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Please note that I will be donating all proceeds from Media Events towards Helene relief efforts in western North Carolina until further notice. If you would like to directly donate, I recommend the following organizations:

Beloved Asheville
Asheville Survival (CashApp: streetsidehelene)
Rural Organizing and Resilience (ROAR)
High Country Mutual Aid
Pansy Collective (CashApp/Venmo: pansycollective)
Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Now, let’s talk about Jelly Roll

Ever since Hurricane Helene hit western North Carolina, I have been listening to the song “Lonely Road,” by Jelly Roll and Machine Gun Kelly, over and over again. These two rappers-turned-singers have, if you’re unfamiliar with the song, repurposed John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” into a song that uses the image of a broken city/road/other decaying urban stuff as a metaphor for some sort of vague breakup situation that may or may not involve toxicity on both sides.

It is a very broad song, so much so that if you ignore the parts that are explicitly about a breakup, it can be read as an anthem about simply surviving as everything crumbles around you. MGK singing, “I’m still here” a bunch of times does a lot of the heavy lifting, but hey, it’s pop music. 

The music video for the song is ten thousand percent worth watching, because it is insane. Its plot, as best I can understand it, is as follows: 

Machine Gun Kelly and Jelly Roll are the proprietors of an autobody shop, and are also former criminals. We learn that Machine Gun Kelly and his wife, who is played by his real wife Meaghan Fox, are in deep medical debt when they receive a bill from a healthcare company in the mail with the words “FINAL NOTICE” printed on it. This is bad, because in addition to having no money, Meaghan Fox is pregnant. Meanwhile, we learn that Jelly Roll and his wife, who is played by his real wife Bunny XO, are struggling to conceive a child because when Jelly Roll gets home, Bunny XO shows him a letter that says “INFERTILITY DIAGNOSIS” on it.

Machine Gun Kelly, in a state of desperation, asks his best friend Jelly Roll if he will do one last crime with him so that he can get some money. Jelly Roll, who presumably has enough money, says no and Machine Gun Kelly is completely cool with this and says something vague about brotherhood/friendship/brothership.

At some point, both couples pray, and then Machine Gun Kelly then spray-paints his motocross-style motorcycle jet black. Without disguising his motorcycle helmet, which makes him look like the Marvel character of Venom, Machine Gun Kelly rides his newly black motorcycle to a bank, which he robs with nothing more than a rifle bag that could have been filled with anything.

He escapes with a duffle bag full of money, leading the cops on a chase that lasts just long enough for him to throw the duffle bag in the back of a pickup truck in the parking lot of his and Jelly Roll’s business, and then kiss Meaghan Fox one last time before being slammed on the hood of a cop car. Jelly Roll then retrieves the money and gives it to Meaghan Fox. Eight months later, Machine Gun Kelly, who is in prison, gets a visit from Meaghan Fox and their child. The end.

I have watched this music video so many times that I was able to type it all out without rewatching it. Now, it is your turn to watch it.

Dedicated Media Events enthusiasts will know that I’ve been fascinated by MGK for quite some time. He’s been taking the song — which is unironically pretty fantastic, if only because it’s basically impossible to fuck up “Take Me Home, Country Roads” no matter how many unnecessary Taking Back Sunday references you throw into it — on some sort of traveling roadshow in as many contexts as possible. Here he is playing it live in Nashville with Lainey Wilson subbed in for Jelly Roll. Here he is at a radio station in Ohio, playing the song on acoustic guitar with Teddy Swims, who is a singer with face tattoos who I have heard of, and 44phantom, who is a singer without face tattoos who I have not heard of. Here he is at the People’s Choice Country Music Awards, which is an awards show that exists, playing both the John Denver version of the song as well as the new one. Despite the context of the People’s Choice Country Music Awards, MGK is playing a guitar shaped like a razor blade. And finally, here he is in literal West Virginia, live at the CBS version of College GameDay, doing the combination John Denver Machine Gun Kelly version again, once again with his razor blade guitar. 

Machine Gun Kelly will soon get his own whole-ass essay on this blog, but not today, for today we must talk about Jelly Roll. His new album, Beautifully Broken, came out today, and judging by the combination of his organic popularity and the massive publicity push behind him right now, it will most likely go straight to number one. Given that he’s a 41-year-old, 300-pound former D-Boy with face tattoos who spent a couple decades grinding in the Tennessee rap scene, he is the most unlikely breakout pop-country star imaginable. And yet, Jelly Roll, the rapper who was in a group that put out an album on Hypnotize Minds, did multiple collaborative albums with Haystak and Tech N9ne, and who before a few years ago seemed to me to have an absolute ceiling of “co-headliner on a tour with Tech N9ne and/or Yelawolf” is now singing country songs on Saturday Night Live, yukking it up with Jimmy Fallon, and talking about redemption on The Today Show, because Jelly Roll is one of the biggest artists in the world now. 

