This post should be a fairly quick one because The Gathering of the Juggalos is the only festival that I get sent to where people don’t want photos of the bands. In the past the festival has had some huge headliners but the last few years the festival has stuck to more juggalo friendly bands instead of big national acts. Clients of mine don’t really want to see photos of juggalo rappers so here we are.

I did shoot some music though and I will go through the gallery real quick. When I got to the Gathering Immortal Technique was playing. I would have shot him but I missed most of his set. The first photos in this gallery are of the day one headliner ABK. Unless you are a juggalo you have no idea who that is, but I assure you juggalos love him despite his lisp. I photographed some girls named Glitter Money on one of the late night tents but we were leaving so I don’t even know what they sounded like.

The next day I shot Ouija Macc cause I kinda know that dude and his old group Swag Toof was from NYC and so it’s cool that he’s now on Psychopathic records. Gwar also played that night which is always awesome except when they cut Donald Trump in half I got covered in his blood and I am not sure I will ever get it all off me. I have no idea who the one photo of one woman in a No Lives Matter shirt is, but my friend Contessa was listening to her and I took one shot as I was meeting up with her before we went back to the hotel.

Day three photos include some of RA Da Rugged Man who I actually think is a great rapper but also he hit my hat while I was trying to take his photo which seemed kinda unnecessarily agro so I’m n0t gonna hype him. The person I was most excited to see was Esham who invented horror core rap. Pretty much everyone who came out of Detroit was influenced by him. I assure you Eminem and ICP wouldn’t ever have existed with Esham. He played the Gathering once before when I was there but it was late at night and I missed it. He was punk as fuck. Hopsin played that night but I was doing some shit and didn’t get down in time to shoot him. TechN9ne played after that and I love that dude but I also have photographed him at every Gathering so let’s move on.

Lastly, we left early on Day 4 so we didn’t shoot ICP or Yelawolf (I have photographed them both a bunch so I wasn’t worried about it), but I did get to shoot my friend Contessa aka CuntMafia. Contessa just decided she would come to the Gathering with me and it was clear pretty quickly she belonged there. Whenever we would stop in middle America on our road trip, people would stare at her, but at the Gathering of the Juggalos she blended in. I asked the dudes in the Wolfpac if she could perform on their stage and they were all about it and she played 4 songs and kinda killed it to be honest. My new goal is to actually get her booked next year. It was awesome.

Okay, that’s all I got. This was longer than it was supposed to be and I got 5 more updates to go. Be back tomorrow with a couple more. Whoop whoop, etc.

Click here to see the music of the 2018 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH.

I have now photographed 9 consecutive Gathering of the Juggalos. If you don’t know what the Gathering is, how did you even get to my website? I keep telling myself I am going to retire after 10, but I said that after 5 too. Hopefully this will be the year I finally do my juggalo photo book but then again I have been saying that for years too. Whatever the case I took 3000 photos of jugalos which I have edited down into seven galleries that will be distributed to you throughout the week along with some articles/galleries I did for other clients. 

This first post is sort of a “best of” gallery in that it’s my favorite portraits from the festival. Obviously there’s some crazy fun stuff in here that isn’t in this gallery, but it’s a good place to start. A bunch of these are in the Noisey article that came out today but there is stuff in here not in there and vice versa. There’s also a few photos in here that are also in other galleries but it serves as a good teaser of what’s to come.

I should also mention that I had a VERY NSFW tweet go viral from the Gathering, and if you want to see the high resolution photo from that Tweet I put it and a bunch of other NSFW juggalo photos on Girls of Driven By Boredom.

Lastly a couple things I should mention about the actual logistics of my trip and the festival. The festival returned to Thornville, OH where it had been for three years previous to last years last minute Gathering in Oklahoma. I drove there with fellow juggalo journalist Camille Dodero and my friend Contessa Suto who performs music as Cunt Mafia (more on her later). We rented a car and drove there to save money. Camille couldn’t leave Tuesday so we got to the fest late on Wednesday and had to return the car early Sunday morning so we missed most Saturday. We did spend a couple hours there on the last day and I was actually pretty productive so I don’t feel like we missed out on too much.

