
Riddle Box is a 1995 album by the Hip-Hop act Insane Clown Posse, and their only release on Jive Records, who notoriously screwed ICP by not marketing the album outside of Michigan, resulting in ICP having to drive to other markets to promote the album themselves.
The album's lyrics deal with the uncertainty one faces upon death. The entity serving as the face of the third Joker's Cardnote of ICP's Concept Album saga is a Scary Jack-in-the-Box whose painted question mark has faded over time, representing the mystery of one's own afterlife. Upon turning the crank, the good see Shangri-La, and the evil are cast into Hell's Pit.
While the album wasn't well reviewed at the time, it was Vindicated by History, as today it is seen as one of ICP's best albums.
Track listing
- "Intro" (1:23)
- "Riddle Box" (2:51)
- "The Show Must Go On" (5:07)
- "Chicken Huntin'" (Slaughter House Mix) (3:24)
- "Interview" (Skit) (0:47)
- "Toy Box" (5:24)
- "Cemetery Girl" (5:08)
- "3 Rings" (4:50)
- "Headless Boogie" (4:22)
- "The Joker's Wild" (4:56)
- "Dead Body Man" (4:20)
- "Lil' Somthin' Somthin'" (5:28)
- "Ol' Evil Eye" (4:53)
- "12" (6:35)
- "The Killing Fields" (4:55)
- "I'm Coming Home" (5:52)
The trope's on you:
- Black Comedy: On "Headless Boogie", Violent J witnesses zombies gathering in a cemetery to dance, and in one line he recalls "I even seen Kurt Cobain gettin' live", followed by the sound of a shotgun blast, essentially turning the Nirvana frontman's suicide, which was still recent in people's memories, into a dark joke.
- Body Horror: "The Killing Fields" is a descriptive depiction of Hell, referring to J trying to chase down and eat a baby billygoat with a man's head while a demon tries to chase J.
- Full-Boar Action: Among the other horrors of "The Killing Fields" is waking up from a bed of nails that peels off your flesh, an eternally on fire house that causes J to stand only one night in the smoke, hanging bodies from trees and the walking dead that beg and pray for death and try everything to die, summers of literal fire reducing people to surviving in the sewers with rampant cannibalism, vicious wild pigs that feed off the dying and storms of blood and internal organs.
- Game Show: "The Joker's Wild" is about a game show in Hell in which damned souls are tortured for an audience of corpses with the promise of a cash prize they'll never get because the game is impossible to win.
- I Love the Dead: "Cemetery Girl" is about a man who digs up the body of his dead girlfriend and tries to have sex with it as it slowly falls apart in his hands.
- Sampling: "I'm Coming Home" samples "Confetti Day" by Hot Chocolate. "Cemetery Girl" samples the Carnival of Carnage song "Guts on the Ceiling". "Toy Box" samples Gong's "The Pot Head Pixies" and the theme song to Pee-wee's Playhouse.
- Updated Re-release: In 2015, Psychopathic Records reissued the album in a 20th anniversary edition, featuring 17 bonus tracks.
- Whole-Plot Reference: "Ol' Evil Eye" is a pretty faithful rap adaptation of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, with the protagonist split between two characters: Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope. Violent J is haunted by the dead-looking eye of the Old Man, and sets out to murder him. Shaggy attempts to stop him, but once he sees the Old Man, he joins J's quest to murder the man. The music is pretty consistently dark and nightmarish, and actual excerpts from the Poe story appear sporadically.
