Don’t Worry, We Will Always Have Juggalettes

In 2010 Saturday Night Live released a video mocking the Insane Clown Posse’s song Miracles. The line “fucking magnets, how do they work?” had already gone viral and the SNL video just added fuel to the fire. Everyone on the internet was dunking on ICP and juggalos. The problem with all that is that if you are at all familiar with their music you would realize that ICP was in on the joke and I just so happened to be familiar with their music. 

When I was 17 Insane Clown Posse released an album called “The Great Milenko”. It’s possible that you would have never even heard of the band if a bunch of conservatives hadn’t lost their damn mind and started protesting the record. Hollywood Records, and imprint owned by Disney, dropped the band. MTV News picked up the story and a bunch of disaffected teenage kids picked up the album…

The subculture of juggalos didn’t really exist back then and so it didn’t seem that out of character for a bunch of DC punk kids who loved b-horror movies to take a chance on the band when their albums were essentially musical b-horror movies. The music might not have been great but the songs were funny and fucked up and people had been telling us forever that our music was terrible, so it’s not like we gave a single fuck what people thought about that. 

By the time I went to college in 1999 I had pretty much stopped listening to ICP. They had a new album out that year and it wasn’t really for me and I wasn’t hanging out with my high school punk friends on the daily. I didn’t really think about them again until the Miracles video dropped. But when it did, I found myself defending them constantly. I don’t know how many times I had to explain to someone that they were trying to be funny. They thought the famous “magnets” line was funny too. 

At some point I almost jokingly Tweeted “Who wants to go to the Gathering of The Juggalos with me?” My editor at the Village Voice, Camille Dodero was the only person who responded. She started working at the Voice wanting to write, but she had been stuck editing other people’s work and she thought this would be the perfect story for her. The Voice only wanted to send a photographer but she wanted to go so she paid for her trip out of her own pocket. By the time we returned from the 2010 Gathering of the Juggalos my photos had already blown up, her story had become a cover story, and she definitely got reimbursed for her expenses. 

From then on juggalos were my beat. I returned to the Gathering every year and ended up covering juggalos for dozens of outlets, from Rolling Stone and Vice and the Daily Beast,  to countless alt weeklies and music magazines to even Playboy and Hustler. Last year I was even interviewed by All Gas No Breaks/Channel 5 as their “juggalo expert” for a video that tragically still hasn’t dropped yet. 

Over the years (amazingly partially thanks to my coverage) juggalos have become less of a punchline. The Gathering of the Juggalos has become less terrifying and far more accessible. The festival has publicists and wifi and dozens of social media influencers who show up to make fun of juggalos only to leave loving these insane clowns. The problem for me is that I am a victim of my own success and people are sort of over it. The collapse of media hasn’t helped, but my clients have ben dropping one by one. Last year I only had two clients and one of them was Brooklyn Vegan who just laid off most of their staff. 

That’s all to say that The Gathering of the Juggalos is happening right now and for the first time since 2009, I am not there. I was going to lose money on the trip and it was the best time for me to visit my family and see my niece and nephew and I made the hard decision not to attend. I hope to get back next year because I am having crazy FOMO and I miss my clowns. I have been working on a Gathering of the Juggalos book for years that still doesn’t exist and until it does I can’t retire… just take a little break. 

Now, did I think this post was going to be 1000 words long? No, probably not, but I started and I couldn’t stop and here we are at the main point on this post, which is to say, don’t worry, I still have some NSFW juggalettes for you which is honestly half the reason people love my photos in the first place. I have not one, but two juggalette galleries for you that I have already posted to my paysite Girls of Driven By Boredom (which has so much juggalette content if you are interested).

The first shoot I actually did on the ground last year at the Gathering. I shot my pal Lil Filth and her friend Quaesita on a poison ivy covered hill that people were camping on for some insane reason. I actually never asked them if they got poison ivy, I hope not but sometimes you  have make sacrifices for art.

