Tila Tequila Attacked By Juggalos!

I spent all Sunday trying to make sense of 2010’s Entertainment News Headline of the Year: “Tila Tequila suffers cuts, but escapes juggalos attack” (I didn’t have the heart to tell my grandma why I seemed so distant at her 90th birthday party. Sorry Grandma, matters of great national import demanded my attention). Frankly, as I type this it’s 11:18 p.m. on Sunday, and I’m still not sure what this all means.

Since ThirdCoastDigest is generally a high-class web-based magazine whose arts focus is usually tuned toward the Milwaukee Performing Arts Center rather than Art’s Performing Center, Let me get you up to speed on our principals:

(Excerpts from the Glossary of American Pop Culture, Morlock Division)

Tila Tequila: “Singer”/model who achieved initial fame by having more MySpace friends than anyone else during the heady days of MySpace’s dominance over social media (approx. May 2006). Tequila currently has 3,753,285 MySpace friends, 3,753,200 of which are spambots, bands, and various services to help GET YOUR BAND NOTICED!!1!1

Juggalos/Juggalettes: Fans of alleged hip-hop group and science deniers Insane Clown Posse

The Gathering of the Juggalos: Yearly juggalo-themed (and juggalette-themed, I assume—BREAKING NEWS: ICP MUSIC FESTIVAL HAS SEXIST TITLE; ALSO WATER IS WET AND MAGNETS ARE MIRACULOUS) music festival which in 2010 featured Tone Loc, Vanilla Ice, and Gallagher (as cited in the incredible Gathering promotional video)

…Gallagher. Christ, I don’t even have to write jokes for most of this blog post. Take the cnn.com article itself, which is so brilliantly written, it would do a disservice to Alan Duke to do anything but step aside and let his golden words speak for themselves:

“She’s pretty cut up,” said a performer who saw the violence at the “Gathering of the Juggalos” in rural Hardin County, Illinois. The witness asked not to be identified so that he does not anger the juggalos.

Tequila, a Playboy model who also sings, (I love the implication that she’s known for…well, anything. Wait, shit, sorry, I said I wouldn’t talk)

The witness, who was standing in the rear of the stage, said the crowd of about 2,000 was immediately angry toward Tequila and she was unable to turn them around.

“She was taunting them,” he said. “She didn’t know how to handle them. She didn’t understand the dynamic.” (WTF? Shit, sorry again)

The rocks and bottles flew harder and faster when Tequila bared her breasts, he said.

“She took her top off and they got really violent,” he said.

Oh, and by the way, someone got frakking stabbed:

This was not the only violent incident at the festival early Saturday, Seiner said.

A 49-year-old Georgia man was arrested for allegedly stabbing another man in the abdomen just hours earlier, he said.

 

Someone give Alan Duke an award, because this is textbook journalistic humor at its driest. Dude got stabbed, but never mind that—he’s never bared his breasts in Playboy, or in an attempt to soothe an angry mob of juggalos.

I’ve spent all day trying to process why this incident so deeply resonated with me—and mostly, it’s resulted in total synaptic shutdown (in fact, I’ve passed out twice while composing this article). After forcing my body into a perpetual state of alertness thanks to a $2.49 12-pack of Mountain Holler, the “radical citrus thirst blaster!” available at a Save-A-Lot near you, the overdose of high fructose corn syrup produced an altered consciousness that yielded the following theories:

1) I am a horrible person who unhealthily obsesses over invertebrate-level bullshit as a distraction from working to become a serious, relevant writer

The evidence for this is compelling: the existence of this article provides more exposure (well, exposure to the six Facebook friends I have that actually read my stupid articles, anyway) for an essentially worthless “subculture” and a walking, dancing personification of famous-for-being-famous. In a perfect world, stories about the Inane Clown Posse and Tila Tequila would be met with Snorlax-sized shrugs of indifference. However, this isn’t a perfect world, and I am Part of the Problem. (If this sounds needlessly self-loathing, keep in mind I was raised Catholic, and it’ll make sense).

2) The icky violence against woman angle

Despite what you may think of Tila Tequila (and really, you shouldn’t), the fact remains that a female “entertainer” was forced into a situation where she felt obligated to strip in order to stave off an attack by a violent throng. Bloodhound Gang-level gallows humor aside, that’s pretty goddamn gross. (To be fair, the disrobing may be part of her act; I don’t know. Incidentally, on a purely anthropological level, I’m still baffled as to why that didn’t work. The best theory I can formulate is that the men in the audience were pissed that her breasts were nicer than theirs.)

3) We are witnessing bottomfeeder trash culture slowly devouring itself

This idea fills me with optimism: what if the juggalos (and juggalettes) are the naturally occurring, cleansing wildfire of trash culture’s forest ecosystem? Look at the screenshots accompanying this piece—what if, just what if, the Gathering of the Juggalos is an elaborate setup with an endgame of pruning the most seedy underbrush off America’s pop culture shrubbery? And what is it with all these vegetation metaphors?

Violent J: Hey Shaggy, let’s invite Vanilla Ice and Gallagher to the Gathering this year. We’ll lure them in, then sic them on the juggalos, who shall feast on their bone marrow in an orgy of human sacrifice.

Shaggy 2 Dope: What’s bone marrow, and how the fuck does it work?

Folks, in case you missed it, we are now living in a world where our mainstream news outlets regularly cite TMZ.com as a legit source of information. We’re in the shit worse than Matthew Modine in Full Metal Jacket. So the thought of the most base, valueless elements of American culture policing themselves with a version of The Most Dangerous Game (not that Tom Green constitutes “dangerous game,” but let’s not split hairs) fills me with a strange sort of hope—the hope that eventually all these idiots will collapse into themselves like a hatchet-faced black hole (and considering their ineptitude in eliminating Ms. Tequila, who now plans to sue juggalo culture out of existence, this may be close to reality). Let’s just hope the juggalos don’t kill Terry Funk before this happens.

Oh, Terry—what the fuck are you doing?).