It appears that Machine Gun Kelly has changed his stage name to mgk.
The rapper – real name Colson Baker – recently changed the name of his profiles on different streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube as well as his X/Twitter account to mgk – the initials of his pseudonym Machine Gun Kelly.
According to a biography on the talent First Avenue, the musician revealed that he “got the name Machine Gun Kelly because of my rapid-fire delivery when I was 15 and started doing shows.”
His most recent single ‘Don’t Let Me Go’, which arrived on February 21, was the first release under his new moniker of mgk.
Last year, speculation of a name change arose when Baker’s comments and online activity suggested that he had started going by “machine”.
It came after he was previously asked by comedy duo Chad and JT at one of his shows to change his name in a video. During the show in question the pair held up a sign that read, “Change your name!!!”
“I have no idea what that sign means,” he replied on stage at the time.
“We want you to change your name. We want you to take out the ‘Machine Gun’ so we don’t glorify machine guns. Just take out the ‘Machine Gun,’” they shouted back.
When MGK asked the audience what they thought, he was met with loud cheers.
Mgk’s last full-length release was 2022’s ‘Mainstream Sellout’. Prior to that, it was 2020’s ‘Tickets To My Downfall‘, which earned him his first US Number One album on the Billboard charts.
Speaking to NME as part of The Big Read back in 2020, he shared that the album may be inspire new generation of festival headliners.
“This album might be the reason why bands of our generation, instead of the Foo Fighters, Green Day or one of those established artists, get to headline Coachella and shit like that – because this album is gonna make the demand for guitar music go up!,” he said.
He continued: “It’s tapped into the new generation of kids, the 13-to-18-year-olds, that those bands I just named can’t reach at this point.”
In other news, the rapper and rocker recently took to social media earlier in the week to show the new tattoo, which sees a black block covering up his previous inkings, with a blank cross on his chest. In the post, he said he made the decision “for spiritual purposes only”.
The tattoo artist Roxx explained that the rapper spent 13 six-hour sessions in her studio to get the tattoo completed.
Back in January, he also received a negative backlash about his new signature guitar, which is designed to resemble a razor blade. In response, he wrote: “I’ll never explain my art, because true art is conversational and always up for interpretation. But I will say, most of you constantly interpret it wrong. And then blame me for your version of what you think my art is. Ultimately I’m sad at how people perceive me in general. Peace.”
Elsewhere, Tiger King star Joe Exotic has expressed his admiration for Machine Gun Kelly, claiming he’d woo his crush with “a tiger and a bit of meth”.
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