Curious what notable personalities in the scene think was great this year? So is TGEFM! So we reached out to some of our favorite luminaries ranging from musicians, label personnel, and more for their “Best of 2025” lists. Now, listen: TGEFM is not a taskmistress. Contributors can write these out however they want. So if it doesn’t actually look or read like a list… and sometimes it really is just a list with no other observations! Who cares?
For his year-end list, MC Lars went full heart-on-sleeve in a way only he can. The lit-hop and nerdcore pioneer who originated the post-punk laptop rap sound, spent 2025 bouncing between minivans and laundry rooms, Juggalo mayhem and family milestones and the kind of music moments that stick to your insides. What follows is his unfiltered, funny and romanticized look back at a year where fatherhood, fandom and all the wicked ish collided in the best possible way.
Twiztid kicked off my year by dropping Welcome to Your Funeral on Valentine’s Day, which felt weirdly romantic in the way only Juggalos can pull off. Their 17th LP hit with Zeuss’s nu-metal crunch, Madrox and Monoxide snarling like it was 2001 again, and me blasting “Fed Up” in the minivan while the kids requested fruit snacks at top volume. The “Be My Bloody Valentine” tour only proved what I already knew: Juggalos understand courtship better than the rest of us.
By August, I was at the 25th Gathering of the Juggalos in Legend Valley, which honestly felt like stumbling into the world’s rowdiest family reunion. ICP celebrated “Wraith: Shangri-La,” juggalettes took Faygo showers like it was baptism, and Tech N9ne, Waka Flocka, and Mushroomhead formed a genre smoothie no one asked for but everyone tasted. Then Bone Thugs showed up on Day 4, and I yelled so loud I accidentally startled a teenager into dropping his nachos. My kids were safe at home, my marriage steady, my knees begging for ice, but spiritually I felt twenty again.
ICP’s The Naught arrived one day before the Gathering, closing out the second Joker’s Deck with a record that somehow doubled as my late-night laundry soundtrack. Only ICP could make folding onesies feel like a metaphysical quest. When they asked, “If there’s no afterlife when you die… were you ever really alive at all?” I nodded like a man who had spent the last ten minutes searching the dryer for a missing sock that never existed.
And while all that wickedness played out, my home life added its own slapstick energy. I had a vasectomy that humbled me in ways language can’t capture, but my wife and kids were sweet through the entire ice-pack saga. I found accidental serenity after some doomed yogurt choices in a Princeton parking lot. I became the dad who hums Bone Thugs while pushing a stroller. I spent midnight hours ripping 1930s Mickey Mouse cartoons while the house slept, feeling oddly grateful for quiet and cartoons and stability.
Somewhere in the middle of the minivan nu-metal, the Faygo showers, the laundry-based existentialism, and the yogurt-induced enlightenment, it hit me: I wasn’t trying to escape anything. Life is good. The kids are hilarious. My partner keeps everything steady. And the Juggalo world isn’t my exit door, it’s my comic relief. My circus. My silly, messy, wicked joy.
Whoop whoop to that.
MC Lars
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/