The moment Machine Gun Kelly almost gave up on music
Machine Gun Kelly’s music career has had its ups and downs, but there was a time when it all nearly became too much for him. MGK came close to quitting the industry.
He addressed this difficult period during a conversation with Dave Franco for Interview magazine, explaining that it occurred throughout the cycle for his fourth album Hotel Diablo. Released in 2019, the album saw MGK move towards a new pop-punk sound that would find a purer expression in the years to come.
Hotel Diablo was the follow-up to his Binge EP, released less than a year beforehand. This was the project that produced his infamous Eminem diss track, ‘Rap Devil,’ but it received mixed reviews, leaning towards the negative, if anything. Hotel Diablo needed to be good if he was to recover his career.
As MGK told Franco, Hotel Diablo represented the first time he had “really expressed [his] true self with no outside influence.” What he meant by that was that his label hadn’t interfered with the work, meaning it was truly his vision that drove it.
He believed that it functioned as a hip-hop album, describing it as “flawless front to back,” but he was also fond of its hints towards his pop-punk sensibility that would truly set in on 2020’s Tickets to My Downfall.
But Hotel Diablo faced an uphill battle to find recognition, from MGK’s perspective, because of the noise that his beef with Eminem had created not long beforehand. He felt that, because of the beef, nobody wanted to give Hotel Diablo “the time of day.”
“It’s like if you make a shitty movie and then you come out with a great movie right after,” he suggested, “but people want to focus on the fact that they hated whatever you just did.”
MGK believed that the Eminem beef had turned people against him. He felt that negative energy directed towards him, and it drove him to consider quitting music. But he ultimately persisted and Hotel Diablo ended up clawing back his reputation in the industry.
He believed the album was one of his best, precisely because his reputation had been at such a low point. Because he was widely disliked at the time, he felt free not to adhere to anyone’s expectations. It was therefore “the most effortless [album], with the least outside influence.”