"Welcome to Hell. Why did you choose this?"
— Violent J, opening up the Hell's Pit album.
The Insane Clown Posse look like Monster Clowns, but usually act as Anti-Heroes or Sociopathic Heroes in their song lyrics, and off-set their Horrorcore lyrics with overtly comedic content, and are far from scary in person (in fact, they're fairly approachable and down to Earth). That doesn't mean that their music is all happy and fun. In fact, they've made quite a few downright frightening tracks.
Welcome to the Nightmare Fuel of the Insane Clown Posse. Why did you choose this?
open/close all folders
Carnival of Carnage
- The end of "Never Had it Made" has Violent J surviving execution, waking up in a morgue and taking out several cops, trying to push his guts back inside his body as he falls out and dying to face judgment, where the song had started. The entire song is him trying to convince St. Peter that despite all the murders he had committed (and eating a dead body), he somehow deserves to go to Heaven because society drove him to it. However, the really dark synthesizer music towards the end implies that his pleas didn't work and that he's Hell-bound. There's all kinds of Nightmare Fuel here.
The Ringmaster
- "The Dead One" is about a gangbanger who survives being shot by a rival gang...or does he? (No, he doesn't.)
- "The Loons", and its remix with Awesome Dre, "Neck Cutter". The song is from the perspective of a serial killer who stalks his victim, taunting her by calling her each step he is closer to her house.
Riddle Box
- "Cemetery Girl" is about a man who digs up the body of his dead girlfriend and tries to have sex with it as it slowly falls apart in his hands.
- "Ol' Evil Eye" is a pretty faithful rap adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, with the protagonist split between two characters: Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope's. Violent J is haunted by the dead-looking eye of the Old Man, and sets out to murder him. Shaggy attempts to stop him, but once he sees the Old Man, he joins J's quest to murder the man. The music is pretty consistently dark and nightmarish, and actual excerpts from the Poe story appear sporadically.
- "12" is told from the perspective of a convicted murderer, Violent J, who rises from the grave as a zombie to seek bloody revenge on the 12 jurors, who show no remorse for their judgment and are declared by J to be just as guilty of murder as he is.
- "The Killing Fields" is a descriptive depiction of Hell, referring to J trying to chase down and eat a baby billygoat with a man's head while a demon tries to chase J.
- Among other horrors is waking up from a bed of nails that peels off your flesh, an eternally on fire house that causes J to stand only one night in the smoke, hanging bodies from trees and the walking dead that beg and pray for death and try everything to die, summers of literal fire reducing people to surviving in the sewers with rampant cannibalism, vicious wild pigs that feed off the dying and storms of blood and internal organs.
The Great Milenko
- "Just Like That" starts out as your average day in the life of an inner-city guy on a quest to get laid. Up until he gets shot. Just like that.
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers
- "I Stab People", about... a man who stabs people. Its sequel is longer and somehow less unnerving.
- "Assassins" tells two stories about the Wicked Clowns committing various atrocities. The first verse depicts Shaggy as a teenage petty criminal, homeless and starving to death, who recognizes his teacher at the mall and climbs into the back of her car and waits. When she gets back, he sticks a shank to her throat and holds her up for her money and "all [he] can sell", then cuts her tongue out so she can't snitch on him, and finally shoots her to death before fleeing. End of the verse.
- In the second verse, which is slightly more comical, Violent J is drunk driving on the freeway after killing his father, a bigoted priest who was possessed by a demon (just roll with it) when he sees a "fine hitchhiker" and offers to give her a ride. Along the way, he manages to smooth-talk her into coming back to his trailer for a glass of Faygo and some casual anal sex. Afterward, the woman kisses J and asks "so when am I getting paid?" J flies into a rage and tries to choke her, but she escapes and tells him "welcome to the disease there's no cure for". J then chases her across the trailer park, and just when you think she might get away, his friend Billy shoots her in the back as she passes by him and she goes down. J, not satisfied with this, grabs a hatchet and chops her into pieces, culminating in him shoving her head up her butt. End of the verse.
- Another nice depiction of Hell occurs in "Echo Side", which has Damien, the protagonist, suffering Body Horror in the form of his legs decaying, rodents crawling through his veins, and being accompanied by headless children that piss in his lap, red skies that rain blood, and a wicked man with a long black tongue that talks backwards. And in the end, all he accomplishes is crawling back into Hell through the front gates.
Bizzar/Bizaar
- "Mr. Happy" is a cheerful little song about a friendly(if slightly-odd) fellow that really, really loves people. Really. He just also happens to consider gruesomely murdering people the ultimate expression of love. The fact that he appears to be singing this song to a group of children simply adds a whole other layer of creepy to this already-disturbing track.
The Wraith: Shangri-La
- "Hell's Forecast": J wakes up to find out that everyone he knows is dead and bodies/blood are raining from the sky. Once things clear up, the Wraith appears before him and he learns that he is dead and has gone to Hell.
