Insane Clown Posse has emerged from the smoldering wreckage of the record industry and its Detroit hometown with a remarkably robust first week for its latest long-player, The Mighty Death Pop! The album has debuted at No. 4 on the pop charts with an impressive showing of 41,000 records sold, which ties Bang! Pow! Boom! and The Amazing Jeckel Brothers as the duo’s best chart showing to date.
The self-professed “most hated band in the world” has survived the apocalyptic conditions of the record industry through sheer carny cunning. The duo recently made headlines when it launched a bold plan to take legal action against the FBI on behalf of its fans, after the feds deemed Juggalos a gang—a strategy outlined on its website, juggalosfightback.com (which deems itself “A place for ‘los and ‘lettes to be heard).
The big sales of Mighty Death Pop! can also be attributed to the non-Juggalo world’s enduring fascination with the duo’s annual Gathering Of The Juggalos festival, which wrapped up another epic, eventful year in beautiful, historic Cave-In-Rock, Illinois earlier this month. It was there that Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope discussed their bold legal action with Detroit newcomer Danny Brown, during a mentoring session aboard ICP’s tour bus that was captured for posterity by the cameras of VICE. Of course, the duo’s high-minded talk of protecting its fan’s civil rights is slightly undercut by Violent J’s more pragmatic concern that the FBI’s designation of Juggalos as a gang could seriously complicate its lucrative and mutually beneficial relationship with the ninjas over at Hot Topic.
Mighty Death Pop! was first made commercially available at Insane Clown Posse’s much-publicized festival of arts and culture in three different versions, each of which contain both the original album and a bonus disc. The bonus discs include Covered, Smothered And Chunked (alternately known as Red Pop); an album of covers from ICP and the extended Psychopathic Records family; Freaky Tales (alternately known as Black Pop), an album-length homage to Too Short’s classic ode to the fairer gender “Freaky Tales;” and finally, Mike E. Clark’s Extra Pop Emporium, a 13-track assemblage of outtakes, collaborations, and B-sides assembled by the duo’s producer Mike E. Clark, including the long-awaited teaming of Insane Clown Posse and Color Me Badd on “Ghetto Rainbows (Soft Ass R-N-B Remix)”
The success of these three-part releases illustrates yet again Insane Clown Posse’s unparalleled ability to get fans to pay good money to buy the same content over and over. How else do you think the underground institution is able to afford to pay for its fans' legal appeals?