Whatever “it” is, Jelly Roll has it. He’s just a personally magnetic guy. Part of his success over the past decade-ish, even before he “went country,” is simply that he’s fucking great in the context of a YouTube podcast. He’s visually striking — again, he is physically massive and has a bunch of face tattoos — and contrasts that with a genuine warmth and sense that he’s comfortable in his own skin. He’s a great storyteller, funny and empathetic, fluent in the both the language of therapy and the streets. In case you were wondering, he has been on Theo Von approximately one million times.

As far as his music, Jelly Roll has lived a pretty fucked-up life. When he was younger he was arrested frequently, and ultimately spent time in prison on felony robbery charges. He has experienced chronic substance misuse, as well as health problems related to his weight. He got in a legal dispute with Waffle House, which while funny to think about, was probably not great for his finances. He spent years as a struggle-rapper, living in a van and going through all the attendant doubts/depressions/money issues that accompany that lifestyle. This is the stuff he now sings about. And even when he’s being vague, there’s an earnest sense of pain in his voice, the sort of thing that can’t be taught, only earned. He is Bonnie “Prince” Billy for people who don’t give a shit about abstraction. 

Jelly Roll has something else going for him, though I’d hesitate to say that it’s intentional or even conscious on his part, which is that he is one hundred percent apolitical. As a felon in Tennessee, he’s legally unable to vote, and in an interview with the New York Times, he indicated that this disenfranchisement has left him cynical about politics as a whole. “I don’t have a view” of politics, he told David Marchese, in the middle of an exchange in which he declared he hates paying taxes, but would be open to paying more taxes if his money went towards governmental programs he cares about.  “It’s a system made for us to fight about, and I’m not getting involved in that shit,” he continued, adding that he thought voting was pointless. To be clear, Jelly Roll quite movingly testified before Congress about America’s opioid crisis in favor of a bill called the FEND Act that ultimately passed. Even if he was mostly joking about how people shouldn’t vote, Jelly Roll’s non-political political views make him the median voter personified. 

It’s not that Nashville as a music industry town doesn’t produce political music, it’s just that it’s a commerce-driven one, where artists and their collaborators are pragmatic to a fault — if they’re in the studio, musicians are focused on what will sell, regardless of ideology. Jelly Roll has worked in the past with MAGA-coded rappers like Adam Calhoun or Burden, as well as guys like Rittz and Caskey, who are explicitly anti-MAGA-coded rappers, but Jelly Roll truly views himself as a neutral party. But I get the sense that now that Jelly Roll’s so huge, he is a Too Big to Fail institution of kinda-trashy indie rap, someone of the scene whose transcendence of it means that everybody who’s ever worked with him doesn’t want to bring him down by exposing him to reputational risk. What I’m trying to say is that through a purely vibes-based analysis, I have concluded that Jelly Roll’s newfound fame has had a second-order effect of killing the popularity of MAGA rap. 

More than that, because he avowedly doesn’t “have politics,” he floats above any and all political camps — he’s just a guy, who’s had a hard life, singing his songs. He is, as much as I hate to use the word in such a context, highly “relatable.” 

What makes this all ironic is that Jelly Roll is maybe one of the only mainstream musicians who explicitly writes from a working-class perspective in a way that suggests he actually knows what the fuck he’s talking about. The people in his songs smoke cigarettes in trailer parks. They grew up next to parking lots filled with trash. Instead of going to college, they go to jail. Now that they’re grown up, their parents are in the hospital. Their idea of making it big involves drinking a beer while driving. They’re showing up to AA meetings in a state of desperate overwhelm. They cannot process their emotions and believe they are unworthy of love. They are not okay.  There’s little in the way of abstraction here. Like, he has a song about how he is not okay titled “I Am Not Okay.”

That Jelly Roll often delivers these sentiments among instrumentals that might veer into rap-rock, or Lumineers-y jangle-stop-clap-core, or non-hipster-acceptable country music is part of his appeal. He doesn’t look like a star, he’s nearly twice the age of lots of other people on the pop charts, he’s not a product of the industry machine, and he uses sounds that represent the lingua franca of contemporary pop to sing and rap about shit that feels achingly real. To millions of people, that makes him the best type of outlier. 

I usually try to write these posts throughout the week when I have time, and then drop them on Thursday, or Friday morning at the latest. This one is coming late, because since I wrote a whole-ass thing about Jelly Roll I figured I might as well listen to the record and tell you what I think about it. My conclusion is that it’s schlocky in a very charming way, very very big-budget-sounding, and contains at least four hits that have not yet been serviced to radio, whatever that means in 2024. It errs way more towards jangle-core than I’m usually down with, but that almost adds to the frisson of the record. Also, there is a Wiz Khalifa feature on the album that is about smoking weed because you’re sad, and I believe it portends a country turn for Wiz Khalifa within the next 18 months.