March 28, 2024
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Psychopathic Indians and killer clowns

Hey Homies, Creative Loafing approached SPIN‘s Brandon Soderberg and INDY Week‘s Eric Tullis for a little insight on the subgenre of Horrorcore. In this interview they discuss ICP, Geto Boys and ABK. They also answer these questions, So, horror rap. How’d this stuff come about?, Are horror rap acts still surfing that wave, or is there a possibility of resurgence?, So where’s everyone fall on ICP? and more. You can read the full article at the link at the bottom of the page.

 

Here is a part of the article from Clclt.com:

So, horror rap. How’d this stuff come about?

Brandon Soderberg: I think it’s probably more intertwined with hip-hop that’s considered good and important than we want to admit. It isn’t horrorcore but the Bomb Squad were slicing up Slayer samples, and the Beastie Boys with Rick Rubin’s help were rapping over Led Zeppelin. I mean, that’s in part what horrorcore is, right? (It’s) bringing in this tangible “hard rock” menace to hip-hop. Then you got gangsta rap, which was always about describing violence in gory detail, so even stuff like Schoolly D or NWA were creating raw visceral rap. But it really starts with the Geto Boys, right? They pretty much were a horrorcore group.

At the heart of horrorcore it seems to me though, is nostalgia: which makes it like a lot of weird rap sub genres! So much of the stuff on ICP’s Psychopathic Records, in particular, is just longing for this strange moment in the early ’90s – when a lot of these goofballs were young and impressionable – when rap was a big deal but the labels hadn’t yet figured out how to control it, so they were, like, left with a one-eyed little person like Bushwick Bill or Mobb Deep holding scythes. Rap really had its metal moment there where it was just truly aggressive, un-PC, scary-as-hell music; the next generation of goofy white boys who wanted to piss their parents off embraced Marilyn Manson, Nine Inch Nails, etc. A lot of proto-horrorcore like the Geto Boys probably has more in common with that stuff than it does a lot of “golden era” hip-hop.

Eric Tullis: In the early ’90s, in Wichita, Kansas, I hung out with a bunch of gang-bangers who listened to a rapper from Houston named Ganksta N-I-P, who was also down with the Geto Boys. These dudes would always listen to one of his songs called “Reporter From Hell.” So, that’s where it all started for me. At the time, I just identified it as some scary gangsta rap that these guys thought was more entertaining than serious. It turned out that he was one of the originators of the style.

I just remember feeling excited (and sometimes guilty) that there was finally this secret, evil corner of hip-hop that I could crawl into, that, to me, functioned just like the make-believe of a typical scary movie. For me, the realities of gangsta rap were too much of threat since I actually knew gangsters. With horrorcore, the rapper was obviously pretending, right? None of that stuff actually happens, right? That’s what made it safe and approachable for me.

I’m just theorizing here, but where the term “gang” was operative in gangsta-rap, horrorcore gave solo rappers, especially the white ones like Necro, Cage and even Eminem, more of an opportunity to rap about an individual brand of terror and crime without having to pretend that they knew what it was like in the “hood” or in a “gang” situation.

Good point bringing up Eminem, Eric. A lot of stuff off that Slim Shady record edged in on suburban horrorcore, but he got a pass as a “real” rapper while a lot of the clown makeup dudes didn’t.

ET: And ICP and Eminem hated each other at one point, if I’m not mistaken.

BS: Eric’s point about horrorcore giving white rappers and/or just rappers not from the “streets” or lacking “cred,” a way to act hard is great. On a basic level too, if you’re doing horrorcore, it gives you that baseline subject matter to riff around, which is crucial to rap for whatever reason. Same way there are gangster rap tropes that rappers can lean on when they need to, horrorcore has its signifiers. Out of that, if a rapper chooses, they do a lot more. ICP for example, have really affecting and sincere songs. Or like, one their last album, Mighty Death Pop, they used their like horrorcore penchant for violence to imagine going to the Grammys and murdering Chris Brown. I guess it is appropriate that I admit here that I gave Mighty Death Pop a “7/10” over at SPIN and named the Freaky Tales disc my “Rap release of the week” the week it dropped.

So where’s everyone fall on ICP?

ET: I should probably come clean and say that I don’t know or care about anything ICP-related. I dig their cult following – the Juggalos – from afar, but that’s about it. When I was a kid, one of the first books I read from cover to cover was Stephen King’s IT. Since then, I’ve avoided anything that incorporates scary clown makeup.

BS: I ride for Insane Clown Posse. They know exactly what they’re doing and they execute that idea perfectly every time, which is more than I can say for almost every one of my favorite rappers. Last year, one of the bonus discs for The Mighty Death Pop was a single-track, hour-long riff on Too $hort’s “Freaky Tales.” It’s incredible: The Infinite Jest of chubby white guy horrorcore.

The first I ever heard of ICP was in the late 90s, in high school where I grew up in backwoods Eastern North Carolina. There were these two brothers – I think they were twins – who adored ICP. They even went so far as to put on clown makeup and perform as them at some festival in New Bern, N.C., though I only heard about it secondhand. They were supposedly scary dudes, but they always seemed pretty good-natured and funny. They were always nice to me and, at the very least, they weren’t as scary as some of the guys who lived there.

One of those guys died young, years ago. It struck me as the saddest thing ever – those brothers loved each other so much. But the ICP identity (I didn’t know the word Juggalo yet) seemed to give them something to hold onto in what was a pretty bleak place to grow up for a lot of folks.

You can read the full article by clicking the link below.

Psychopathic Indians and killer clowns

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