Music publications are heralding mainstream sellout as one of the worst albums of the year. That’s probably true, but how can it be bad when it’s so boring?
The last time I wrote a column, it was my thoughts on the modern interpretation of the “Deluxe album”. In writing that article, I found myself struggling to find super recent examples of artists ham-fisting the release of a deluxe album soon after the original drop. It’s one of those things that isn’t terribly common, but it happens enough that it bothers me.
So, of course, when I began listening to an album I planned to review, I came across this…
Of course.
Machine Gun Kelly has been a punchline for a long time now. He’s always going to have his die hard fans, but most music listeners have brushed his career off as a novelty. This wasn’t helped by the utterly corny collaboration with WILLOW titled Emo Girl.
Despite being released after YouTube disabled viewership of a videos dislikes, enough people still disliked the video that it has more than 50% dislikes.
It’s hard to believe that Machine Gun Kelly had any credibility which could be killed by this song after being dissed by Eminem and claiming to Megan Fox that “[he] is weed,” but somehow he became more of a joke after this track.
Personally, I think it was just a regular bad song; Not any better or worse than the thousands of bad songs released to the masses every day. Besides the incessant memes surrounding it, I found it perfectly avoidable. I was happy to live my life in an MGK free bubble.
In writing music reviews though, there comes a time where you have to look a bad project in the face and take it on. One can only take my word for what’s really good if they know what I think is really bad.
And trust me, the album attached to this single is really bad.
In March of 2022, Machine Gun Kelly dropped Mainstream Sellout, his sixth studio album and second pop punk album.
Weirdly, the bonus tracks tacked on for the deluxe edition are added in the beginning and the end, making it impossible to keep up with the album when trying to decipher the lyrics because there’s inconsistent track lists.
Annoying formatting aside, something has to be said about the actual content of this album before anything else.
Machine Gun Kelly is not a good singer.
Kelly’s cover of System of a Down’s classic track Aerials on the Howard Stern show proved to me that he was a rotten singer, but the vocals on the original track were soaring and impressive. Surely on an album centered around him, those working on the album would make him sing to his strengths. As this album goes on, it becomes apparent that he doesn’t really have any strengths as a vocalist.
He sings in this boring and droning tone for the majority of the album. I don’t know what pop-punk artist he’s trying to emulate with his vocals but he’s not even trying to sing outside of his comfort zone. Pop punk is fun and energetic, so a vocalist should be ready to belt, scream, etc. In general, a rock vocalist should at least sound awake.
Unfortunately, it seems like the whole album was recorded sitting on a stool and smoking a cigarette like the Aerials cover at Howard Stern. He’s the biggest obstacle preventing this album from being even passable. I don’t think I’d like this album if it featured a good vocalist, but it’d be a huge difference.
Sonically, MGK doesn’t have much original to perform. The track papercuts sounds a whole lot like Brain Stew by Green Day. die in california and more than life sound like really poor Hollywood Undead cuts. The track maybe straight up rips off the chorus from Paramore’s greatest hit Misery Business.
Not to mention that half the tracks sound like Blink 182 songs made by someone who hates Blink 182.
Considering that Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker was heavily involved in this album, it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that Barker tried to make this as textbook pop punk as he could.
Barker actually tries really hard on the drums to keep the energy up on the harder rockers on this album. At the end of the day though, any kind of energy we get from Barker’s thrashing and bashing are disrupted by Kelly’s horrific singing.
Why does he sound like that, anyway?
Throughout the album, Kelly makes sure to tell us incessantly that he does drugs. He mentions it on almost every song. In fact, there’s a song called drug dealer which is about how much he loves this girl who gives him drugs. I can’t argue with the authenticity of that, considering that he and Megan Fox allegedly drink each other’s blood as a ritual?
Speaking of Kelly’s lyrics, he relies really heavily on rock/emo cliches to get through these tracks. More Than Life is about how bad this girl is and how much Kelly needs to have her. I think every artist with even the slightest hint of edge from the last 25 years has written a song like that. One could defend Kelly going down that route, but the lyrics don’t go much further than “…without you I’d die, and I don’t wanna die”.
fake love don’t last stops with the subtlety at the title. It’s about a girl who wants Kelly back, except he’s not interested in her using him.
Is there anything not cliché on this album?
Well, there’s the song sid and nancy about committing murder suicide in the vein of nazi-punk Sid Vicious.
…
Yikes.
For some reason, the title track mainstream sellout decides to take the B-Rabbit in 8-Mile approach of saying all of his artistic flaws. Assumably, this is so that he can get in front of critics who claim that he’s a poser or unoriginal, but that doesn’t absolve him of those criticisms.
Does he ever seem earnest in a worthwhile way? Well, the last track of the original release of the album twin flame is probably the best out of a bad bunch. It’s just an acoustic love song to Megan Fox. It’s not too well written, but it makes sense tonally and it feels authentic to him. Barker and the rest of the band get the chance to thrash and bash at the end which was one of the brighter sonic moments of the album.
5150 and WW4 are both tracks a bad garage band conceivably could have made, but it’s still a drastic improvement over a lot of the album. Of course, the hook on 5150 has these annoying interrupting vocals to ruin the best hook on the record and WW4 is unfinished because Kelly lost his voice while recording and it never came back.
God Save Me was a really promising track building up to a really intense and powerful chorus that never comes. Instead, Kelly just continues strumming at the same pace and droning on in the same boring manner.
What about the bonus tracks? Well, the first four tracks are new tracks not originally part of the album. why are you here is the best of a tacky bunch, but it’s not any better than the dreck the album subjects its listeners to afterwards.
The two tracks at the end are new versions of tracks already on the album. The live version of papercuts just further exposes how bad of a live singer Kelly is with a pitiful rendition of a bad song. Meanwhile, the acoustic version of maybe exchanges the riffs from Paramore for the most boring tone in any song ever recorded.
There’s also a lot of features on this record, and they’re all bad. Lil’ Wayne has two horrific verses (if you’re curious, his verse on ay! Is the worse one). Iann Dior and Glaive both hop in to sing inane MGK lyrics, but they both shine over Kelly because they’re halfway decent vocalists. Willow shines on Emo Girl as well despite her lyrics being just as stupid and annoying as Kelly’s.
Young Thug and Gunna both turn in half asleep verses on die in California alongside someone named Landon Barker…
Who is that?
That explains so much.
Don’t listen to this album. It’s not the car crash people have been telling you about. At the end of the day, the biggest flaw of this album is that despite Machine Gun Kelly living the strangest and most tabloid friendly life one could imagine, he’s the most boring musician in the game right now. Boring vocals, boring lyrics, and unoriginal sonic ideas lead to almost an hour of wasted time and an eternally ruined Spotify algorithm.
I don’t think this album deserves the distinction of worst album of the year because it doesn’t do enough to even achieve that much. It’s a constant drone of boring garbage.