httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-agl0pOQfs

“If magic is all we’ve ever known / then it’s easy to miss what really goes on.” So begins the Insane Clown Posse’s music-poem “Miracles,” a meditation on man’s lamentable darkness in a blindingly bright world. Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope see miracles all around them, yet their sense of the sublime is continually undercut by the suspicion that it is all a product of forces beyond their understanding. That seems likely, considering how little Shaggy and Violent understand. “Miracles” is a catalog of the phenomena that we take for granted every day, probably because our senses of wonderment have become dulled by the postindustrial world. Of course, it could also be because we have successfully completed Earth Science. The same cannot be said of Insane Clown Posse and their fans, whose childlike sense of amazement remains intact because A) they are actual children or B) they have devoted too much of their attention to big money hustlin’/rustlin’ to keep up with developments in contemporary physics and biology. Thus are Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope made the Pagliaccis of the modern world. A source of joy and laughter to the rest of us, they sit silent—their smiles painted on, mute witnesses to a joke that they don’t get. As a public service to juggalos everywhere, we’d like to take a moment to address some of the seemingly unanswerable questions put forward in “Miracles.”

Music is magic, pure and clean / you can feel it and hear it, but it can’t be seen. (You can’t even hold it.)

Okay, what you’re talking about here is sound. While its invisibility and non-holdable properties make it initially resemble magic, centuries of experimental research have revealed that it is actually a compression wave that travels through a medium to be interpreted by your brain. That’s why you can feel it—like your eardrums, your skin is a membrane that registers pressure distortions, albeit with less precision and, in your case, more makeup. As evolutionary biologists have noted, sound is all up in this bitch; the human ear can only detect a comparatively narrow range of sounds, whereas other animals experience the world as an almost continuous cacophony of audible vibrations. Sound is everywhere. I don’t want to alarm you, but it’s coming out of your mouth right now. I know. Please try to calm down.

Water, fire, air and dirt, / fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?

Interestingly, the construction of the universe you describe in the first line was originally laid out by the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Empedocles, who postulated that the universe was composed of those four elements. Violent J, are you even paying attention to my explanation right now, or are you doing something violent? This is why people do not call you Studious J, but I digress. Fuckin’ magnetism is the result of the organized orientation of the atoms and shit all up in a ferromagnetic object; when the fuckin’ microfields generated by the angular fuckin’ momentum of electrons around their respective nuclei get all oriented in one direction and shit, the fuckin’ object generates a dipolar magnetic fuckin’ field in this bitch—this bitch being three-dimensional space, unless otherwise specified.

And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist / y’all motherfuckers lyin’ and gettin’ me pissed.

This actually puts us in a pretty difficult position. I can understand your suspicion that science is a primarily instrumental endeavor, whose approach seems to privilege Western ways of knowing over more circus-oriented systems of inquiry. Consider, though, that what may initially seem like a lie designed to anger you could actually be an explanation arrived at through experimentation and impartial analysis. Shaggy, do you remember when you loaned your car to Violent J and then went to sleep and forgot about it, and when you woke up you accused everyone of stealing it? It’s possible that you find scientific explanations frustrating because your background has not provided you with the tools to confidently evaluate them. Q.v.: your belief that the universe is a dark carnival, when contemporary scientists agree that it is more likely a space-time manifold. If you are satisfied with your worldview as it currently stands, that’s great, but if you genuinely want to increase your understanding of fuckin’ magnets and shit, you’re going to have to open yourself up to new experiences.

Shaggy’s little boys look just like Shaggy / and my little boy looks just like daddy.

I cannot tell you how relieved I am to hear that. If you thought that previous explanations of scientists were gettin’ you pissed, you would not want to hear the plausible theories as to why your little boy might look just like Shaggy. While much of the human genome remains unknown, we now know that certain heritable traits like eye color (blue, brown, terrifyingly pure black) are passed from parent to offspring through strings of amino acids called genes. When human beings reproduce, the genes combine and copy themselves via structures in the zygote called chromosomes. That’s why your little boy looks just like you—although, based on this video, it could also be that you have painted the same design on his face.

Magic everywhere in this bitch.

I know, dog. I know.

Combat! blog is free. Why not share it?