Following his embarrassing feud with Eminem, a rapper who’s pushing fifty and still failing to recreate the music that made him big in the first place, rapper Machine Gun Kelly attempted to subvert the rap industry until he decided it was time for a change, and pop-punk seemed like prime –and vacant– real estate. Machine Gun Kelly, born Colson Baker, has since asserted himself as the arbiter of what constitutes “rock and roll” and punk, taking shots at Warped Tour headliners for wearing comfortable shoes while performing and at Corey Taylor of nu-metal legends Slipknot for wearing a mask onstage during Riot Fest. He has made it very clear he’s not here to make friends, especially not within the many diverse and bustling punk scenes that exist right now. It also seems he’s not here to recognize the countless punk bands who came before him and paved the way for a washed-up 31-year-old to dye his tongue black, cosplay as an angsty high-school sophomore, and dance to his own demos on a board table in front of Interscope studio execs.
Punk is, and has been since its inception, queer, Black, Latine, and generally a genre of rage coming from marginalized groups towards the systems that oppress them. Its many modern iterations vary in the explicitness of their anti-establishment views, but they remain, at their core, true to the ideals of punk itself. Even currently, artists of color, queer artists, and artists who uphold the longstanding values of the punk movement are working harder, building more extensive communities, and making far more interesting music without a major label backing them, unlike the “Rap Devil” himself.
Punk is ever-evolving and intersecting with different genres, including pop, rap, emo (a genre that is an offshoot of punk in its own right), metal, and even folk. The diversity both in terms of demographic and sound within punk, then begs the question: Why is Machine Gun Kelly being heralded as this harbinger of a punk revival? Punk, and especially pop-punk, has done nothing but thrive in the past decade. MGK’s genre shift seems like an opportunistic ploy to tap into the already nostalgia-laden trends of the 2020s and the upward trend of pop-punk in the mainstream.
Pop punk is not the only iteration of the genre which has seen a renaissance with a 2020s audience; Detroit’s post-hardcore quartet Dogleg received Best New Music in their Pitchfork review, pop punk/easycore band Meet Me @ The Altar recently signed with Fueled by Ramen and collaborated with Facebook to put out their song “Hit Like A Girl.” Baltimore punks Pinkshift saw massive success on the incremental output of their self-released EP ‘Saccharine,’ so much so they recently embarked on a west coast tour with Mannequin Pussy, a band whose name will, in a decade, undoubtedly replace Paramore’s in the age-old tradition of cis white men telling female-fronted pop punk and alternative bands they sound just like them. Not only do all of these bands have members from different marginalized groups, they also embody the intense DIY ethos that makes punk what it is, and they’re far from alone.
So no, punk’s not dead, and treating Machine Gun Kelly as if his half-assed attempt at a punk album as a means of nursing a wounded ego is reviving a genre that is better than alive and well is ignorant, and blatantly disregards the countless smaller bands that have to work exponentially harder than Colson. Below is assembled a non-comprehensive playlist of punk and the many forms it takes today from artists who actually know what it means to make punk music, consider it an alternative to giving MGK your streams.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7qhUJMl289zLdsNfG4uiRN?si=956020292b7a4867
Article by Walker Price
Photos by Rich Fury / Getty