“I was looking for a change that wasn't just a sound wave,” Colson Baker said, and then set out to make that change literal. Better known for nearly two decades as Machine Gun Kelly, Baker released the collaborative mixtape Blog Era Boyz with Wiz Khalifa after completing a blackout-tattoo overhaul that covered the vast majority of his arms, chest and stomach.
Baker framed the physical reinvention as part of the mixtape’s return to the 2000s and 2010s sound and spirit that first defined him. He said, “It had to be something physical.” He found a solution in celebrity tattoo artist ROXX, who showed him an initial design described as a massive dark-mode treatment meant to take two years to complete.
But Baker gave them two months. “She warned me that it was going to be near impossible, even from a pain tolerance standpoint,” he said. “yeah, we got two months.” He said he woke up each morning and traveled 15 minutes to ROXX’s Los Angeles studio to get under the needle, day after day, until the coverage was finished.
The scale and speed are the weight of the story: a project ROXX estimated would span a two-year calendar was compressed into roughly eight weeks, covering most of Baker’s upper body. After the first week, he said, the work hit his lymph nodes around his armpits and shoulders and he got really sick. “My skin was turning yellow. I wasn’t able to sleep. I stopped being able to move certain parts of my upper body,” he said.
Those details sit beside the mixtape release. Blog Era Boyz, a collaboration with Wiz Khalifa, is presented by Baker as a recapture of his early hip-hop energy under the Machine Gun Kelly name — a deliberate pivot after years spent exploring pop-punk, nu-metal and country. The tattoos were not decoration; for Baker they were a statement to accompany the sonic reversal.
The friction between intention and cost runs through Baker’s account. He described the designs as confrontation and confession: “Who the f— am I?” he asked aloud while choosing images to ink. “I saw death and drugs in all these patterns that I was literally writing on my body,” he said. “There were happy tattoos, sad tattoos, holy tattoos, hellish tattoos. It was like my bipolarity was screaming off my skin.”
That bipolarity extended into the process. The project’s compression into two months meant Baker pushed through medically significant symptoms to meet his timeline. He acknowledged both the warning and the consequences: ROXX told him the work would be lengthy and brutal; Baker accepted the shorter window and the body paid the price. Yet he insisted the experience was transformational in motivation as well as appearance. “I came out the other side extremely inspired,” he said. “Not just because of what I had done, but because of what I had to overcome.”
Context matters here only after the immediate facts: Baker first emerged in the 2000s and 2010s as Machine Gun Kelly, and Blog Era Boyz is billed as a return to that era’s energy. The tattoo work is part of a wider reinvention linking an audible shift back toward hip-hop with a visible, permanent remaking of his body. The mixtape release and the cover images — shot in Los Angeles in May 2026 — present the two changes together.
The remaining question, and the one Baker has not answered, is practical and consequential: how long did the physical aftereffects last? He described weeks of sickness, yellowing skin and temporary immobility, then said he emerged inspired. He has not specified how long those symptoms endured after the sessions stopped, nor how the recovery will shape tour plans or future recordings.
For now the immediate next step is clear: Blog Era Boyz is out and Baker has completed the tattoos he promised himself. What remains unresolved is the duration and permanence of the medical toll he described — the exact length of recovery that followed his two-month push, and whether that toll will define the next public chapter of his career.
