“The mainstream’s waiting! Give ’em what they want!” bawls Colson Baker on the title track of Mainstream Sellout. The rapper-turned-rocker duly delivers, knocking out 13 tracks that wrap generic angst around formulaic grunge-pop parcels. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect to hear in the Vans outlet of your local shopping mall.
This is Baker’s sixth album as Machine Gun Kelly and, in a sketchy way, follows the arc of his life to date. We witness his journey from outsider kid (the child of divorced missionaries) through the additional outsidering he experienced as a young celebrity, to the soppy soulmatery he’s found with fiancée Megan Fox. The pair have been delighting the press by drinking vials of each other’s blood and chaining themselves together. The actor – who calls Baker her “twin flame” – doesn’t appear to be bothered by the recently resurfaced comments he made about Black women, or wanting to have sex with Kendall Jenner when he was 23 and she was 17 (the legal age of consent in California is 18).
