Oddly, Insane Clown Posse rapper Joey Utsler — better known as Shaggy 2 Dope — is humble. Today, on the group’s bus in the parking lot of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, he speaks as if he can’t believe his duo’s success. His counterpart Joseph Bruce (aka Violent J) is watching SpongeBob SquarePantson a small TV, smirking now and then.

Ever hustling, the group offered to meet us at the L.A. Weekly offices, but their tour bus wouldn’t fit in our parking garage, so here we are.

They’ve come out to Hollywood before, and remain enamored of the local women. “There’s so much parking-lot pimpin’ going on,” Utsler says, a bit cryptically. “The women are like 3-to-1, all over this fuckin’ place.”

The bus itself is a typical rock-star 40-foot coach, unadorned, and there’s no Faygo in sight. Utsler and Bruce look the part, however, dressed in Hatchet Man gear and done up in their signature face paint, black-and-white schemes that have remained unchanged for decades.

While for much of their 21-year history they were largely ignored by the media, more recently they’ve broken through, although mostly to be mocked, by everyone from Saturday Night Live to Comedy Central show Workaholics. Their “Miracles” video (“Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?”) went viral enough to give the Internet chlamydia. Meanwhile, their Juggalo fan base has landed on the FBI’s national gang watchlist, which distresses Utsler: “That’s now calling our concerts a gang rally, that our fuckin’ merchandise is gang apparel. That’s a public lynching of our name.”

Now the Detroit-based outfit is set to release its 11th studio album, The Mighty Death Pop!, out today. Hugely ambitious and a little, um, insane, it comprises four individual discs: one featuring the original rap-rock tracks the group is known for, another that’s a 64-minute riff on Too $hort’s 1987 sex rap “Freaky Tales” and a third that covers songs like Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful,” Eazy-E’s “Love for Them Gangstas” and Tears for Fears’ “Shout.”

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