The Most Awesomely Demented Fans in Music
Jacko WackosMichael Jackson Fan Club
Setting HIStory straight
To Michael Jackson’s true believers, his problems all stem from media persecution. His semi-official fan club — which grosses around $250,000 a year and has a staff that has included an official poet and a team of lawyers and investigators — often directs fans’ energies toward evening the score. They’ve protested Sony’s inadequate promotion of Invincible and the broadcast of Living With Michael Jackson. And hardcore nutters from as far away as Norway relocated to California for Jackson’s 2005 child-molestation trial.
Justify your love: “Michael’s too big for people to understand,” says Jeannette Manbrink, 29, a Swede who camped outside the courthouse late last year. “He rose above pain. He’s a role model of survival.”
Idol PursuitsClaymates
Defending Clay Aiken’s masculinity since 2003
Fans of the former American Idol runner-up have been dismissed as a delusional cult of lonely, middle-aged hausfraus, but critics who utter an unkind word about the crooner are routinely deluged with angry letters. In 2005 and 2006, Claymates harassed both Rush Limbaugh and Tucker Carlson into apologizing for insulting their hero. The live ammo, however, is reserved for those who insinuate that their beloved Clay is anything less than a strapping hetero: When a former Green Beret dished about the sex he’d allegedly had with Aiken, the ex-soldier was bombarded with death threats frightening enough to lead him to call the FBI.
Justify your love: “Many of Clay’s fans are older women, and they react the way a mother would if her child was being picked on,” says Becky Kolacki, an 18-year-old college student who runs a Clay Aiken fan site.
Send in the ClownsJuggalos
Makeup. Soda. Machetes?
Becoming a Juggalo is more a lifestyle choice than a musical one. Followers of the suburban-Detroit shock-rap duo Insane Clown Posse share their heroes’ passion for ghoulish clown makeup, backyard wrestling and the cheap Faygo soda they’re showered with at ICP concerts. Sometimes their passion gets the best of them: After the duo’s single failed to enter MTV’s rotation in 2000, irate Juggalos stormed the Total Request Live studios and had to be forcibly removed by the NYPD; and in June 2006, a handful of machete-wielding ICP fans went on a violent robbing spree in a Washington State park, shouting, “Woo, woo, Juggalo!”
Justify your love: “Kids find it an outlet for all the pent-up stuff going on in their heads,” says Michael Sorg, a 25-year-old video editor who runs a Juggalos fan site. “Whether you’re anti-establishment or your life just sucks, it fits.”