The second shoot is of Malibu Montana aka Tat2Barbie who I met at the Gathering of the Juggalos years ago. I have some insane photos of her over the years but we had never done a proper shoot. I followed her on Instagram at some point and while I was in Vegas in January for the AVN Awards and noticed she was also in Vegas. I hit her up and she came by and we attempted to shoot some photos in the “kitchen” of my hotel room. The lighting was so bad I actually turned off all the lights and used this cheap video light I have to light her and those ended up being pretty cool. I feel like we could have done better, and hopefully we will one day, but like if juggalette strippers with face tattoos are your cup of tea I have a feeling you are gonna love these photos. 

So now that we are over that 1000 word count I mentioned earlier let’s get to the photo gallery. I have just hand full of mostly safe for work images below from both shoots, but you can see everything over on Girls of DBB, so go there now and I will be back soon, I swear. 

Click here to see all the NSFW photos of juggalettes over on Girls of Driven By Boredom!

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Connie Perignon

Okay it’s been a minute since my last proper update on this site. Unfortunately my website has been having some issues and honestly I don’t know what I am doing enough to fix it. Trying to figure that all out but for now I am just gonna try and do a better job of updating it while I can. As I mentioned in my NSFW last post, I shot eight galleries when I was in Vegas way back in January so I have a lot of content to get up. I also shot a ton of film that I am just finally getting around to getting developed. I kept thinking I was going to get to NYC this spring but flights got so expensive and I didn’t have a real reason to go back so I finally just mailed my rolls back to my old photo lab. You can keep me shooting film by sponsoring one of the rolls and in exchange you get to see all the photos from that roll and then you get to pick your favorite and I send you a signed print of it. You could even get a print of Connie Perignon. 

This post is of course about the photo shoot I did in Vegas with Connie but I had to get all that out of the way before I talked about these photos. I met Connie way back in 2020 via Tinder of all places. She wasn’t a porn star back then and we never ended up hanging out but I followed her on socials and it was cool to see her absolutely blow up in the adult industry. We suddenly had a bunch of mutuals and I finally met her IRL at a party I shot for my old friend, the amazing photographer, Ellen Stagg. I ran into her again at AVN last year and when I was heading out there this year I hit her up again about taking some photos. 

She was down to shoot and had some free time during the day because she decided not to sign at the convention. We made a plan to shoot at my hotel across the street but right then I had to help another model I photographed get a pass to the convention. She showed up late and I was scrambling to get her this pass while Connie was just sitting in the lobby of my hotel. I basically sprinted across the street and was in full panic mode because I hate being late, but she was just chilling and was not even slightly bothered I made her wait, which I really appreciated. 

The light in my hotel room sucked but I used the one window in there to backlight her and we played with the curtains and all that stuff which was honestly a staple of my old AVN shoots. I haven’t done any shoots like that in a while and I kinda forgot how nice they look. It might not be my most original work but as you can see Connie is an absolute babe and I think they came out pretty well. I can’t wait to see the film we shot as well because it was one of only two daytime shoots I did at AVN and you know I prefer some natural light. 

Anyway, if you want to see the full NSFW gallery of Connie Perignon, you should head over to Girls of Driven By Boredom, and in the meantime I have a little mini teaser gallery for you guys below… 

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Welcome To Driven By Boredom 4.0

24 years ago today Driven By Boredom 1.0 was born in a Penn State dorm room. I hated the frat party scene there and spent most of my time talking to my friends back in DC on AOL Instant Messenger. I was bored out of my mind, but I had broadband internet and too much creativity with no outlet. I needed a place to post my photos and weird projects I was working on long before sites like Flickr and YouTube existed. On March 1st, 2001 Driven By Boredom went live and it changed my life forever.

Never in a million years did I think I would still be blogging nearly a quarter of a century later. I have run this site for more than half my life and it’s been my full time career since 2008. There’s no chance I would have made it as a photographer without this site, but this site has not always been a photoblog. 

Driven By Boredom 1.0 – 2001 – 2005:
The original site was just whatever I wanted it to be. I would post my photography of course, but it was so much more. It was a journal where I would would deeply overshare on the internet long before that was a thing that people were doing. I would post weird internet projects I was working on, memes, links to sites I found interesting, weird videos and whatever I could think of. After I left Penn State and went to art school I started managing a band called the Gaskets and for the last couple of years of DBB 1.0 it was really just a blog about that band with some occasional photos thrown in for good measure. 

