Corey Taylor probably just reignited his longstanding feud with Machine Gun Kelly over the weekend, after comments made during an audience Q&A.
The Slipknot frontman had been headlining the ShipRocked Carnival cruise festival when he was asked about Kelly, whose real name is Colson Baker. “For those of you that don’t know, MGK doesn’t like me very much,” Taylor told the audience with a smirk. “And let me follow that up by saying, I don’t care.”
Clearly!
Starting from the beginning, Taylor recalled how Kelly and Travis Barker had reached out to him to provide a track for his 2020 album, Tickets to My Downfall. Taylor said he agreed to collaborate out of his respect for Barker, but didn’t appreciate the notes he was given so decided to bounce from the project.
About eight months later, he continued, Kelly was doing an interview with Spotify’s Allison Hagendorf when went off on a bizarre rant about rock stars wearing comfortable shoes on stage, and about how that evidently was a betrayal to the spirit of rock.
Taylor was unamused:
“It sounds as smart as you think it is. It’s like, ‘What are you doing up there in your fucking comfortable — put on some boots and rock!’ I mean, spit is coming out of his face. And I’m watching it and I’m going, ‘You fuck. You’ve been here for five minutes, basically, and you’re gonna fuckin’ run your mouth about bands that have been doing this for 20 fucking years?’ Like, in the dirt. In the mud. They’re gonna wear whatever the fuck they want. You’re gonna walk in here with your black tongue and try to talk some shit about bands that can fucking circle your ass? Fuck you!”
In response, Taylor said that he later made some comments about artists who slide from one genre into another, as Kelly did from hip-hop to rock. And though Taylor said his comments “upset” Kelly, he didn’t say anything further until both rockers were in Chicago for 2021’s RiotFest.
Apparently, Kelly was not thrilled that he and Slipknot shared set times on different stages, and that once both acts kicked off, fans began a mass exodus to the Slipknot stage. This further set off Kelly’s ire, causing him to go off on the below rant about being a 50-year-old wearing a “fucking weird mask” on stage.
As such, Taylor maintained that he didn’t start the feud.
“The only reason I said what I said, was because he said what he said. You don’t get to walk into a genre with the history and the work. And the fact that this genre really doesn’t get the fucking respect that it deserves. You don’t get to walk in as some weird substitute teacher and pretend like you can tell us what to wear. Boots, shoes, house fucking slippers. How about you suck every inch of my dick?”
“And these are bands that maybe I don’t even fucking know,” Taylor added. “But guess what, I fucking respect them, because they fucking get on stage and they fucking give everything they’ve got!”
A fan captured the moment and saved it for posterity on Facebook:
Regardless of whether you have skin in this particularly dumb game, for what it’s worth, Taylor does put his money where his mouth is. Following the RiotFest nonsense, Machine Gun Kelly tweeted that the reason they didn’t use Corey’s track on the album was because “it was fucking terrible” and that Taylor was just bitter.
But Taylor quickly followed up an hour later with receipts in the form of the back-and-forth emails, including the one where he decided to opt-out of his participation.
We’ll provide updates on this thrilling saga as it develops!