Hell's Pit
- That intro that serves as the page quote? That's the last line. The rest of the track is an auditory trip into Hell.
- The very first song on the album "Walk Into The Darkness". Violent J's verse describes him decapitating a mule and shooting up a school with the mule head on his head, and Shaggy's verse has him shooting up a funeral and burning down the place, and both of these events are happening in the name of The Witch.
- "Everyday I Die": J and Shaggy wake up each day, try to make it through the darkness of Hell, cannot die, but still feel pain. It's particularly worse when Shaggy is basically being eaten alive by demons.* "The Witch", a full description of the devil's (successful) lies and manipulations of J and Shaggy.
- The shock therapy sounds in "Sedatives"
- "In My Room" with lots of Yandere goodness. J is involved with a ghost girl and they hang out a lot in his room. One night, he murders one of his mother's cats because it scared her. It certainly doesn't help that you actually hear a cat yowling during the verse. The girl is obviously freaked out by his behavior and runs away. Then she tells him that she was seen by a neighbor's kid and he proceeds to brutally murder the kid and his parents. It doesn't help that the song leaves it ambiguous as to what the girl actually is: a ghost? A demon? A hallucination? And on top of all of that, the girl never comes back, forcing him to realize he's just killed those people for nothing.
- "Basehead Attack" describes zombie baseheads coming out of the grave begging for change and J and Shaggy attacking seemingly-undying crack addicts.
Bang! Pow! Boom!
- "To Catch a Predator", in which J violently tortures pedophiles by pretending to be a little girl and enticing them to his house. The neighbors and mailman see him dragging one of his bloody victims into his house, but make no attempt to have J jailed because they know the man he is torturing is a pedophile.
- "Fonz Pond", about a haunted pond that drags down those who dare to swim in it.
The Mighty Death Pop!
- "Chris Benoit" and its remix that includes Ice Cube & Scarface (not that Scarface). Another Sanity Slippage Song, using the professional wrestler as a loose metaphor. Its lyrics describe a normal person suddenly snapping and committing acts of violence and murder. The perspective varies from verses; Violent J's verse is definitely from the perspective of the person described, Shaggy's verse is pretty schizophrenic, implying the perspective of someone of multiple personalities, Ice Cube takes an outside perspective and your guess is as good as anyone as to what Scarface's verse is about.
- "The Blasta" has a section where, later on in life, after having left the military and started a family in an attempt to put his vengeance-fueled, murder-filled past behind him, a bully who had picked on the main character's son at school turns up missing, and he goes to ask his son about it:"'Did you have anything to do with this?'
He gave me no answer, just a hug and a kiss
And said, 'Don't worry, Dad; everything'll be fine.
Just you pay it no mind; it's all over.'"- In other words, it's heavily implied that vengeance-fueled murder runs in the family. Holy...
The Marvelous Missing Link: Lost
- "Falling Apart" describes a Body Horror filled day, where Violent J says he feels too sick to come into work. But as he tries to rest, several parts of his body falls off, including his toes, fingers and his dick. This keeps going until he throws up his guts and his limbs fall off, and by the end of the song, he's left being "a pile of meat, baking under the sun".
EPs, etc.
- The entire concept of the Dark Carnival can be pretty frightening to some, depending on your point of view.
- Their music doesn't get much more frightening than "Mental Warp", a very disturbing and surreal song which seems to be told from the point of view of a person who has slipped into a deep psychosis and just descends further and further into incoherence.Violent J: "Staring at the ceiling/The roof has a face/It's telling me I don't belong with the human race/He's asking me to join him in eternal sleep/I give him my soul/My body I can keep."
- The (quad?)logy of songs "Night of the Axe", "Night of the .44" "Night of the Chainsaw" and "Night of Red Rum", which each describe violent murder sprees with an axe, a .44 caliber pistol, a chainsaw, and a bottle of red rum. "Night of the .44" is a direct sequel to "Night of the Axe", with the two titles being lampshaded in the song "The Juggla", which contained the lyric "night of the axe, night of the .44". The remix of "Night of the Chainsaw" features Three 6 Mafia. "Night of Red Rum" is a bit different, as it describes a man getting drunk on red rum and going on a murderous rampage with his hands and whatever he can find.
- "Amy's in the Attic" is about a guy who accidentally killed a girl as a child, and hid her body in his attic. He is slowly eaten alive both by guilt and by thoughts that he is seeing her even over a decade after her death.
- "Prom Queen", in which J portrays a nerdy and unstable high school outcast who asks the prettiest girl in school to go to prom with him. She tells him she'd rather die, but she never said she wouldn't go...
- "The Tower" is about a war veteran who spends his last moments shooting random civilians due to neglect from his years of service. Made worse by the fact it is based on an actual event
. - "Ding Ding Doll" is about a kid who buys a cursed doll. The song is told from the perspective of the doll as it sees the kid panick and try to get rid of the doll, only to fail and give up. It ends up with the doll murdering him by hammering some nails trough his skull... talk about a Creepy Doll.
