posse’s music-poem “Miracles,” a meditation on man’s lamentable darkness in a blindingly bright world. Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope see miracles all around them, yet their sense of the sublime is continually undercut by the suspicion that it is all a product of forces beyond their understanding. That seems likely, considering how little Shaggy and Violent actually understand. |
“Miracles” is a catalog of the phenomena that we take for granted every day, probably because our senses of wonderment have become dulled by the postindustrial world. Of course, we might also take these miracles for granted be because we have successfully completed Earth Science. The same cannot be said of Insane Clown Posse and their fans, whose childlike sense of amazement remains intact because A) they are actual children or B) they have devoted too much of their attention to big money hustlin’/rustlin’ to keep up with developments in contemporary science. Thus are Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope made the Pagliaccis of the modern world: a source of joy and laughter to the rest of us, they sit silent—their smiles painted on, mute participants in a joke they do not get. As a public service to juggalos everywhere, we’d like to take a moment to address some of the seemingly unanswerable questions put forward in “Miracles.”
Music is magic, pure and clean / you can feel it and hear it, but it can’t be seen. (You can’t even hold it.)
Okay, what you’re talking about here is sound. While its invisibility and non-holdable properties make it initially resemble magic, centuries of experimental research have revealed that it is actually a compression wave that travels through a medium to be interpreted by your brain. That’s why you can feel it—like your eardrums, your skin is a membrane that registers pressure distortions, albeit with less precision and, in your case, more makeup. As evolutionary biologists have noted, sound is all up in this bitch; the human ear can only detect a comparatively narrow range of sounds, whereas other animals experience the world as an almost continuous cacophony of audible vibrations. Sound is everywhere. I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s coming out of your mouth right now. I know. Please try to calm down.
