Song of the Day 1/7: Insane Clown Posse, “Miracles”

I still can’t get over Trump’s bonkers statement about magnets, to wit: “Now all I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets.” So he knows even less about magnets than he thinks he does.

Turns out Trump has company, though. People who spend too much time on the internet quickly noted that the 2010 song “Miracles” by the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse contained a line that spawned many memes:

Water, fire, air and dirt
Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?

The rhetorical question drew widespread derision, to which Violent J (the heavy one) said, “[E]veryone seems to pick on the fact that a lot of the things we mention are not, in fact, miracles, but they’re totally missing the point of the song: It’s just about appreciating those things.” In a later interview he clarified, “Yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible.” His most eloquent response came in an interview with the Guardian:

“Have you ever stood next to an elephant, my friend? A fucking elephant is a miracle. If people can’t see a fucking miracle in a fucking elephant, then life must suck for them, because an elephant is a fucking miracle. So is a giraffe.”

That sensibility, not to mention comic timing, is how ICP survived all this time while being mostly ignored or reviled by the mainstream music industry. It’s become clearer over the years that despite their horrorcore shock lyrics, the duo is most concerned with the struggle between good and evil, and their community of Juggalos and Juggalettes support each other in the manner of early Christian groups. They get really bristly if you call them Christian, though.

Violent J, whose real name is Joseph Bruce, told an interviewer, “We’re just trying to say that there’s bad guys out there and that there’s good guys out there. We weren’t taught about the Commandments, what’s in the Bible and all that. We just want to see good people hopefully go to heaven, which we refer to as Shangri-La.”

They got even more upset when a writer for the Atlantic called Trump the political equivalent of the Insane Clown Posse. This is a band that used to sell a concert t-shirt that read, “Fuck Your Rebel Flag!” and showed a laughing clown burning one – hardly an image Trump would endorse.

When “Miracles” dropped, though, people still thought of ICP and Juggalos as something akin to a violent gang, so even fans weren’t sure whether it was a spoof. Its fame spread when it was then spoofed on Saturday Night Live, and it became a viral video in those early days of YouTube, demonstrating a new route for getting indie music to the masses.