MC Lars: Edgar Allan Poe Was A Juggalo

Good morning, Juggalos! Nerdcore hip-hop champion MC Lars recently published fresh article entitled "Edgar Allan Poe Was A Juggalo" via Hit Parader Magazine. All about his journey discovering the Dark Carnival and how it musically collides with the influential dark poetry of Edger Allan Poe. You can read a brief snippet of the article below! From MC Lars via Hit Parader Magazine (Photo by Levi Green)

In the early Nineties, when I was a kid in rural Carmel Valley, California, I traded tapes through the mail with strangers I met on Usenet. Prank calls, mostly. You found your people on a text board at two in the morning, argued with them about something nobody else on earth cared about, and then mailed each other cassettes. Bootlegs of bootlegs, every copy a little more worn down than the last, like a photocopy of a photocopy of somebody’s laugh. When the pranks ran out before the tape did, whoever dubbed it would fill the leftover space with whatever else they had lying around.

That is how two clowns from Detroit ended up in my Walkman.

Nobody sold them to me. No algorithm recommended them. A stranger in Michigan had extra room on a cassette and thought, “here, kid, you might need this.”

He was right.

There is a game I have been playing since I was a teenager and have never been able to stop. Name any sick, beautiful, or awful thing Edgar Allan Poe wrote about. Any of them. I will show you that Insane Clown Posse made a song about the exact same thing. Poe wrote about a man driven to murder by an old man’s clouded eye, who hides the body under the floorboards and then hears the dead heart beating until he confesses just to make it stop. They have that one. Poe wrote about a lunatic who stabs an animal and bricks a body into a wall. They have both. Poe wrote about a man escaping a pit and a descending blade by inches. They have it. Poe wrote about cannibalism born of pure desperation. They have that one too, and honestly, I wish they didn’t. Poe wrote “Annabel Lee,” love surviving into the tomb and past it, the narrator lying down in the sepulchre beside her. ICP wrote “In My Room,” where a dead girlfriend comes back as a bloody ghost and gets into bed with him. It is the most Poe thing ever committed to tape. A couple of years ago it became a TikTok hit, which means the American gothic clawed its way out of a garret in 1849 and onto the For You page on a record by two clowns from Detroit. And then there is “The Masque of the Red Death,” where the rich lock themselves in a castle to party while a plague takes the poor outside, sort the guests by rank, and Death walks in wearing a costume and takes the people who assumed the walls were built for them. That is a Poe story. It is also the single most Juggalo sentence I can construct. The clowns have been making that exact argument for thirty years.

Read the full Hit Parader Magazine article by MC Lars here:  https://hitparader.com/features/edgar-allan-poe-was-a-juggalo/