Mainstream Sellout by Machine Gun Kelly Album Review

Controversial musician and rapper Machine Gun Kelly released his sixth album, Mainstream Sellout on the 25th of March. MGK has been in the spotlight lately for his engagement with actress Megan Fox, and their bizarre relationship has been ridiculed for as long as it’s been public. Despite the mostly negative critical reception his music has received, Machine Gun Kelly still maintains a fairly large following and is usually somewhat commercially successful with his releases. 

The beginning of this album sends the message to listeners that they shouldn’t expect much from it. The first two tracks are nearly indistinguishable from one another, except for the lyrics, which are still poorly written on both songs. The third track, with Bring Me The Horizon, is just as forgettable as the first two, and the feature (from an already mediocre band) fails to make the track any better. Seeing a Lil Wayne feature at this point gave me a naive hope for something redeemable on this album, but Wayne surprisingly doesn’t deliver a quality feature, and the instrumental is so boring that I doubt even a good feature could really save the track. The title track contributes even less to the album than any other track, and despite the running time of less than two minutes it still feels like it drags out for far too long. “Emo Girl”, the album’s lead single, has a slightly better instrumental than most other songs, but is still hard to sit through without becoming bored. The rest of the album is mostly forgettable and not really worth talking about except for a few features. Wayne’s second feature is a lot better than his first (despite still being pretty sparse) but fails to improve the track. “Die In California” is easily the album’s best track; I can actually say that the two features are genuinely good (especially Thugger’s). Unfortunately this project gets back to its standard mediocrity by the track “Sid and Nancy”, which is the point where I stopped listening to this album. 

The most surprising part of this album is that it was actually far below my expectations (which I barely had in the first place). Machine Gun Kelly has managed to make an album so horrible and boring that practically nothing from it is redeemable aside from features. Everything in this album reveals a drastic misunderstanding of the music MGK is trying to imitate; his interviews show this whenever he talks about “reviving rock” or “bringing back guitar music”. The title Mainstream Sellout, intended to be ironic and self-aware, is actually an apt description of his musical endeavors, which cater to nostalgia and past rock tropes instead of moving towards (or even recognizing) the genre’s current nature. 

This album sucks. I’m tired of even thinking about it. Also, Machine Gun Kelly is a creep.