Remembering the Bad Boys of My Youth Through Machine Gun Kelly

I’ve got to look this dude up, I think, scrolling through a BuzzFeed article about “How Megan Fox and Machine Gun Kelly Met.” I know most of the celebrities who make up Hollywood’s current power couples: Kourtney Kardashian, Travis Barker, Kim Kardashian, and Pete Davidson—but the tall, tattooed man who nabbed Megan Fox is still a mystery to me.

I type “Machine Gun Kelly” into Google, click “Videos,” and begin to watch “Bloody Valentine,” the first song that pops up. The opening chords strum against my ears and, before I know it, I become enamored with the kind of musician I thought died out after I graduated high school.

As I watch, I’m enrapt with MGK’s bad-boy aesthetic, as well as music that sounds like what was popular when I was a teenager. I’m breathless as the camera lands on Fox’s perfect face, panning out to show MGK wearing only his underwear. I note his shaggy blond hair and bright blue eyes, tattooed chest—silver earrings dangling from his ears and chains wound tight around his neck. As the video continues and MGK appears fully dressed, his six-feet-four frame is clad in everything from a pale-pink sweatshirt to black platform boots to a zebra-print jacket. Leaning into the mic, he belts out the chorus, “I don’t do fake love but I’ll take some from you tonight,” sticking out his tongue between lines.

I wasn’t always as uninteresting as I am now, I think, refreshing the browser and teleporting back to my punk rock heyday. Instead of a thirty-three-year-old assistant professor, mother to a four-year-old, and partner to a man who is no longer anything like MGK, I am sixteen years old again and dating a guy who got expelled from Catholic school for smoking weed. He’s the lead guitarist in a band that has a cheerful condom for a mascot, who his doting parents plaster on T-shirts. The band consists of my boyfriend, with his sideswiped bangs and belt loops he weighs down with chains; a short, heavyset bass player, who wears a permanently chill expression under a worn Slipknot ball cap; and a drummer built a lot like Barker, who spikes his hair and stretches his earlobes out with 10 mm gauges. My boyfriend’s gauges aren’t quite as large, maybe 7 or 8 mm, but I wonder what they’ll look like when he’s older.

At thirty-three, I wonder what they look like now. I grab headphones in case my partner hears me listening to the same, angsty song over and over. This time, I travel back to a cramped, box-like venue. I’m listening to that boyfriend with the gauges sing a song called “I Like Sex” while a girl with a green Mohawk thrusts against her friends in the crowd. I sit in a chair beside his parents, wearing a beige cable-knit sweater with big brown buttons and black boots with the tiniest bit of a heel.

I’m out of place and I love it, I think, as my boyfriend jumps off the stage after his set and makes his way toward me. A skinny bad boy brushing hair out of his eyes, pushing past other girls in the crowd—my desire for him, and his for me, is thrilling. I love his tumultuous energy, our differences, and that feeling of freedom he gives me.

Each time I watch Machine Gun Kelly’s “Bloody Valentine,” my eyes move over the sharp, attractive slope of MGK’s nose as he gazes at Fox and I see this boy from my past, hunched over a guitar in his basement with a tiny amplifier sitting behind him, exuding an “I don’t give a fuck” kind of cool as he plays “Too Many Puppies” by Primus.

“Teach me,” I say, opposite him on a green couch that smells like weed.

*

After that night, “Bloody Valentine” becomes that song I commit to for months. I listen to Tickets to My Downfall, MGK’s latest album, countless times because it captures a certain kind of “cool” for me, one tied to the deep agitation I felt, and still feel, growing up. Some days I’d rather be the kid breaking curfew, listening to songs about despair that have nothing to do with adult responsibility—and enjoying less self-reflection in general—than be the responsible adult.

When I listen to MGK, I forget about the effort it takes to maintain a full-time job, healthy kid, and happy partner and imagine I’m young and dating a lead singer who wears nail polish again, someone who inspires me to be just as reckless and disillusioned as they are. As Brian Hiatt observes of MGK in Rolling Stone, he “just looks like trouble, somehow.” It’s not MGK the actual person and the trouble he gets into that holds any appeal for me, however. I wince when I hear about his slit-throat neck tattoo; previous, failed rap career; and the thoughtless and harmful comments he makes. It’s the feeling of freedom in his music and aesthetic that’s alluring. A privileged kind of destruction made up of fast-moving minor chords, silver spiked jewelry, and leather jackets. Tickets to My Downfall makes me want to go looking for this kind of trouble again.

