a preliminary defense of neal medlyn’s juggalo performance
God, I’m not even a Juggalo. But this is alienating. I get that fuckin’ magnets is funny! That’s universal, that’s sacred. Jokes about fuckin’ magnets are not offensive to me.
But . I am not a Juggalo, but that is very real to me. It makes me feel like I’m in a fishbowl. Because the jokes that you make at Juggalos’ expense (other than, you know, Magnets) are really jokes about the material and geographic conditions of my own life. And it makes me feel like I’m in a fishbowl, and it reminds me that some people (me) can’t participate in a lot of art culture and subculture.
Given the choice between Making A Spectacle Of Poor White People For An Audience That Doesn’t Understand The Context and Not Making Poor White People And People Of Color Feel Really Uncomfortable, people like this will always choose the former. Why?
I know it’s just Juggalos, but, like, God, white girls, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up all of you.
You can only make jokes about Juggalos if you are from Michigan. You can never make performance pieces inspired by Juggalos.
I IMMEDIATELY thought about this performance piece when I saw RGR’s post about not being able to make fun of Juggalos unless you are from Michigan (re: that terrible “Juggalo Drake” drawing) but didn’t want to bring it up because I am trying to cut down on the volume of tumblr fuckery I think about on the regular. And of course the person putting this performance piece on wrote one of those awful pieces on the Gathering that has somehow managed to become a summertime blog journalism tradition (I seriously think that voyeuristic subcultural tourism pieces about the Gathering are the #2 thing I hate about music journalism, right behind my blanket hatred of the coverage of “female musicians.”)
When I was growing up my uncle worked for an artist management company that handled distribution for Psychopathic Records which made me like a minor (less than minor, really) celebrity among some of the fringe weirdos at my school because this meant that my uncle sometimes went up to Michigan to meet with Violent J & others to talk about shit like revenue streams. I don’t live in Michigan, but there are a lot of Juggalos in northeastern and northwestern Ohio (enough that I was shocked when I went to visit April many years ago and she had never heard of them as like a subcultural thing, but not enough that we get more than a couple of flavors of Faygo). Driving to work I am regularly cut off by a van that has a homespun Psychopathic Records mural painted on it & the hatchet man definitely crops up when I think about the various iconographies of middle school fashion present when I was a pre-teen.
I think that RGR could not be anymore on point when she says “bullshit like this is just lampooning a subculture that arose from poverty and some of the most fraught race relations in the country.” I mean, come on. When I think about the actual IRL people I know who identified as Juggalos, most of them were/are just kids that I grew up with that already took enough shit from people/the world without having to deal with the subculture they call their home/family being mined for a tongue in cheek performance art piece that supposed “hip” people will go to so they can feel a self-congratulatory sense of subcultural superiority (which is, without a doubt, also a classed superiority). And like is that so much to even ask for? That people not pantomine your identity to a paying audience so that people can feel good about how they are not you? Because I really don’t think that is so much to ask for in the grand scheme of things you could be asking for.
wait, whoa dudes. you know i love you. but neal medlyn, who put together and stars in this show, is one of my best friends. he totally grew up poor, not in michigan, but in texas. i’ve met his dad and the 18-year-old son that neal had when he was still a teenager and i can assure you he is not from some hipster background. also, i’ve seen a bunch of his other performances and they are always super-smart about race, class, pop culture. and he has a feminist wife that i used to write a feminist blog with and also he knows more about feminism than almost anyone i know. i have tickets to see the show next week and i’m super psyched and i’m definitely not going to have a sense of subcutural or class superiority. i mean, i know i have talked a lot about my fancy phd program (which, in fact, houses some really important thinkers on race who also did not necessarily come from hipster backgrounds) and fancy former jobs, but my ex-boyfriend of 10 years made like $15,000 a year plus tips working at a coffee shop, while in his 30s and 40s, and that was his full-time job, he wasn’t secretly a filmmaker or something. i feel like an asshole marshaling all of this biographical information to be like “neal (and i) have the right politics!” but i think there are some conclusions being jumped to here about who made this piece, what their intentions are, and who will go see it. also, are artists only supposed to make art about what they have experienced themselves? really no one can make performance pieces inspired by juggalos? are you sure that a lot of artists (and audiences) don’t have really complicated relationships to gender, race, class, etc.? okay, shit, i actually have to go do some work.
Everyone is saying a lot of good things here.
(Source: pitchfork.com)
