Insane Clown Posse
The Amazing Jeckle Brothers (Island)
by Ryk McIntyre
Finally, the long-awaited fifth Joke’s Card falls. And that’s pretty much the flavor that runs through Insane Clown Posse‘s latest. Here, I think, is the thing. There are good cuts on this CD, lots of them, but over-all it lacks the focus of Great Milenko, or RiddleBox. Still, there are some solid tracks here, like the metal-edged “Terrible,” which juxtaposes actual day-to-day concerns, as opposed to media headlines. Oddly enough, it showcases Violent J creeping close to relevance with lines like, “Listen up please/poor Nancy Kerrigan’s sweet little knees/someone took a black thing and went ‘pop’/that’s terrible/we heard about it for months!” or “you put a slave-owner on the one dollar bill/and you wanna know why I kill people?” OK, it’s serial-killer social activism, but hell, it’s a step. That track and “Fuck The World” really let you know that these clowns will say anything that’s on their minds, whoever and whatever the fuckin’ consequences. The latter track features the media-friendly lines, “fuck the critics/fuck your reviews/even if you like me/fuck you!” It even helpfully suggests, “don’t bother trying to analyze these rhymes/in this song I say ‘fuck’ 93 times!” Thank you for counting for us! Not to be left out, Violent J ends the joint with the inclusive, “and fuck Violent J!” How democratic. A funny aside, the p.r. company that handles ICP and The Beastie Boys objected to the line, “fuck the Beastie Boys/and the Dali Lama!” and insisted on its removal. So much for working for The Clowns – they were fired.
However, there seems a further split happening in the rapping styles, with Shaggy 2 Dope leaning more towards the eased-back rapping of, say, Snoop Dog, who, in fact, appears on the talk-show modeled “The Shaggy Show.” A fine track, like a talk-show it features current and upcoming products, has a house band, a host, and a fat side-kick that laughs at the host’s jokes. What it has to do with the whole Dark carnival storyline escapes me. In fact, few of the songs seem to have a connection to that, with the exception of the first single, the goofy FrankenShaggy origin story, “The Mad Professor,” or the truly unnerving “Play With Me,” a sequel of sorts to “Toy Box,” where a forgotten toy plots its gruesome revenge on the child that forsook him. It’s their scariest song since “Amy’s In The Attic.” Unfortunately, a large number of tracks are kinda lame, excuse me for saying so. “I Want My Shit” starts off well, but has a Rage Against The Machinesque chorus that seems disjointed and just a little much. The less said about “Bitches” (the collaboration with Dirty Ol’ Bastard), the better. Is it misogynistic? Well, duh… But its biggest crime is it’s neither funny nor clever, just the dull wit of a simple joke with a hobnailed boot punch-line. And considering that they have female fans, a dumb move. Again, not that they really care, but they’re capable of better humor, if not kinder. They do an old-school tribute in adapting the Ghetto Boys’ “Assassin,” but I think they need to refocus toward the future. While they flood the market with comics, dolls, direct-to-video movies, and wrestling tapes, please remember to finish the Three Stooges/Cthulu/Tales From The Crypt riff you started. Plainly 
put, the dearth (you’ll pardon the term) of creepy, Carnival pipe-organ variations hurts, not that the production is any less than high caliber, fleshing out their stories… heh, heh. This is my review: It’s a flawed effort from the Wicked Clowns, and they could do better. Still, there’re great tracks here, and it’s worth having, if only to have all five Joker’s Cards in your hands.