It’s the feeling of freedom in his music and aesthetic that’s alluring.

This might be why I feel a rush of emotions, full of tension, watching Fox and the Kardashians run from more-mainstream relationships to these tattooed men. On one hand, I feel powerful stepping into the role of disapproving adult, gasping at the video of Kourtney Kardashian sucking Travis Barker’s thumb, laughing at the hickey Kim Kardashian gave Pete Davidson, raising my eyebrows when Fox and MGK touch tongues to kiss. On the other hand, these couples poke at my continually squashed desire to reject everything that comes with being grown-up, to become irreverent and irresponsible again.

As I continue to read articles about these celebrity couples, in their thirties and forties like me, I sometimes wonder if I can return to a time when driving to Florida on a whim was a real possibility, as I did with a handful of other international students in undergrad, waking up bleary-eyed in the backseat after my shift at the wheel and seeing bright blue skies and palm trees. I could renew my scuba diving license while there and swim with sharks, like MGK and Fox did on an early date. Maybe even ride a roller coaster with an MGK-type dude and watch my partner desperately sing songs begging me to “run back” to him, as Kanye West did after Kim and Pete were photographed at Knott’s Scary Farm.

Because I’m supposed to be a responsible adult, with a marriage, a daughter to tuck in at night, and bills to pay, I settle for listening to MGK’s album instead of getting “drink all on my car seat,” to quote his song “Drunk Face.” I listen to it driving into work, turning down the volume once I arrive on campus in case a student hears MGK belting, “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss the bottle all night.” I listen to it as I dump clothes into a washer in my apartment complex’s laundry room, fumbling to find the volume button on my iPhone when the maintenance man walks in. I listen to it on a road trip to visit my sister and nephews, lightly banging my head to a song called “Concert for Aliens.”

As I go to hit repeat, a tiny voice interrupts from the back seat. “I don’t like that song,” my daughter says, looking up from her iPad.

I don’t know if my four-year-old doesn’t like “Concert for Aliens” because it’s been on repeat for the entire trip or because she’s already mature enough to agree with one of my students’ opinions (“Machine Gun Kelly just rides waves and is corny and has an annoying fan base”) or because she genuinely doesn’t like it. But I feel called out and mutter “okay” before quickly changing the album to Beyoncé’s Lemonade.

My daughter, satisfied, starts watching YouTube again, and I remember when I could listen to whatever I wanted in the car before I was a mother (without fearing that a four-year-old would repeat lyrics like “I’m insecure. I fuck things up”). Before I got married, I could go to bars and make out with whoever I wanted. Before I became an adult, my straight-A girlfriends all had chaotic boyfriends and we hung out whenever we wanted, like these celebrity couples, barreling headfirst into all kinds of adolescent fun—like the time my friend’s furious parents dragged us to an adult New Year’s Eve party because they caught us gulping down Baileys from their liquor cabinet. Now, I’m the one who gives out the grades, rations alcohol for myself, and falls asleep at 9 p.m. lying down with my daughter.

Finally, when my fascination with MGK and the youthful fun he represents reaches undeniable levels, I use AirDrop to play “Bloody Valentine” for my partner as a kind of confession.

“Doesn’t this sound like high school?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” he responds, as Fox dances around in MGK’s sweatshirt, looking perfect.

“I mean, like Blink-182 or something,” I say, trying to sound casual. “That punk rock kind of feel?”

“Well, not really,” he responds. “There’s a lot of processed pop sound on top of the guitar and drums and stuff.”

I wince—it’s one thing to be obsessed with punk rock at thirty-three years old, another when it’s pop punk rock. As I watch MGK wrench one of his hands out of the duct tape Fox wrapped him in and start to pluck away at a tiny synthesizer, I wonder why I need a sensible adult, or a four-year-old, for that matter, to validate my feelings about a celebrity my decade-younger brother deems “big weird.” My partner is around my age, though, and I’m ashamed that MGK’s music doesn’t make him nostalgic for decades of youth he’ll never get back. As he eats another spoonful of his bowl of cereal, I wonder if he’s more satisfied with adult life than I am. But I don’t ask—I don’t need any more proof my obsession with MGK’s music is ridiculous, especially from my partner with his more “refined,” less mainstream tastes.

“What about the drums though?” I press. “Travis Barker is friends with him and they collaborated on this album.”

