ascension of Korn-schooled rhythmic metal mutations, the timing couldn't be better for ICP to ride a wave of rock-rap fusion. They are marketing their own comic-book series and promoting "Play With Me" ICP dolls, and they have starred in a direct-to-video cinematic caper, Big Money Hustlas. And they'll continue to embarrass the hell out of white and black folk alike with their first manifesto forged under the mainstream gun, The Amazing Jeckel Brothers.

Unless you're already a Juggalo (that's Posse-ese for fan), you've probably never heard ICP's music and have probably heard that it sucks. Aside from a few spins of the novelty record "Santa's a Fat Bitch," radio hasn't touched ICP. MTV has looked the other way. Critics have taken particular glee in trashing these Jean-Claude Van Dammes of the hip-hop world. No rap act has inspired such a credibility gap between sales and status since the glory days of Vanilla Ice. And like Ice or Kiss or Spice Girls or Detroit forefather Alice Cooper or the World Wrestling Federation, ICP are more about conceptual exhibitionism than introspection and skill. Boasting revenge-minded raps, toxic-level testosterone and Y2K-timed concepts of divine retribution, ICP aim to stage a big-top hip-hop wrestling bout in which the forces of good-evil (theirs) and bad-evil (everyone else's) duke it out. Yeah, it's kinda corny, and the routine is designed to separate the Juggalos from the nonbelievers, a split that fuels ICP's us vs. them sensibility but that hasn't actualized their goal of world domination. As J himself once put it, the ICP experience is "not really a display of talent. . . . We use [theatrics] to hide the fact that we suck."

Like their previous four albums, six EPs and two-CD B-sides-and-outtakes hodgepodge, Jeckel was put together with Mike E. Clark, a Detroit producer-engineer-remixer who has freaked the funk for George Clinton and Primal Scream. Here, Clark manages to supply ICP with enough musical hat tricks to sustain their voodoo-doodoo thematics. While Shaggy and J endeavor to explain their latest morality tale -- one involving Jake and Jack Jeckel, brothers who juggle the sins of man until Judgment Day -- Clark brings the hip-hop beats, carnival organ riffs, power chords and shotgun blasts that Juggalos expect, plus a whole new slew of alt-rock swindles.

Whereas Milenko included rock-cred-conscious contributio