Well, here's a sentence: Steve Albini believes Joe Rogan should be more like the Insane Clown Posse

Culture moves in unpredictable ways. In 1999, the following sentence would be impossible to believe and yet now, 23 years later, it’s perfectly sensible: Steve Albini thinks Joe Rogan should look to Insane Clown Posse for moral guidance.

Yes, the guy from Newsradio has been called out by an era-defining musician and audio engineer as lacking the good judgment of a pair of horrorcore rappers who perform in clown makeup. Albini made his feelings known in a series of tweets prompted by an exchange taken from a resurfaced 2020 Stereogum interview with the Insane Clown Posse’s Violent J.

In the excerpt, Violent J looks back on homophobic ICP lyrics with regret, emphatically stating that “there’s no excuse” for what he’d said in the past and calling the offense he might’ve caused gay Juggalos “a terrible thing.”

Albini quote tweeted the interview screenshots and called them “absolutely model owning-your-shit behavior,” adding that “if a goddamn fucking Juggalo can manage it, a nine-figure podcaster can step the fuck up without whining.”

The “nine-figure podcaster” refers, of course, to anthropomorphized weed-crumbed first-year philosophy textbook Joe Rogan, who’s been in the news lately for making Neil Young upset enough with Spotify hosting a podcast filled with racial slurs and COVID misinformation that he (along with others, including Joni Mitchell) has pulled his music from the streaming service.

Albini goes on to further praise the Juggalos as “a non-judgmental, inclusive community for people on the fringe, built on a beautiful communion they call ‘family.’”

“They remind me of punk/queer chosen families and I love them,” Albini continues. “I haven’t heard much of the music, it’s atrocious. Who cares.”

To round things out, he writes that Juggalos are “less annoying than Deadheads by an order of magnitude” and addresses the fact that “a lot about the Juggalos is dumb/laughable.”

“So what, your life isn’t? Get over yourself,” Albini writes. “The part that matters to them, that they are there for each other in material ways other communities fail at, that’s the whole thing.”

This is all true and, hopefully, a good reminder of what we can all learn from the Juggalos. It also gives us a shred of hope that maybe now, with yet another music icon speaking out about his show, Rogan will take Albini’s advice, throw on some face paint, drain a Faygo, and take a look at how he could better emulate the Insane Clown Posse going forward.

[via Stereogum]

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