HogRock Campground in Cave-In-Rock, Illinois—where The Gathering, an annual five-day festival staged by Insane Clown Posse, has been held since 2007, after being rudely ejected from less open-minded and/or desperate venues in Michigan, Illinois, and Ohio—is so remote that it doesn’t even have an address. It’s a barren, borderline-untamed realm where churches, which appear every few miles, represent the only real marks of civilization. It’s Southern and rural, socially and politically conservative. (Billboards decrying Obama as a political antichrist and agitating for a return to prayer are numerous.) Yet for four or five days every year, creepy, sleepy old Cave-In-Rock becomes the epicenter of the Juggalo universe. To borrow the parlance of Insane Clown Posse’s Dark Carnival mythology, it is Shangri-La, the eternal paradise Juggalos will ascend to if they lead virtuous lives—although the shape of paradise has changed during the three years I’ve attended The Gathering.

When I first visited The Gathering in 2010, the press presence was minimal. This year, it went beyond our nation’s borders. In front of the mainstage one afternoon, I talked to a middle-aged woman who explained that she was a journalist from Norway who was covering The Gathering for a piece about the vanishing middle class in Europe and the United States. The woman’s manner was polite and understandably confused, though in an adorably misguided attempt to fit in and go native, she sported the requisite clown makeup.

 

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