19 Thoughts on Machine Gun Kelly's Tickets to My Downfall
- I’ve been thinking a lot about what celebrity looks like after (waves hand in the air) all of this. At the beginning of the pandemic, it seemed like the notion and function of celebrity had quite possibly and finally proved to be useless—and I do think we’re still witnessing that bear itself out on some level, at the very least in the continued collapse in perception towards the Kardashian industrial complex.
- Here’s what I think is actually going to happen on a wider scale, though: we’re about to revert back to the Bush II-era celebrity culture, in which collectively despising celebrities for their low-grade trashiness, obnoxiousness, and/or all-around omnipresence replaces the Obama-era, Avengers-esque valorization of celebrities that we’ve been in the throes of from, let’s say, 2011 on. Again, you can look at the Kardashians’ cultural currency for proof that this is already taking place. If anything, their trajectory represents a full-circle moment back to the late 2000s, when they were often held as totems of fame-hungry excess, rather than the serious reconsideration they received in the mid-to-late-2010s. For a certain (and growing) subset of people, it feels good to hate the Kardashians again, if only to place the anger somewhere else that’s inconsequential for a moment or two.
- It’s a little surprising that it took the pandemic for us to potentially return to such a time in U.S. popular culture. Our current President is essentially the decaying T-1000 of the advent of reality television, and even on the eve of (chokes down vomit) the election he’s still acting like a cast member on The Surreal Life.
- Hey, remember when there were all these predictions about how Hollywood would embrace more conservative-minded entertainment following Trump’s election? Remember how the Roseanne reboot turned out? The cognitive dissonance between supposed blue-state and red-state cultures (Hamilton vs. whatever stereotypical thing you want to claim that non-coastal elites regularly consume) has somehow only grown in the last four years, only it’s less about party affiliations and more about culture reflecting reality. Mass entertainment has increasingly focused on finding hope in search of social justice and battling various societal abuses, while real life seemingly and often mirrors anything but a positive arc.
- So a return to the “Celebreality” era was effectively delayed by the cultural hangovers lasting from the Obama era—but if it isn’t about to arrive again, then at the very least things feel a whole lot like the 2000s again. Borat’s back, we’re getting a new Jackass movie next year. After spending most of the decade shaping popular culture around her, Taylor Swift dropped the surprise album folklore that had many a critic throwing around the term “indie-folk”—a subset of indie that has more or less been out of fashion with the cool-kid set since the late 2000s—for the first time in many years. One of the biggest pop stars in the world is Post Malone, a tattoo-covered goofball who loves drinking Bud Light beyond the obvious promotional aspects and has gained a plethora of media coverage simply off of how people don’t like him very much. (I wrote a little about that phenomenon here, and here.)
- One bright spot in the beginning of the pandemic was Post Malone’s all-Nirvana-covers charity livestream. Despite the idea of the event itself seeming like a total potential trainwreck, it was impossibly good-natured and revealed Post to be a true study of the band’s catalog. The stream was hangdog and relaxed, as band mates—including Travis Barker, situated up near a corner and pounding away at the drums—popped in and out of the feed while social distancing in the same bigger-than-most-of-our-Zoom-rooms room.
- Travis Barker having been attached to two improbably good pop cultural occurrences this year seems like another harbinger that we’re in the midst of some form of a 2000s revival. The other thing is the new album from Machine Gun Kelly, Tickets to My Downfall, which may as well be considered a ghostwritten Travis Barker solo record: he co-wrote, co-produced, and plays drums over the entire thing, the result of a two-month creative process between him and MGK.
- Tickets to My Downfall itself feels very 2000s as well—an album ripped straight from the “Parental Advisory” horde of releases a teenager might have been accruing around the start of this millennium. It sounds like it could’ve been one of the gnarlier syncs on The O.C., it sounds like fodder for every chauvinistic teen sex comedy from 1999-2005. Some of it seems directly inspired by (and one of its songs directly features) MGK’s relationship with Megan Fox, a celebrity who many associate with the 2000s by design. One of the songs on the deluxe edition sounds so similar to Fall Out Boy’s “Dance Dance” that it required clearance from the band itself, and Bert McCracken from the Used guests on it. That’s how 2000s this album sounds.
- I was obviously very aware of the virality of the above video at the time, but I completely forgot (it didn’t even register with me, really) that Travis Barker was the one who captured it! As many people who have worked at a label or music publication mentioned at the time, there is something so relatable about all the people sitting at the board table in this video—barely pretending to be impressed, clearly itching to be out of the room as soon as possible, maybe even vaguely annoyed they’re being subject to this when there’s actual work they could be doing. Again, extremely relatable.
