Despite making two successful rock albums, Machine Gun Kelly still hasn’t earned the respect of his rock peers, but it doesn’t seem like the Cleveland rapper-turned-rockstar cares about it.
While accepting the award of Favorite Rock Artist at the 2022 American Music Awards, Machine Gun Kelly decided to address the accusation that he was a “tourist” in the rock community.
“There have been some people in the rock community who called me a ‘tourist,’ but they’re wrong: I’m a rocket man,” Kelly said as he raised his trophy gleefully. “We weren’t born on the moon, but we looked at it, and we were curious, and then we went there.”
Kelly noted that his last two rock albums, 2020’s Tickets To My Downfall and 2022’s Mainstream Sellout, were him “going to the moon.”
One of the loudest voices against the former rapper’s genre jump is allegedly Slipknot leader Corey Taylor. While he has not called out the “Emo Girl” singer by name, he did address people who flow in and out of genres during a recent interview.
“I [hate] the artists who failed in one genre and decided to go rock — and I think he knows who he is,” Taylor said in an interview with Loudwire. “But that’s another story.”
Kelly would later take aim at the band, referring to them as “old, weird dudes with masks.”
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