Mgk is back in hip-hop with Blog Era Boyz, a collaborative mixtape with Wiz Khalifa that lands after Colson Baker spent two months turning his body into a near-total blackout canvas. The release ties a new record to a physical reinvention Baker said he needed, not as a change in sound but as a change on skin.
Baker said he was looking for a change that was not just a sound wave. He said it had to be something physical, and when he looked at the tattoos covering his body, he saw a mismatch of designs from different phases of his life. In those patterns, he said, he saw death and drugs, and described the look as if his bipolarity were screaming off his skin.
He found a fix in celebrity tattoo artist ROXX, whose design covered the vast majority of his arms, chest and stomach in dark ink. ROXX warned that the work would be nearly impossible even from a pain-tolerance standpoint and said it would normally take two years to do properly. Baker cut that down to two months.
That compression came with a cost. He said he traveled 15 minutes each morning to ROXX’s Los Angeles studio and, after the first week, the tattooing hit his lymph nodes around his armpits and shoulders. He said he got really sick, his skin turned yellow, he could not sleep and he stopped being able to move parts of his upper body.
The physical ordeal is part of why Blog Era Boyz matters now. Baker spent nearly two decades moving from Cleveland rap underdog to a global, multi-genre presence, and the mixtape is being framed as a return to the sound and spirit of his 2000s and 2010s come-up as Machine Gun Kelly. It is also the clearest marker yet that the transformation was not a publicity flourish but a hard, recent reset.
Baker said he came out the other side extremely inspired, not just by what he had done but by what he had to overcome. The music is out now; the remaining question is whether the new look, and the pain that came with it, marks a lasting shift in how he moves through hip-hop next.