- Let’s focus a little more on Barker’s side of things for a bit longer, because we’ll get to MGK himself in a bit. Tickets to My Downfall has a few good songs (and one or two flat-out amazing songs) on it, but it sounds not-so-great. This is mostly because of the production, I think; Barker’s drumming is like some sort of massive wall constantly rushing towards you while you’re listening to this thing. Songwriting-wise, it’s also clear that he (in congress with MGK) is a little limited when it comes to framework. There’s not a ton of variety when it comes to pacing here, and a front-to-back listen can be a bit exhausting aside from some of the more mediocre cuts.
- But, good lord, this song. “Bloody Valentine” is one of the best pop songs of the year to me—basically what you’d get if a pop-punk band attempted their own “Mr. Brightside” and ended up totally nailing it. Great opening line, great throwaway lyrics (“I don’t do fake love/ But I’ll take some from you tonight”), a massive-sounding anthem that I will absolutely do at karaoke when we’re allowed to do karaoke again.
- Machine Gun Kelly isn’t much of a rock vocalist. (Most of the time, he’s not much of a lyricist, either.) He mostly sings in this deadened, hyper-affected monotone that closely resembles so much post-grunge alternative rock that was unloaded around the turn of the century; sometimes, he does a snarling thing, but it’s not very convincing. (I’ll be doing a little blurb on what I think is his best vocal performance in the next Baker’s Dozen.)
- Which is why Halsey absolutely wipes the floor with him on “Forget Me Too.” It’s one of the better songs on the album overall, MGK sounds totally okay on it—then Halsey comes in and just shreds it with a hair-whipping verse and chorus that makes you wish it was just her song. If I sound like a stan, so be it; I loved Manic from earlier this year and last year’s “Nightmare” was a taste of the stormy, moody rock side of her that she should definitely continue to explore.
- Along with contemporaries like Post Malone and Justin Bieber (specifically, his latest album), Halsey often receives the criticism that her music sounds like the streaming algorithm—a criticism that can be well-deployed but is also often used as a rhetorical crutch to dismiss the intangible or vague. (Even Tame Impala gets accused of making background music these days—a far cry from the band’s guitar-stomping Lonerism era, to be sure.)
- It is true that a lot of modern pop sounds murky and purple, though, and perhaps that’s why Tickets to My Downfall feels like such a surprise. It’s loud and aggressive, at times to a fault. So much radio rock these days has essentially re-defined what it means to “rock,” in a sense—I’m thinking Imagine Dragons, twenty one pilots, et al—but there’s no mistaking what Tickets to My Downfall is, which feels like a fascinating throwback to the (you guessed it) hard-chugging pop-punk radio environs of the early-to-mid-2000s (especially in a year in which Green Day themselves bricked hard with a new release).
- Pretty decent year for rock music in general, huh? There’s the Dogleg album, obviously. Jeff Rosenstock might have made his best record yet, I’m still listening to the Loathe album constantly, Deftones returned with the dark and seductive Ohms, lots of good scattered talky post-punk revival songs, the Code Orange album was very enjoyable, Soccer Mommy made one of the best straight-up indie rock records I’ve heard in years, the Beach Bunny album was excellent too. Even The Killers came through with an absurdly excellent new album, and when I interviewed them around the last album they seemed like the most creatively bored people I’ve ever met in my life.
- As much as MGK is doing a “rock thing” on Tickets to My Downfall, though, I’m not sure it’s worth calling this a “rock album” as much as it is a “pop album in the guise of a rock album.” Or maybe it’s neither of those things, really. This whole cycle is a chameleonic exercise for MGK, who was previously a terrible and very annoying rapper and has pulled off a reasonably successful rebranding that, if he’s smart, he should probably stick with and maybe even refine a little.
- The biggest influence that seems to loom over Tickets to My Downfall—more than any Road Trip DVD or Sum 41 CD—is Lil Peep, the late emo-rap auteur who beautifully blended hip-hop and pop-punk and felt like a true once-in-a-generation talent. His influence on popular culture has only begun but is already deeply felt; you can hear a little of what he did in spots of Halsey’s Manic as well as the work of late Chicago rapper Juice WRLD, not to mention the myriad rappers that were Peep’s peers and continue to pop up in his wake.
- The more emotionally pained moments on Tickets to My Downfall feel like an attempt to channel Peep’s own anguish and anger, but even though this music succeeds as pop the overall gesture feels anything but sincere. “Machine Gun Kelly the emotionally tortured pop-punk artist” is certainly a more effective pose than “Machine Gun Kelly the rapper,” but it still feels like a pose regardless, at least for now.