Okay so now let’s go look at some juggalo photos already.

Click here to see my favorite portraits from the 2018 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH.

Okay! This is it! Final post of the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos. I know how much you guys like looking at photos of juggalos. This is probably the biggest gallery of the four days with nearly 200 photos. Gonna run through the day real quick and then end with a bunch of links to all my coverage from around the internets.

Oh and speaking of coverage, I got a name drop on the second to last ever episode of @midnight last night. That was kinda cool.

Day four was the final day and of course it all ended with a crazy set from Insane Clown Posse. Even if you hate their music, their sets, especially at the Gathering are totally worth watching. I always like watching them with people who have never seen them because they go from mocking to on board in about 10 minutes. Even at this under attended, last minute Gathering in Oklahoma the conclusion of their set was a hell of a moment.

Before ICP went on there were sets from POD and this dude Prof who was actually pretty great. People were throwing water balloons full of ketchup, mustard and brightly colored water at him and he seemed to love it. Personally my camera smells like mustard now so I was less excited.

The only other thing worth mentioning in this gallery was the piñata madness that happened. This juggalo who I have met a bunch of times over the years named Poncho walked around the campgrounds collecting shit for two piñatas and had everyone break them open on the last day. There was so much insane shit in them and juggalos basically tried to murder each other for shit. It was like in a movie when they throw a dead body in a pen of starving pigs. I ended up with a beer, a can of off brand Nutella and a clown nose. I still have the clown nose.

Okay, that’s all I got here’s all my coverage and then we will get to the day 4 photos at the end.

Voice Media Galleries (LA Weekly, Miami New Times, Houston Press, etc):
The Party Begins at the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos
The Best Dressed of the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos
The Juggalos of the 2017 Gathering Show Us Their Ink
The Extreme Scenes of the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos
The Gathering of the Juggalos 2017: Welcome to Juggalo Island
Clown Love: The Cutest Couples of the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos
The Grand Finale: The 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos Comes to a Close

Voice Media Article:
Turns Out Moving the Gathering of the Juggalos to Oklahoma Was a Bad Idea

Chicagoist:
Get Weird With Our NSFW Photos From The 2017 Gathering Of The Juggalos

Brooklyn Vegan:
Gathering of the Juggalos 2017 (ICP, Waka Flocka, Faygo, pasties & more)

@Midnight:
Juggalo missed connections (around the 18min mark)

Driven By Boredom:
For all Driven By Boredom’s Gathering of the Juggalos content over the last 7 years click here.

And finally, click here for the final, mildly NSFW gallery from day 4 of the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos in Oklahoma City.

Okay, I promised two updates today but I lied. It’s 8pm already and no one wants a post at fucking 11pm so you get this one today, another one tomorrow and then back to naked people and party pictures on Monday. Let’s get into this shit.

Day three of the Gathering was my longest day there. I got there early cause I wanted to shoot a bunch of day time stuff for my “Juggalo Island” gallery. (Bonus content: watch this fucking video.) After being outside for an hour I wanted to die so I headed over to Psychopathic Radio to take some photos of the madness that Wolfpac’s gets into every day. The first event they had was a juggalo drinking contest. They had two juggalos take 10 shots each. One of them made it about two shots in before puking. The other crushed his. After he was finished and the other guy was done vomiting, the sick juggalo finished the rest of his shots. I saw him 45 minutes later and he had completely lost his fucking mind. Good times.  After that they had a round of the infamous juggalo fight club. Two brothers faced off and kicked the shit out of each other for three rounds. That was real fucking enjoyable.

At some point during all that my GOTJ date Gia Paige put stickers on her nipples which made the rest of the day interesting because every five minutes we’d be stopped by some juggalo who wanted to smoke weed with her or take her photo or in the case of a cop want to take her stickers off and put new ones on. Another cop just said “Niiiicee” to her which was creepier than anything the juggalos did. How delightful.

