![]() It just snowballed and picked up and as time progressed we realized ‘Holy shit!’ this is more than just a rap group. When you do it like that, you can pretty much do and say what you want. “When you do everything yourself, you have control of every thing yourself. “We realized we had to start doing everything for ourselves,” says Utsler. This is the time when those rap dreams would morph into another sort of monster one in which a legion of fans that would call themselves “Juggalos” would be birthed from. Joe and Joey knew that the fantastical notion of getting a record deal wasn’t in the cards for them necessarily that they had to take the bull by the horns and make their dreams happen by their damn selves. When that record came out, we knew we were a name, but we didn’t know how much until we put Ringmaster out.” We had a show at Saint Andrews and it sold out. “When we put Ringmaster out, and this was unheard of to any local bands back in the day, was that we ordered 10,000 CDs and they just went,” explains Utsler. It wasn’t until ICP’s second full length project in 1994 and second Joker’s Card, Ringmaster, that really felt that their popularly was legit. ICP even had Kid Rock and Esham on their 1992 debut album on Psychopathic Records and the first Joker’s Card, Carnival Of Carnage, which without any real statistics, sold well in the eyes of ICP. Without even really knowing, even as just a fan, you always felt like their was a bit of a competition between ICP, Kid Rock, and Esham, and I’m not sure if they would all fess up to it but they were all at least conscious of what each other were doing. Every step of the process was also new and fresh, it was all exciting.” Going to put it in the stores and all that, it was phenomenal. The day the record came out, the excitement behind it. Everything was so new to us at that point. “Just being on stage in front of 200 people. ![]() “Just going to a store and them ordering more cassettes on consignment, realizing people were buying our shit, it was great,” explains Utsler during a phone interview about his fondest memories of those early days of ICP. It was their work ethic during those early years that would eventually start to pay off for them in the long run, learning and being excited about all the little steps along the way that it took to put out a record. Still in their late teens, they had the same rap dreams as anyone else where they just wanted to get a record deal. It was an exciting time for ICP group members Joseph Bruce (Violent J) and Joey Utsler (Shaggy 2 Dope). Whether it was flyers for upcoming shows or just the tapes and CDs themselves, they just popped on the shelves you couldn’t help but be curious. Going around town to the record stores, you slowly started seeing their products displayed in a different manner than their Detroit counterparts. The rise of ICP was something organically achieved. The method of operation from these artists was that everything was an event. They all found regional success using similar tactics they all had fantastic live shows, did great in-store appearances, had fan clubs/newsletters set up, and released new albums and EPs on a somewhat regular basis. Stepping back to the early half of the 1990s, the Insane Clown Posse were a part of the “big three” of Detroit rap artists, along with Kid Rock and Esham, who stylistically had an off the wall sound that was not embraced by the city’s hip hop sector. For someone that at a young age paid immense attention to what was going on in pop culture, but feeling like it all seemed a million miles away, finding a connection with what ICP was doing was exciting for a kid and that was their winning ticket, even to this day with their new album The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost. To wax poetic about such a weird subject like the Insane Clown Posse is easy for someone who became a fan of the Detroit rap group during my formative teenage years in the 1990s. The Insane Clown Posse Want You to Find That Missing Link in Your Life It’s a great read, and you can see it all here! They even talk about what’s coming with the Found album. They talk about Carnival of Carnage, how they knew they were onto something when the first 10,000 copies of The Ringmaster sold out so quickly, and then describe everything up to the point of their latest release. ![]() ![]() Here’s yet another article from a mainstream publication showing the Insane Clown Posse a lot of love! The Huffington Post posted a pretty lengthy article about the new album: The Missing Link (Lost), and went ALL the way back to their humble roots when they were just forming. ![]()
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