“LA Weekly, March 2011” posted:

Joe and Joey, aka Violent Jay and Shaggy 2 Dope, became the Insane Clown Posse around 1992. Before that they were the Inner City Posse, a crew based on the southwest side of Detroit, notorious for petty crime, graffiti and an obsession with gangsta rap and barely professional wrestling.

Joe is prone to mystical raptures: His autobiography is marked by a series of crucial encounters with the divine, both within and beyond nature. The decision to turn the Inner City Posse into the Insane Clown Posse, though deliberately crafted as an answer to the pseudosatanic antics of local MC Esham the Unholy, was infused with a kind of supernatural revelation — “like getting the Holy Ghost,” according to Joe.

The Insane Clown Posse spawned something called the Dark Carnival, a complex mythology with a strong ethical component (including work ethics) designed to help people cope with a wicked environment. There are many parallels with the Wu-Tang Clan and their Shaolin universe, also built up around the same time from the debris of '70s and '80s pop culture in a bleak landscape of poverty, joblessness and family instability left behind after the Reagan years.

The Dark Carnival was a kind of religious revelation slowly unveiled between 1992 and 2003 in a series of ICP albums known as “The 6 Joker Cards.”

This whole scheme was in Joe's head way back in 1992. He inspired his closest friends, including hip-hop nut Joey, and soon the whole artistic-mystical project had a commercial component called Psychopathic Records…