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a preliminary defense of neal medlyn’s juggalo performance

theoreticalgirl:

karaj:

lookuplookup:

Girls Get Busy: Kathleen Hanna Is Doing Set Design for a Performance Piece Inspired by Insane Clown Posse

rgr-pop:

[I clipped out my commentary as well as RGR’s just so this is a little more readable because text-heavy reblogs can get hard to wade through, if you want to see what we initially said, you can click through to this post.]

wait, whoa dudes. you know i love you. but neal medlyn, who put together and stars in this show, is one of my best friends. he totally grew up poor, not in michigan, but in texas. i’ve met his dad and the 18-year-old son that neal had when he was still a teenager and i can assure you he is not from some hipster background. also, i’ve seen a bunch of his other performances and they are always super-smart about race, class, pop culture. and he has a feminist wife that i used to write a feminist blog with and also he knows more about feminism than almost anyone i know. i have tickets to see the show next week and i’m super psyched and i’m definitely not going to have a sense of subcutural or class superiority. i mean, i know i have talked a lot about my fancy phd program (which, in fact, houses some really important thinkers on race who also did not necessarily come from hipster backgrounds) and fancy former jobs, but my ex-boyfriend of 10 years made like $15,000 a year plus tips working at a coffee shop, while in his 30s and 40s, and that was his full-time job, he wasn’t secretly a filmmaker or something. i feel like an asshole marshaling all of this biographical information to be like “neal (and i) have the right politics!” but i think there are some conclusions being jumped to here about who made this piece, what their intentions are, and who will go see it. also, are artists only supposed to make art about what they have experienced themselves? really no one can make performance pieces inspired by juggalos? are you sure that a lot of artists (and audiences) don’t have really complicated relationships to gender, race, class, etc.? okay, shit, i actually have to go do some work. 

Everyone is saying a lot of good things here. 

Thanks for reblogging to add some context, karaj. I don’t have any prior experience with Neal’s work & based my response primarily on the description of the show on The Kitchen’s website. I don’t think you should feel like an asshole for contextualizing your identity online — who we are definitely feeds into how we feel about stuff like this (I know I’m always describing myself/my background whenever I get a little “political” on tumblr).

I probably didn’t make this clear in my initial response to RGR’s post, but I don’t think that artists should be strictly limited to making art about their own experiences — I do think that when they look outside of their own experiences to find source material for their art, they should come from a place of respect & sincerity, especially when dealing with an often disempowered or disenfranchised group of people. (Obviously I am talking about more than just Juggalos right now.) I don’t want to make any further judging-type statements on what kind of place Neal is coming from since I do not know him/haven’t seen his show.

Speaking generally, I think most people (not just artists) have intensely complicated relationships to gender, race, class & other components of their identity — & I think that’s part of what makes good art so rich & powerful & awesome for both the people who make it & the people who experience it… & it’s also what makes art that “gets it wrong” (for lack of a better way of phrasing it) so painful for some people to experience. (Of course, what it means to get it “right” or “wrong” can be subjective depending on who you talk to, especially since there’s no way to predict how individuals will perceive something vs. how an artist intended for it to be received.)

I do think in the last few years (since that Gathering infomercial went viral awhile back), there’s been an increased sense of interest in Juggalos as a subculture and that that interest normally comes from a place between bewildered curiosity and judgmental in a way that’s explicitly hostile to white folks living in poverty (you see the words “white trash” getting thrown around a lot) & it’s that “general sense of interest” that motivated the bulk of my response. It seems like every summer for the past couple of years bloggers have “ventured” to the Gathering to write “think pieces” on the mysterious world of the Juggalos, then you have the photo journalism series, the generally hostile people in the comments sections of the aforementioned think pieces, etc. I think that the vast majority of this content is not coming from a place of respect or sincerity & that it traffics in a fucked up discourse of “look at these freaks” — if you know Neal & trust him & think he is doing something different, I respect that (and would obviously be happy to hear your thoughts about the piece after you’ve seen it).

(It is weird for me to have written two lengthy posts about Juggalos in a row. This is a big deviation from my regularly scheduled odes to The OC and Stephen Malkmus.)

(Source: pitchfork.com)

  1. zazoo911 reblogged this from girlsgetbusyzine
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  3. xyrophile reblogged this from rgr-pop
  4. jsex reblogged this from saltmarshhag
  5. mizbelle said: my mom is a social worker, and for job training, she learned that Juggalos are considered a gang in our area. /random /dunno how i feel about this /i hate Juggalos because they’re often assholes /I was poor and I didn’t like mean horrible shit /etc
  6. djripley reblogged this from blackamazon
  7. freshstrawberries reblogged this from cloacakiss
  8. cloacakiss reblogged this from svetlana-del-rey and added:
    Juggalo culture is barely a thing where I’m from, but my sisters were into ICP for awhile when they were younger & now...
  9. sexshooter reblogged this from saltmarshhag and added:
    yo i am from Juggalo Country and idk i get kind of tetchy about when people talk about juggalos because it’s usually...
  10. saltmarshhag reblogged this from blackamazon and added:
    my immediate reaction to reading about it was what is this vice magazine shit and then there was great commentary
  11. trayshtawk reblogged this from blackamazon
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  17. freibiergesicht reblogged this from svetlana-del-rey and added:
    most juggalos may be poor white ppl but a lot of other terrible groups and people are made up of poor white people too...