Plain Jane in the membrane

Lots of things look different on paper. The new puppy's errors in judgment, for one thing. Another was the Insane Clown Posse's show at the Bronco Bowl last Friday, February 27.

On paper, it read like one of the more interesting concerts this year. ICP is a Detroit-spawned rap group composed of two MCs: Violent J (Joseph Bruce, 25, the stocky clown with blonde dreadlocks) and Shaggy 2 Dope (Joseph Ultser, 22, the skinny one). Although they've been together since 1991, they burst upon the public consciousness last year when Disney-owned Hollywood Records signed the duo and put out their fourth full-length album, The Great Milenko, apparently without ever listening to them. Disney dropped the act the same day Milenko was released in reaction to a cry raised by the Southern Baptists (among others), who didn't care for ICP's lyric tendency toward death, dismemberment, damnation, and unfriendly sex with fat girls.

That, of course, was all it took for ICP to make national news, which is often all it takes for a band to break big. It was enough for the Clowns. They re-signed with Island, which re-released a restored Milenko (Disney had nixed three cuts), and hit the road. ICP shows have been described as "thematic riots," and they've been banned from many clubs. J and 2 Dope--performing in their black and white clowns-from-the-circus-of-the-damned greasepaint--have had eyes blackened and fingers cracked, and received numerous other injuries (Violent J has had dreadlocks pulled out of his scalp) at the hands of overzealous fans. The entire ICP entourage seems constitutionally unable to make it more than a day or two without getting into some sort of altercation, most recently a sprawling post-show melee in the parking lot of a pancake house in "Butt Lick," Indiana, that resulted in the whole crew being jailed. (A quick perusal of an Indiana map reveals no town named Butt Lick, although a park in nearby Kentucky sports the even better name of Big Bone Lick.)

So there you have it, on paper at least: a portentous combination of threatening bad-boy imagery that frightens parents and enthralls kids, the possibility of anything happening, along with danger, mayhem, and a general adventure in the erosion of core social values--everything rock and roll used to be about. From many angles ICP was a show as ominous as the riot-plagued Guns 'N Roses tour that staggered into Dallas in 1991.

At least this show started on time. In every other way, ICP's gig was just as big a let-down as the G'NR show, which seemed as ominous--prior to the fact--as an SS panzer division appearing on the horizon and ended up a rather ordinary affair.

Ditto the clowns. Their music takes a healthy dose of blue-collar Midwestern attitude--"whaddafuck you lookin' at?"--and pairs it with horror-movie imagery supporting a malevolent cosmology called the Dark Carnival, which promises impending judgment for all mankind. Yay. ICP has many marketable things going for it--a real sense of outsider-ism (only seven stations in America play their songs; they had to buy time on MTV to air their self-made documentary) and an attention-grabbing style that creates an almost-self-perpetuating vortex of hype. But at the Bronco Bowl Friday night, all it amounted to was one average, anticlimactic night of Xeroxed rap.

The crowd was young and evenly distributed between the curious, the believers, the style counselors, and the kids. They sent up a mighty cloud of what was mostly--and surprisingly--cigarette smoke. Almost lily-white, the audience was at the same time lacking in whiggers and wannabes, as if this was one of those shows where it didn't pay to play black. (By the same token, last summer's Starplex show by the Artist [Formerly Known as Prince] was infested by Caucasians being "down"--saying "yo" and "boy-ee" and generally making asses of themselves.) The floor crowd was suitably (but not stunningly) into it, able to get the first 10 or so rows into unconsciously coordinated mass reaction--hopping up and down, waving their hands in the air--but unable to take it any further or higher. Stage-diving proceeded at a credible, but by no means extraordinary, rate. Behind the stage-front wall of the faithful, a clear spot formed by bulky morons crashing into each other moved about like an erratic hurricane system.

Fans took the trouble to duplicate the face paint of their heroes, but weren't putting in the two-plus hours that Midwestern diehards are known for; here, those who bothered were more lackadaisical--using two colors seemed the limits of their devotion. The stage was a haunted house-style living room, full of skewed angles a la The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, but it didn't really connect with a story line.