One of the few true countercultures left in the shadow of an ever more pervasive monoculture, Juggalos have long fought police prejudice and social ostracization. Like their beverage of choice, Faygo, alienation runs in their blood. That fight continues today, taking on fresh clown paint amid a changing drug culture and the aftermath of a wacky FBI investigation.

Insane Clown Posse (ICP), the underground hip-hop duo from the dregs of postindustrial Detroit, boasts a massive following in low-income rural communities across the United States. Once a year, thousands of the ICP devotees, known as Juggalos, swarm an unassuming Midwest locale for the four-day bacchanale known as the Gathering of the Juggalos. They come for “the Family” — the term for the Juggalo collective — for drugs, and especially for the music.

These gatherings have often been met with heavy-handed shows of police force; police in at least twenty-one states have postulated the existence of fictional Juggalo gangs. The Juggalos have even been targeted by federal police enforcement, under frameworks established by anti-communist laws passed during the hysteria of McCarthyism. Despite suffering — like many lower-income communities, especially in rural America — from the blight of drug addiction and overdose, their real crime seems to be their existence as a very visible subculture of poor and working people.