“Well, yeah, I hear that,” my partner says. “And Travis Barker is, like, one of the top five drummers in the world, so that’s cool.”

This makes me feel a bit better. Then the video ends and my partner takes his empty bowl to the kitchen, returns, and starts playing a pool game on his phone.

I put my headphones on and press play again.

*

On the extended version of Tickets to My Downfall, there is an acoustic version of “Bloody Valentine.” At the beginning of the music video for it, MGK rides in on a motorcycle. His hair falls into his eyes as he sits on the bike parked in a gravel lot. He clears his throat before saying “okay” and begins to sing. His blue eyes crinkle up at the edges when he powers through higher notes, but he never changes his stance, legs askew, shoulders hunched in his leather jacket adorned with pale-pink patches and silver studs.

Over a decade ago, the first night my partner and I hang out, he wears a leather jacket too. After walking drunk-me home from a bar, away from a too-interested bartender, he stands outside my place—a house divided up into four cheap apartments where English graduate students live—and hunches his six-foot-two body over me as his dark-brown hair falls into his dark-brown eyes. He tells me he’ll never get married—that marriage is “bullshit.”

“Maybe I would,” he concedes after I tell him I think he’s full of shit, of himself. “If the understanding was we’d go our separate ways amicably after ten years. No kids of course.”

Ten years later, we are married with the kid he said he’d never have. He might not wear his leather jacket anymore, but between then and now he helped me write our entire wedding ceremony. He might have become less trouble, but he gathered up the courage to move to New York City with me, breaking into publishing while I survived getting a PhD. He might not be a lead singer or one of the top five drummers in the world, but he walked our newborn daughter home from New York-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital with me, beaming, and proceeded to read to her, snuggle with her, and pick her up from school every day. He might not be a punk rock bad boy, but he’s a damn good copy editor—which, at this time in my life, is very sexy to me.

He might not be a punk rock bad boy, but he’s a damn good copy editor—which, at this time in my life, is very sexy to me.

My desires, too, have morphed and matured. Not just from exhaustion or because I had my daughter, but because I have the privilege of settling down. I met my partner before I was forced to figure out dating apps—luckily, given the number of times I had to accompany my girlfriends on dates with potentially chaotic men. Partying less means more energy for visits to botanical gardens, for drinking wine with my colleague-friends at the little place by our campus building, and for the thrilling feeling I get after a good Bikram yoga session. A full-time job with benefits, walks, therapy, lots of water, and—yes—guilty pleasures like MGK help me feel steady, feel good, most days.

I know the countless moments my partner and I share are more or less ordinary, compared to the Kardashian-Davidson-Barker-Fox-MGK lifestyle. We didn’t climb up onto a roof the first night we connected like MGK and Fox, and he’s never installed a giant wall of flowers in my home like Barker has for Kourtney Kardashian—unfortunately. When we got engaged, we didn’t drink each other’s blood and we have yet to get tattoos in honor of our love. But we are our own kind of cool.

Like any good fantasy, my desire for all MGK represents is a guilty pleasure, not sustainable or practical. Like my youth, his allure passed (in part because I’ve grown past ignoring the harmful things some bad boys say and do). It wasn’t that my high school boyfriend or current partner got boring, per say, but they were just boys underneath the facade. If you’re with someone for long enough, you begin to peer past all-encompassing desire, and there’s always someone left standing in front of you who’s less of a type and more of a flawed human being. Despite how thrilling being with him was, that high school boyfriend and I only lasted about six months before we grew apart. My partner’s desire settled into something that endures past the gradual appearance of more and more shortfalls (from my daily catastrophizing to habit of not screwing the lids on containers all the way), however. It’s a kind of desire that comes with responsibility, but it offers a constancy that feels warmer than freedom—than Florida, even.

It stands to reason, then, that my favorite moment in the video for “Bloody Valentine” actually has nothing to do with MGK’s bad-boy persona. It’s a moment I noticed almost immediately, when Fox and Kelly are seated at opposite ends of a dining room table. MGK’s mouth is taped shut with hot-pink tape and Fox saunters up to him, removes the tape, and feeds him a donut despite a bewildered shake of his head. Then she rips the donut away, puts the tape back over MGK’s mouth, kisses him on top of it, and cups the side of his face with her hand. When she touches him, everything in MGK’s body relaxes. He looks at her like the words he sings are insufficient.

I recognize this feeling of relief. It’s why I settled down in the first place.

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