After that the bands started playing. I shot a mosh pit and ate a far too spicy burrito while waiting for Waka Flocka to go on. He played one of the best sets I have ever seen at the Gathering in 2015 and I was really psyched for his set. He did not disappoint. He called on juggalos to get him drunk and people threw beers at him which he caught and chugged. He then was handed a bottle of Fireball which he chugged as well. He jumped into the crowd and played several songs in there while juggalos and security chased him around. I jumped over the photo pit and followed him too. I even got off a couple selfies. After he got back on stage he brought some girls out of the crowd and that was fun too. Overall I took way too many photos of him and posted way too many of them here. Enjoy.

The night ended with fucking Vanilla Ice headlining. He was mostly promoting a home improvement show on the DIY Network or something. Honestly I stuck around for two songs, took some photos and went back to my hotel cause I was exhausted and let’s just say I wanted to hang out with Gia Paige more than I wanted to see a rap rock version of Ice Ice Baby. Sue me.

Now click here for a ton of mildly NSFW photos from the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos in Oklahoma City. 

Day two of the Gathering of the Juggalos was cool because Gia Paige showed up. I met her in LA right around the time my LA Weekly writer told me he couldn’t make the trip. I jokingly said she should come with me since I had an extra press pass and she actually said yes. She’s from Detroit so she was kinda familiar with ICP and seemed pretty unfazed by the whole thing. It was pretty great.

As far as stuff that actually happened on the second day I pretty much started out photographing the VIP meet and greet thing. I got to talk to some juggalos about their memorabilia and shoot the clowns with their fans. I shot a bunch of tattoos for a gallery I did for the LA Weekly and I shot a bunch of portraits that ended up in their “best dressed juggalos” gallery.

That night ICP played their album “The Wraith” in it’s entirety. The Wraith is the 6th Jokers Card and it was supposed to be the last album before the world ended in ICP mythology. Weirdly enough the world didn’t end when it came out, but Juggalos did get a surprise when it was revealed that the “Dark Carnival” was really just a juggalo form of Christianity. Seriously. If you haven’t heard “Thy Unveiling” do yourself a favor and listen to it. It’s way funnier than Miracles ever was.

Late night I shot Wolfpac cause their sets are always a total shit show. They aren’t quite as fun when nudity is outlawed but the photos are probably worth looking at anyway. Lil Debbie was supposed to play later that night but she didn’t show up. She Tweeted that she was playing the next night but I had no idea when so I skipped it. But I was real curious to see what her juggalo set was gonna look like. I still have no idea if she ever actually played.

Okay go look at photos now. Two more updates coming tomorrow…

Click here to see all the mildly NSFW photos from day 2 of the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos in Oklahoma City.

I got back from the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos a few days ago but I have taken my sweet time to post these because most of them are already online via the LA Weekly (and all the other Voice Media papers). I will post all those links in part four of this madness. In past years I have broken these photos down by subject but this is my 8th god damn one of these and I just wanna get these photos up and move on with my life. The plan is two posts today and two posts tomorrow and then on to whatever comes next.

Let’s start by talking about what every juggalo in the festival was talking about: Oklahoma sucks. The Gathering was supposed to be in Colorado but several venues fell through because the FBI designates juggalos as a gang because apparently the FBI has never actually met a juggalo. At the last minute they found this place called Lost Lakes Amphitheater in Oklahoma City and it turned out to be kinda a disaster for a bunch of reasons. First of all beer in Oklahoma is watered down which is like some shit I thought they only pulled in Utah. All hard liquor was theoretically outlawed and the place was full of undercover cops were arresting people for selling drugs and supposedly public nudity. I saw supposedly because I only heard rumors but all the nudity got shut down. Not sure how you can even call it a festival with everyone sober and clothed. The place also had weird cut off times for music, it was hot as balls, it was far from the midwest where most juggalos live, it was spread out over miles and the line up sucked. There were probably a third of the juggalos there as normal It was a total bummer.