Driven By Boredom 2.0 – 2005 – 2006:
I am certain Driven By Boredom 2.0 didn’t even last a year. It might not have lasted 10 posts. The original site had become such a huge pain to update that I wanted to try out the new blogging platforms. Blogs were an actual thing at this point and so I let 1.0 languish without updates and launched a Blogger account. I had this idea to review stuff and for a few weeks I was really enjoying how easy it was to update, but I was busy with the band and working shitty temp jobs and taking photos and once again the site languished. 

Driven By Boredom 3.0 – 2007 – 2025:
This is the site most people think of when they think about this website. When I moved to NYC in 2006 I was going to parties and taking photos and everyone would ask me where I was posting the photos. I had no plans to actually post any of the photos, I just don’t know how to exist without documenting my life. It was the beginning of the nightlife photo blog era and everyone wanted to see their photos from the night before. I figured I might as well bring Driven By Boredom to life and instead of using the old 1.0 design, I started using WordPress. My friend Adam made me a custom template and suddenly I had a photoblog that I didn’t update again until literally today. 

Driven By Boredom 4.0 – 2025 – ???
And here we are starting from scratch again. My old site was so out of date and broken and full of so many people’s regrets that it was time to clear the slate and build something new, while also going back to my roots. I want to blog again, which is why I created B-Sides, I want to post old photos with new context which is why we have a Vintage DBB section, and mostly I want to be able to post photos that actually make sense on modern screens. My galleries actually work now and photos are more than three times bigger now. It’s all really exciting. 

I have no idea what the future will hold for this site, no one reads blogs anymore, but I am excited to post old stories and old photos while also moving forward with new images and new stories that reflect my life in 2025 instead of whatever crazy shit I was posting about in my 20s. My life is always changing, and so is this blog. I can’t wait to see what DBB 5.0 looks like…

Vintage Driven By Boredom

If you’ve been paying attention to my social media for the last couple years I have been posting throwback party photos from the “Indie Sleaze” era over on my VintageDBB Instagram account. I’ve been having a ton of fun doing it and part of that has been going back to old parties and finding photos I totally forgot about, sometimes finding photos I never even published because they didn’t seem interesting to me at the time.

Recently I started doing posts that consisted of images from just a single night or event and writing a bit about it in the caption and with the launch of Driven By Boredom 4.0 I want to expand that. As we start from scratch with this website and start moving forward, I also want to be moving backwards by reposting old images with new context, new edits and most importantly larger files without giant watermarks on them. Back in the day I wanted my logo to show up on people’s MySpace Top 8s so I made my logo take up like 15% of the image. I also posted so many terrible photos that I didn’t edit at all and they were all 750px wide which is way too small for modern screens. I still don’t do a lot of editing these days, but at least I am not posting images that are underexposed by three stops. 

Going back and doing this is going to be a lot of work for no financial reward so I have come up with a bounty system where people can pay me to see old photos again. For $150 I will track down the party or event you want to see and reupload it in high resolution with new edits and all of that. I am happy to shout you out as well in the post if that’s something you are interested in as well. Perhaps your old band from back then has a new album out and you want a little bonus promotion, I got you. I just need to come up with a way to justify all the time I am going to be spending digging through the archives, and maybe you guys can help. If you want to see an old gallery, just reach out. 

Lastly I should mention that one of the reasons that I am starting all over again is because 2025 is not 2007 and I know there are a ton of middle aged people out there who would prefer if there old drunken photos don’t exist anymore. As I reupload old content I am sure I will be unearthing some not so great memories for people and images they wish disappeared with MySpace, so as I go through this stuff I am going to 1) Try and not post the drunkest of photos 2) I will be presenting everything with new context instead of whatever fucked up thing I said about the photos at the time and 3) as always I will be removing any photos that people don’t want up. Again, just reach out. The last thing I want to do is upset anyone. I will be posting some old NSFW content, but all of that will be paywalled, so no one can accidentally stumble on that so if your boss sees it before you can ask me to take it down you can ask him why he’s on my pay site. 

We are currently building a private archive of the old site so that I can go back and see what I wrote at the time so I might not start uploading Vintage DBB posts until that is ready to go, but in the meantime go follow VintageDBB on Instagram. See you guys back here soon…