Hear Machine Gun Kelly’s Ridiculous Cover Of Edwyn Collins’ “A Girl Like You” In The Trailer For The Amazon Show Paradise City
In 1994, Edwyn Collins, the Scottish post-punker and former Orange Juice frontman, scored an out-of-nowhere global hit with his sly, David Bowie-esque jam “A Girl Like You.” It was great! But in its original form, “A Girl Like You” didn’t have any portentous, fake-dramatic digital pounding, and it didn’t have an ex-rapper growling through Auto-Tune. (Tame Impala’s recent cover of the song didn’t have any of those things, either.) These were serious oversights, and now Machine Gun Kelly is here to fix them.
Last year, the B-list Ohio rap star MGK pulled off a truly astounding career pivot. He got together with Blink-182’s Travis Barker, and he remade himself as a mid-’00s Warped Tour mall-punk star. Somehow, this worked out. Machine Gun Kelly’s punk album Tickets To My Downfall debuted at #1, and now other rappers like Trippie Redd are employing Travis Barker’s services and attempting to make the same transition. MGK is continuing down this digital-rock-dude lane — witness “Daywalker,” the screamy new song that he recorded with YouTube star Corpse — and now he’s gotten back together with Barker to record an extremely unnecessary version of “A Girl Like You” for a new Amazon series.
Amazon’s new show is called Paradise City, and it’s apparently a spinoff of a 2017 supernatural-horror musical called American Satan. The show, which starts streaming tomorrow, has a truly head-spinning cast that includes Bella Thorne, Drea De Matteo, Mark Boone Junior, Fairuza Balk, Hopsin, and Lamb Of God’s Randy Blythe. (Somehow, Machine Gun Kelly is not in the cast, despite his proven affinity for this kind of thing.) The trailer would be absurd even without that version of “A Girl Like You.” Below, watch the trailer and then cleanse yourself with the video for the Edwyn Collins original.
I hope to god I’m talking metaphorically, but Paradise City debuts tomorrow on Amazon Prime. Fairuza Balk, though.