Aside from all that it was not completely terrible. The combination of the brutal heat and the line up sucking meant I showed up late every day and still managed to take a million fucking photos. I didn’t have to worry about shooting the bands so I could focus on just shooting juggalos cause I knew I couldn’t sell any of the band photos. Oh and my hotel had a pool plus Gia Paige came with me for three of the four days. So really it was chill as fuck.

Day one I only had one gallery due and I flew in to Oklahoma City that day so I didn’t get down to the Gathering until about 7pm. I had an hour of light to get a few shots and then popped on the flash. Mushroomhead headlined and they are real weird looking so I took photos of them and then hung out with Mike Busey and his “Busey Beauties” who have been the highlight of the last few Gatherings. They had to keep stuff PG and they shut down their stage at 11pm cause of the stupid noise rules so I just hung out with them on their bus mostly. It was air conditioned, full of strippers and there was a pug. 0 complaints.

Anyway, that’s all I got for the first update. Day two is coming in a few hours. It’s a much bigger gallery.

Click here to see the mildly NSFW photos from day one of the 2017 Gathering of the Juggalos in Oklahoma City.

Okay! This is it! The final 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos post and now I can go on vacation! Because I was just trying to figure out how to get these up as fast as possible this gallery is massive. This gallery has over 400 images and I am gonna scroll through them now and see if I see anything worth talking about. Let’s go!

Most of these are just random crowd shots and juggalo portraits that didn’t make it into any of the other galleries. I shot a lot of face paint and tattoos and signs for Noisey and the LA Weekly (links below) so there’s a lot of that stuff in here. Can you spot the selfie these girls made me take with them? There’s a bunch of Wolfpac and Busey Beauty stuff in here so lot’s of eye candy if you are creepy like that. There are some party photos in here too from the late night party tents they have set up. Also these images are all in order so you will get to night time photos and when day time photos hit again that’s the next day. That’s probably common sense but whatever.

Day three and day four have some juggalo fight club stuff in it. I have been covering that for years but it didn’t really deserve it’s own post this year. Sadly one of my favorite juggalos, Nebraska Warrior, finally lost his title to a wrestler named Strychnine which I assume he spells incorrectly cause that’s a real juggalo thing to do. It was a good match though. There are a bunch of photos from Miss Juggalette which I shot for the LA Weekly. It’s just girls standing on stage but there was a nice moment when the winner talked about her social anxiety and how she just entered to help get over her fear. Everyone started crying and hugged her. I was rooting for her because she did a Jessica Rabbit performance and was also not wearing underwear.

Anyway that’s kinda it. Lemme just throw up the links to all my coverage down here so I can come back to this later to see everything if I need to find it and you can lurk it as well if you haven’t already.

Driven By Boredom Coverage:

• The Best Of The 2016 Gathering Of The Juggalos
• Music @ The 2016 Gathering Of The Juggalos
• Jeff Hardy & Juggalo Championship Wrestling
• Never Ending Naked Juggalettes
• This Post

LA Weekly Coverage:

• Day One Gallery
• Juggalos Are The New Ravers by Andy Hermann
• I Think I’ve Been a Juggalo My Whole Life and Just Didn’t Know It by Art Tavana
• The Most Beautiful People of the 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos
• Juggalo Pride: The Tattoos of the 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos
• 10 Things You Can Buy From Random Strangers at Gathering of the Juggalos by Andy Hermann
• The Weirdest Signs of the 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos
• The Maniacs of Juggalo Wrestling
• How to Have Fun at Your First Gathering: Juggalos Impart Advice to a Newbie by Andy Hermann
• Donald Trump and Juggalos Have More in Common Than You Might Think by Art Tavana
• The Best Things We Overheard at Gathering of the Juggalos
• Can You Be a Non-Juggalo and Still Wear Clown Paint at the Gathering by Andy Hermann
• The Gathering 2016: Crowning Miss Juggalette
• Pro Wrestling Gets Wild at Gathering of the Juggalos With WWE Legend Jeff Hardy by Art Tavana
• Paralyzed Juggalo Joe Mekan Feels the Love at His First Gathering by Andy Hermann
• The 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos Comes to a Close

Noisey Coverage:

• Faces of the Gathering of the Juggalos
• Presidential Death Match: GWAR Rain Blood at the Gathering of the Juggalos

Chicagoist Coverage:

• The 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos was NSFW and Juggalicious

And now finally click here to see the rest of the photos from the 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos!

