MGK – Cliché

Will we heed Nortey’s call?

[Video]
[2.89]

Nortey Dowuona: ….please, I beg you, my fellow writers. Do not grant this man the favor of a two-paragraph take down. Respond to acts of desperation with indifference.
[0]

Mark Sinker: tbh we shouldn’t let people carry on saying “I’m a rolling stone” — we shd straight away be like “ron wood is a rolling stone, yr just some guy”. anyway mgk does the taylor s push-push-push thing a couple of times, which does interest me as a fragment of modern learned delivery, but then nothing else interests me, so take him away 
[3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: After a half decade in the lab, MGK’s finally done it: he’s fine-tuned his level of stupidity so perfectly that he has completely eroded the lines between sincerity and irony, the two forces no longer locked in dialectical combat but synthesized into something greater. Gone are the flow-chart love quadrangles of “My Ex’s Best Friend,” the arena rock grandeur of “Bloody Valentine,” whatever “Emo Girl” and the country era were. Those songs were not, in any real sense, clever. Yet even in their context “Cliché” is beautifully boneheaded, taking what must be the product of a truly hideous songwriting camp exercise and committing to it so fully that I am fully convinced of its greatness. I don’t know if this is a great song, but I do want to give it the 2025 Ig Nobel Prize in musicology.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: If you’re gonna crib this hard from emo-pop-punk of yore then you’ve gotta have some whine in your voice. You’ve gotta be kinda unpleasant.  Something shrill and cracking. Because delivering this straight-forward sappy stuff with all the oomph of a burnt-out grocery store clerk asking if you want a receipt is just nothing, man.
[3]

Hannah Jocelyn: Relient K’s “Be My Escape” is a hyperactive 00s pop-rock-arrangement masterpiece nearly on the level of “A Thousand Miles” or “Drops of Jupiter”, so I’m not mad that MGK is ripping it off.  This is entirely predictable, and lacks the desperation of my emotional support Christian rock one-hit-wonder. (To say nothing of the other song it pretty clearly copies.  Wait, what do you mean he’s stolen from “Be My Escape” before?) I don’t even hate this, but it speaks to how lazy this song is. I hate the way he says “create nostalgia”; it’s like when ChatGPT tries to be wistful and whimsical. Yeah, ChatGPT comparisons are also lazy, but that means I’m giving Melly Gelly Kelly the respect he deserves.
[2]

Taylor Alatorre: The loudest backlash against MGK’s “Cliché” isn’t from those on the margins accusing him of “selling out,” an act of which he’ll gleefully accuse himself. It’s from those on the inside accusing him of trying to sneak in. They’re angry that, in trying on a mode of music that seems consciously “above his station,” he’s violated one of pop’s unwritten sumptuary laws. A previous micro-generation may have given him a ride to the top 10 on the backs of Camila Cabello and peak ’90s fetishism, but the Zoomers are not inclined to be so generous. He’s 35 years old and, despite the KFC-esque rebrand, still has “Machine Gun” in his name, so he should be relegated to Blackbear and Trippie Redd collabs for the rest of his career; Jelly Roll if necessary. He should forever live in the shadows of Megan Fox and Eminem, not ask to sit next to them in the cafeteria. As a marrow-deep lover of pop-punk in its variously crass mutations, and as someone who typically scorns this sort of Pop Crave gatekeeping, I wish that MGK had given me a better song to be an apologist for. The best case I can make, aside from the wacky Baudrillardian brilliance of “create nostalgia,” is that the thin, watery production lends “Cliché” a wanly depressive air that’s all-too-fitting of the subject matter. If genres were personified, this would be the sound of a revivalist moment that’s painfully aware it’s nearing its sell-by date; Kelly may not be fully ashamed of what he’s attempting here, but the chorus itself sounds like it is. Though self-sabotage is a ground-level pop-punk trope, that sort of pity-making, on its own, isn’t enough to merit the underdog a free ride. Blink-182’s 2003 self-titled is a prime example of a band jumping ship from a scene they helped create, and sonically that may be what MGK is aiming toward. But Blink had a steadfast and battle-hardened faith in the new path they were knowingly forging there, whereas MGK’s career motives are revealed almost by accident: “I like that you like me.” There’s a deep honesty to that, but I’ve learned from experience that it’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to say out loud.
[4]

Holly Boson: You watched the “Not Like Us” video so now YouTube Shorts keeps showing you interview clips about ancient Eminem beef. His face is screwed up under his hat and beard — “When I wrote ‘next to Taylor Swift‘, I mean that’s not… I think I got taken out of context, ’cause what I meant was that in exactly seven years, MGK is gonna try and combine slightly punk-inflected commercial pop production and his kinda, y’know, singing voice, and people on social media will be like, ‘yo, this shit is horrible, like what the fuck’ but it doesn’t matter because Spotify decides what music kids listen to and he can get next to Taylor Swift, by which I mean in the algorithmic sense. You put on a single from 1989 and it plays a Machine Gun Kelly song next, and it kinda makes sense because it has the same chugging guitar pop thing and lyrics about love, but it’s not something kids actually enjoy hearing but maybe they don’t turn it off.” (Condescending eyeroll/blink.) “So he does his li’l numbers, and then critics will use those numbers to be like “yo, MGK is actually a good pop punk songwriter, dawg,” but those people are just pretendin’ they think that because they don’t like me and it would be more interesting if he could actually do somethin’, because his melodies aren’t as good as they used to be and he looks and sounds like an even bigger fuckin’ herb than he does now, seven years before this happens. And he’ll settle for being an artist people can put up with if they aren’t paying much attention to him, and you won’t be able to bring him up without thinking of artists people actually know who they are, whether that’s the Cars or the Ramones, or Taylor Swift, or me. Or Diddy.”
[0]

Jonathan Bradley: Arpeggiated guitar and some earnest butt-rock spoken word: the opening bars of “Cliché,” suggest MGK has designs of Post Maloning his way back to Nashville, which would be such a crafty expression of white privilege that you almost need him to be deploying that card deliberately. The dawn of Country Kelly is stalled, however, by a double-time drum beat that indicates this is supposed to be more of his pop-punk jawn, and there are some extra “getting out of this town” lines thrown in just in case you missed the design of this exercise. Are we being misdirected though? Breezy rhythm, plonky synth colorings, a tousled-haired gent out front: is “Cliché” what you get if you squeeze “As It Was” into 2025? How thoroughly dispiriting if so: Harry Styles was subject to a lot of sniffy hectoring about his stylized femme turn in those long-ago days of 2022, but with our culture in full masculine ravanchist mode at the moment, it’s hard to imagine anything so frou-frou being so celebrated in the middle of the road. Cliché is what we get, I guess.
[3]

Ian Mathers: I’m sorry, what?
[3]