Beat logo

Seven of Machine Gun Kelly’s Most Complicated, Philosophical Quotes Explained

Satire

By Katie AlafdalPublished 2 years ago 3 min read
1
Seven of Machine Gun Kelly’s Most Complicated, Philosophical Quotes Explained
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash

1. “I am weed.”

This is no doubt a reference to famed Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali’s famous ejaculation that, “I don’t do drugs. I am a drug.” A transgressive artist himself, MGK’s casual acknowledgement that altered states of consciousness do not necessarily require an external substance to catalyze them is still a somewhat radical spiritual and biochemical assertion.

2. “Can we just go to the fucking bar?”

As Nietzsche once expounded, and Kelly was no doubt aware, alcohol is one of the two great European narcotics (the other being Christianity, which will no doubt be the subject of a subsequent album). Or, in the words of George Bernard Shaw, “alcohol is the anesthesia by which we endure the operations of life.” MGK is no stranger to the perils of emotionality, and the trials and tribulations of human suffering. His desire to drown out those impossibilities with ephemeral pleasures is a purposeful escapade into futility and fleeting desire.

3. ‘It’s almost like she [Megan Fox] reconnected a wire in my brain. Creativity won’t stop coming out.”

Obviously, brains do not have “wires” in the literal sense, but the metaphorical implications of MGK’s assertion call to mind Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking “Cyborg Manifesto.” The Cleveland rapper is subtly but unflinchingly alluding to the idea that, “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.”

4. “I love a dark fairy tale.”

MGK's fascination with the “fairy tale” medium places him in good company, amongst the ranks of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christen Andersen, Ursula K. Leguin, Oscar Wilde, Octavia Butler, and many more. The ability to simultaneously locate the trajectory of his own life in the context of narrative, and navigate the uncertainties of an escapist fantasy is worthy of analysis. His application of archaic European folklore to his own contemporary existence reveals the anachronisms of a sensitive, ancient soul trapped in a mechanized wasteland.

5. “I’m just better at speaking with my music.”

Kierkegaard once expressed that, “The most abstract idea conceivable is the spirit of sensuality. But in what medium can it be represented? Only in music.” Kelly too acknowledges that music has a way of bypassing conscious thought and drawing out genius with an immediacy that other mediums are inherently unable to do. After all, one only needs to consider the harrowing, brilliant melodies from MGK’s hits “my ex’s best friend”, “hollywood whore”, or “mind of a stoner” to recognize intuitively the unspeakable and ineffable erudition behind them.

6. “I came from broken homes and I watched love never work. Then I grew up where in pop culture they don’t even make romantic movies any more. It hurts my soul that I wasted 30 years of my life not having any desire. Dude, I was down to die.”

MGK’s poignant and striking revelations about his childhood, bring to mind the early psychoanalytical scholarship of Sigmund Freude. In detailing how his own broken home (and therefore how his highly dysfunctional nuclear family) influenced his later chaotic interpersonal relationships, Kelly is also signaling his knowledge of his own unconscious mind. Not only does he describe his lived experience with the “death drive”, but he also delves into how compulsive cycles of traumatic repetition forced him into an ongoing unhealthy mindset that could only be broken through acknowledgement and awareness of his own repressed desires and libido.

7. “I’m still a motherfucking outlaw.”

That’s right--Machine Gun Kelly is no stranger to the nuances of queer theory! His identification with the outlaw archetype inevitably evokes associations of “otherness” and resistance to existing structures of oppression which keep marginalized groups disenfranchised. The rapper’s purposeful orientation of himself outside of normative power structures might even be a direct response to Jose Esteban Munoz’ stunning work on queer potentialities, Cruising Utopia, where the author explains, “The here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now's totalising rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there.” I mean, what can’t the man conceptualize??

satire
1

About the Creator

Katie Alafdal

queer poet and visual artist. @leromanovs on insta

Reader insights

Be the first to share your insights about this piece.

How does it work?

Add your insights

Comments

There are no comments for this story

Be the first to respond and start the conversation.

Sign in to comment

    Find us on social media

    Miscellaneous links

    • Explore
    • Contact
    • Privacy Policy
    • Terms of Use
    • Support

    © 2024 Creatd, Inc. All Rights Reserved.