After writing 1200 words about fucking wrestling I think life calls for me to make this post a lot god damn shorter. This is everyone’s favorite post of the year for some reason and it’s my second to last Gathering of the Juggalos post. I am on a bus to DC where I am getting picked up tomorrow to go on a mini vacation so let’s just enjoy some weird juggalette nudes and let’s all move on with our lives okay?

So the last few years there’s been less nudity than normal at the Gathering. The Wolfpac girls seem to wear clothes now and even the Busey Beauties were fairly well dressed. Luckily juggalettes give no fucks about clothing or standards of beauty and there were plenty of horrifyingly wonderful boobs to go around.

I also should mention that while most of the Busey Beauties were quite clothed, Mike Busey brought out a woman aptly named Jenny Jizz who was just blowing dudes all weekend. At some point if you bought a Busey Beauties t-shirt you got a free blow job. Like, I am all for promiscuity but blowing 50 juggalos without using condoms seems dangerous for humanity. People keep asking me about those photos but I am not gonna post shit like that on my site… Fortunately for you scumbags I did post them on Girls of Driven By Boredom because I like money. So go fucking sign up now if you haven’t.

Okay, this post is way too long already. Let’s look at some photos. Btw, normally I photoshop the Insane Clown Posse’s faces over the images I post below but I found a few mildly safe for work images in the edit so I don’t have to deal with that shit on a bus.

And one more thing… If you want to see past naked juggalette posts just click here.

Now click here to see the newest gallery of naked juggalette photos from the 2016 Gathering of the Juggalos.

Every year there’s a couple artists that play the Gathering of the Juggalos that you just can’t believe are playing. I have seen everyone from George Clinton to Bobby Brown to three different members of WuTang. This year I was pretty excited to see Bone Thugs N Harmony, Slick Rick and Gwar.

Bone Thugs aren’t really one of my favorite groups or anything but I thought it would be cool to see and it was. Photographically it was pretty impossible to get a decent group shot but not mad I got to see them. Gwar was also really hard to shoot but for a completely different reason. The inside of my hat is still pink from the blood of a decapitated puppet of Barack Obama. Slick Rick was just kinda boring to photograph because he mostly just stands there with mic in his face but honestly it was still fucking amazing. I am a pretty serious Slick Rick fan. Like I get pretty deep with him unfortunately I only got to see about four songs because of other work, but it was still next level for me.

Also great was Tech N9ne who plays every year and this year his some time collaborator Hopsin played too. I really dig both of them so that was fun. They are both really easy to photograph too because they put on a hell of a show and don’t spray any camera destroy substances at the crowd (weird, right?)

Aside from that there wasn’t much I wasnted to shoot. I the performance of Violent J’s Wizard of Oz themed musical “Wizard of the Hood” and that was super weird. I probably should have watched the whole thing but they only let me shoot two songs and I sort of bounced after that. I of course shot ICP but I had a really early fight to catch and I have seen them a bunch of times so I left after I got a few shots. I also shot Psychopathic Records artist Anybody Killa and “West Coast juggalos” Kottonmouth Kings. Oh and this rapper Rittz who I have seen before at the Gathering and is on Tech N9ne’s label.

Aside from that I didn’t really see any other music. None of my clients really wanted any band photos even though I was shooting for both Noisey and Rolling Stone. That being said after I shot Gwar I pitched Noisey on it and they actually published my show review. It’s always weird when people let me write shit, but I appreciate it.

Read my Gwar show review in Noisey here.

So yeah, um, go look at band photos if you want. The Gwar ones are at least somewhat interesting and maybe you will care about them. Honestly if it were up to me I would never have to take or look at a photo of a band ever again, but that’s just me.

Click here to see all my live music photos from the 2016 Gathering Of The Juggalos.