Review Summary: A Bad Singer, In Terrible Lyrics, Marketing Teams
a collaborative effort by dedex, tyman128, ian b. and JesperL
Machine Gun Kelly is a marketing genius. Everything he (or rather, his
team) decides to bring into the public eye is brilliantly designed to outrage those who wouldn’t buy (into) his music, and intrigue those who would. Maximise press, maximise sales, you get the idea. Colson Baker (let’s exclusively refer to the musician by his real name, shan’t we?) giving his beloved fiancee Megan Fox a ring that will cause her to bleed if she tries to take it off? Cringy to most people over the age of thirteen;
deeply epic to the singer’s target demographic. It’s clear that every inch of Colson’s public persona is curated to hell and back by money-hungry suits, which begs the question: why would they ever let him sing? Why don’t they hire some better songwriters?
My guess: Collo’s ego. Either way, it doesn’t really matter, because it’s 2022 and the second full length dose of the man’s pop punk era has arrived. This one is called
Mainstream Sellout, which is funny and hilarious and self aware but also super crazy ironic because this record features more guitars than some of Colly’s other records. Ugh, f
uck, I guess it’s time to actually talk about the music now. You’ve probably heard the single ‘emo girl’, and if you haven’t, imagine the worst Good Charlotte song repeating “
I fell in love with an emo girl” as a chorus. Again, marketing genius: utterly dreadful to any vaguely mature sentient being, yet bound to encapsulate the feelings of anyone who was finally allowed to install TikTok two weeks ago. The Willow feature is by far the best thing about this tune, if only for the fact that she can actually sing. To be fair, this goes for every single one of the features on
Mainstream Sellout. Even Oli Sykes easily outshines Cols-o by virtue of not being completely tone-deaf, even though the Bring Me The Horizon frontman isn’t exactly renowned for his singing voice these days. Okay, cool, that’s half a paragraph of music talk done: I need a break. There’s
sixteen goddamn songs on this record. Boiz, do we have anything else to talk about?
How about the album cover? Tha Colla doesn’t seem to realise his guitar isn’t wired - maybe it’s one of those Elon Musk WiFi guitars - yet he seems ready to smash the two chords he knows. Notice the pink tomatoes thrown at him? Apparently the world of Elon Musk WiFi guitars ALSO is a world where tomatoes are pink, yet none of them have managed to actually land on Coletrain Baker Mayfield. The marketing team does their job well, but they sure need to work on their aim. Even Colibri seems puzzled at this, or maybe he’s just pulling that “2000s mainstream pop punk f
uckboi face”? If so, it becomes quite clear that pop punk is back bitches lmao. Not from a musical point of view - we ain’t here to talk about music - but one of public image: adolescent-looking adults getting uncomfortably close with adult-looking adolescents (remember those tweets, Closon?)… now that’s something we sure all miss from the Warped Tour Era.
Oh, and who’s gonna be the one to tell Colton that he doesn’t know how to sing? Like, for real, what is even going on here? Throughout this masterpiece, the dude manages to hit like three notes at best. And they’re all flat? Honestly, kind of impressed by his (in)ability. I guess pop punk is sort of infamous for its strange vocals, but this is just utterly
extremely grating. And if you thought that was bad, wait till you hear how he begins the wonderful track “maybe”. Instead of your classic count in, Mr. Rap Devil himself has the audacity to say “
two three… five”? Where did the five come from? Beats me. Really sets the tone for the ingenuity of the record if you ask me. *
sigh* …can we just… can we just have someone from pop-punk diss this man to another genre already? Hell, let’s get Eminem to do a pop-punk track to get Cologne out of the industry… one could only dream. Anyway, enough of the vocal rant, let’s get back to Jesper.
Cheers tydex, I feel reinvigorated. Here are some more things that suck about the album! Throughout the record, Colbol seems to have a lot of girls around him. On ‘drug dealer’, this girl is a drug dealer girl. On ‘god save me’, she’s a goth girl and a pop girl. On ‘sid & nancy’, this girl wears t-shirts. On ‘emo girl’... yeah, okay, you get the idea. Naturally, every inch of
Mainstream Sellout treads the line between unoriginal and
blatant ripoff. Opener ‘born with horns’ copy-pastes Blink-182’s ‘Feeling This’, ‘paper cuts’ copy-pastes Green Day’s ‘Brain Stew’. Oh, hey, ‘5150’ copy-pastes Blink-182’s ‘Feeling This’ again! Fun! If anything, the more trap-infused tracks gracing the record’s back half fare better, solely because they aren’t direct copies of some of the most well-known pop punk songs of all time. Moreover, the extremely overblown production doesn’t achieve the same maximalism here, making for a comparatively listenable bunch of songs. Key word:
comparatively.
Let’s finish on an inspiring note.
Mainstream Sellout proves that you don’t need musical talent to make it big in the music scene. You just need a whole lot of money to hire an excellent marketing team. Colson Baker is the voice of a generation that will realise his voice is pretty dreadful approximately seven months from now.
epilogue
Our beloved ian b. has been located. It appears they have been yoten into a wormhole solely due to the terribleness of Mainstream Sellout. The two transmissions we received from outer space read “ww81llsa$3)#1”, which translates to “something something Lil Peep”, and “3slxj%#QEfiskP” which translates to “maybe the gatekeepers are onto something”. After these messages, ian b. was never seen again.
