Last week, Machine Gun Kelly kicked off a beef with Slipknot during his set at Riot Fest in Chicago, taking a dig at the metal otufit while the band were playing at the same time on a different stage.
It turns out those comments didn’t go over so well with the crowd at the metal-oriented Louder Than Life Festival in Louisville, Kentucky over the weekend, which, apart from Kelly, also hosted the likes of Korn, Metallica, Anthrax, Gojira… you get the idea.
Footage from his performance shows some festival attendees booing and flipping the rapper-turned-pop-punk artist off in between songs. Elsewhere during the set, Kelly jumped down offstage into the photo pit while performing a song, and got into an altercation with a festivalgoer, with MGK throwing a punch before security broke up the scrap.
That said, Kelly still completed his full festival set to what appears to be a largely-positive crowd. He later took to Twitter, reposting a video of audience members singing along during his performance. “I don’t know why the media lies in their narrative against me all the time but all I saw was 20,000 amazing fans at the festival singing every word and 20 angry ones,” he wrote.
See footage from MGK’s Louder Than Life set below.
i don’t know why the media lies in their narrative against me all the time but all i saw was 20,000 amazing fans at the festival singing every word and 20 angry ones. https://t.co/hcjJ3LCfKU
— mgk (@machinegunkelly) September 26, 2021
It comes after MGK thanked his Riot Fest crowd last week for coming to see him instead of going to see “the old, weird dudes with masks.” Later in the show, he was even more explicit. “Hey, you wanna know what I’m really happy that I’m not doing?” he said. “Being 50 years old wearing a fucking weird mask on a fucking stage. Fucking shit.”
The source of Kelly’s vitriol initially appeared to point towards comments Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor made earlier this year on podcast Cutter’s Rockcast, in which he appeared to take a swipe at Kelly. “I hate the artist who failed in one genre and decided to go rock. I think he knows who he is, but that’s another story,” Taylor said at the time.
Since then, it’s emerged that the dispute may stem from an axed collaboration between the pair. Following his Riot Fest set, Kelly tweeted that the drama began during the recording process for his 2020 album Tickets to My Downfall, saying Taylor contributed a verse for a song on the album that was “fucking terrible” and hence was not used.
Taylor rejected that assertion on Twitter, saying, “I don’t like people airing private shit like a child. So this is all I’ll say: I didn’t do the track because I don’t like when people try to ‘write’ for me. I said NO to THEM.” He then shared a screenshot of an email from Tickets to My Downfall collaborator Travis Barker with notes from Kelly on the verse with some suggested changes.
Taylor responded to Barker in a separate email saying that after listening to Kelly’s ideas, he didn’t think he was the right person for the track. “Nothing personal, I just think if this is what MGK is looking for, someone else is the guy to do it,” he explained. MGK responded to that tweet, saying, “basically, your verse was really bad. respectfully, i was just telling you to rewrite it because it was really bad.”
corey did a verse for a song on tickets to my downfall album, it was fucking terrible, so i didn’t use it.
he got mad about it, and talked shit to a magazine about the same album he was almost on.
yalls stories are all off.
just admit he’s bitter.— mgk (@machinegunkelly) September 20, 2021
basically, your verse was really bad.
respectfully, i was just telling you to rewrite it because it was really bad.
respectfully. ?
but let’s do a britney spears song cover together ??— mgk (@machinegunkelly) September 21, 2021
