Love to gossip? Us, too. Read last month's SCENE POLICE here.

There are many things that separate Scene Police; the gossip division of CREEM, from the police-police. For one thing, the only “punisher” that Scene Police reveres is the Phoebe Bridgers album. For another, while the Brown Shirts In Blue (as they like to be called) prefer to punch down (literally, if possible), Scene Police are firm believers in punching up. With the occasional lateral punch thrown in (but only if the target is super annoying, or the Scene Police are assigned a fresh-faced rookie who won’t survive the first day on the job if they don’t smarten up.).

As the poet Don Henley once said (between developing the deathless proof of concept for the Ace Hotel chain and all the other purgatorial waystations that the author Jason Diamond refers to as “Millennial Hotels”, settling into his role as a profiteer of Boomer self-hate/love) “kick ‘em when they’re up.” If there are other lyrics/messages to that song, Scene Police doesn’t know them. Scene Police, being a gossip collective that learned everything it knows about gossip from Chain of Strength lyrics, only registers the second lines of choruses if they’re delivered via youth crew chant. Or, as Ice-T once said, on the 2014 Body Count album, Man’s Laughter: “Talk shit, have fun.” So, without further ado, let’s get kicking up.

MGK’s Pretty Face is Going to Hell
Much like how Archie and the Gang felt when Jughead shaved his hat into a mohawk and adopted the moniker “Captain Trash,” we—being not the royal “we,” but officer’s name redacted, the sapphic half of the Scene Police—have been gravely concerned that MGK has been running with the wrong crowd ever since early 2020. That was when Kelly lived up to his circle A anarchy tattoo (the head shop vinyl sticker kind, not the black bloc kind), paid $20,000 for a ‘66 Squire series Jag (that Fat Mike swore was both genuine and used by the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus on every date they played of the 2005 Warped Tour), and wrote lyrics like “l use a razor to take off the edge." For the most part, the wild boy’s wild boy antics had been fairly tame. Until this June when Kelly, in a moment of life imitating angst, bloodied his pretty lil’ face with a champagne glass.

We here at scene police chose to not write it up, figuring it was just a phase. He had a long night and sometimes we all do things we shouldn’t to impress others. And Avril was there. Sometimes you gotta just show the girls that boys can rock every bit as hard. In that incident, MGK ended up getting off with a stern warning from Seth Meyers. Which we deemed satisfactory.

THEN a few weeks ago, while performing a hometown show (on what is now officially deemed “Machine Gun Kelly Day” in Cleveland), Kelly announced to the audience that he would be fined $70,000 for every 10 minutes that went late. Declaring “I’m not stopping this show for shit. I’m rich, bitch,” he once again did his little party trick, causing Scene Police quite a bit of stress… I mean he could really injure (or, worse, disfigure) himself. His face is his money maker. Just because he’s a poet, with the voice of an angel, doesn’t mean he’ll be able to maintain that rock star lifestyle if he didn’t have his looks. Would his fans really still be there?!?!?! Will they remember the man who said, “I'm a demon in the night/She's an angel with the white” for this…

[Scene Police Editors Note: the officer in charge of MGK (and all other punk/rap hybrid bohunk affairs),officer’s name redacted, has been put on paid leave, pending an internal investigation. We’re afraid that, like so many of even the best gossip column police cosplay rookies, the officer got too close to the case. Red flags were raised when, in a first submitted draft, she described Machine Gun Kelly’s music as “actually pretty good." Followed by 3,000 words of slash fiction, with Machine Gun Kelly interacting—in ways soulfull and erotic (and not just a little bit bad-boy dangerous)—with every character (including Mr. Weatherbee) in the extended Archie/Riverdale fictional universe. The officer will be reassigned to Punk Rock Cruise Festival duty, where the chances of her gossip column objectivity being compromised by a pretty face are somewhat lower.

OOOOeeeeeeOOOOOOeeeeeeOOOOOOOOeeeeeeOOOOOO Scene Police!