Are you down with the clown? If not, carry on. If so, please explain to me how the Insane Clown Posse manages to not only pay its bills, but purchase thousands of dollars in Faygo with the proceeds from their concerts.
When I encounter The Family, at a concert or other Juggalo-intensive music venue, I channel the spirit of Jane Goodall and redirect my derision into an attitude of scientific inquiry. I’m no fan of ICP and I don’t normally listen to their songs, but Sunday, all that changed.
Their newest musical creation, “Miracles”, is all about “strange” observations the members, Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope, make about the world. After listening to it, I resolved to investigate some things. While I wouldn’t call it an enjoyable experience, it was almost educational, and can serve as a mile-marker on pop culture’s steady march into ever greater depths of inanity.
Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope’s childlike sense of wonder would be more endearing if it was found in actual children. But like me, they are fascinated by the mysterious forces of our universe and express their frustrations in poetic fashion. When Violent J is faced with such vexations as: how do magnets work, where do rainbows come from or why is this pelican attacking me, I feel it is my duty as someone who got a B- in ninth grade earth science to answer his questions.
And so, in the spirit of Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and James Maxwell (a pioneer in the field of electromagnetism), I am going to unravel the mysteries of the universe, while clearing up some confusion for Violent J and his artistic counterpart Shaggy 2 Dope.
Near the beginning of the song, Violent J boasts, “I’ve seen s–t that’ll shock your eyelids. The sun and the moon and even Mars! The Milky Way and f—-ing shooting stars!” I’ll be blunt with you, J — I’m not impressed. The sun and the moon are indeed beautiful, but first things first, I see with my eyes, not my eyelids.
Second, how long ago did you notice these things? I’ve only seen a few shooting stars in my time, but the sun and moon? These things aren’t exactly secrets. The sun and moon have been there for as long as, gosh, for as long as I can remember.
However, you are on to something. Staring at the Sun for a prolonged period of time will indeed “shock your eyelids.” However, you’d be in good company if you did. Other inquiring minds such as Galileo have had their eyelids shocked to the point of macular degeneracy, or so the story goes.
Violent J goes on to bless us with another verse of prose, which in my opinion is rather reminiscent of the great Italian poet Petrarch. “I fed a fish to a pelican at Frisco Bay, it tried to eat my cell phone, he ran away!”
This is called the fight or flight response and is a common response to danger. Remember when Shaggy D thought it would be funny to put a rattlesnake in the bathtub with you? What you felt at that moment was the fight or flight response which was caused by the sudden spike in your body’s adrenaline levels. Personally, a large man with black and white clown face paint on offering me a fish would make me pretty uneasy, but maybe the pelican was just having a bad day.
“Water, fire, air and dirt. F—-ing magnets, how do they work?” Actually, we’ve known about this one for over a century, but I’ll try and explain it in familiar terms. Magnets are objects that produce magnetic force. Magnetic force comes from moving electron charges. This creates a magnetic field.
Magnets only affect ferrous objects like iron or cobalt (atomic number 27 in the house!). Each magnet has two differently- charged poles. Magnetism is a weak atomic force like gravity. Gravity is what sends your hatchet plummeting towards the earth when you throw it in the air (not a very safe or practical practice).
“And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist, y’all motherf—-rs lying, and getting me pissed.” I think we’ve come to the root of our problem here. I can understand your frustration that science tends to privilege Western ways of looking at the world as opposed to other, more carnival-based methods of understanding. But if you refuse to accept a scientist’s conclusions on something, you can test it yourself.
All science tries to say is that every time we have done A, the result was B. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume this will happen in the future. Is that so deceptive? Sometimes scientists’ explanations for things aren’t very emotionally gratifying. For example, wouldn’t it be more fun to believe one side of the magnet is good while the other side is evil, and that good attracts good and evil attracts evil?
Unfortunately, there is no good reason to believe this. Until there is, I’m going to keep believing the universe is a time-space continuum governed by impersonal physical laws, as opposed to a Dark Carnival in which a giant jack-in-the-box determines the final destination of my undead soul.
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