Machine Gun Kelly Brings the Pop Punk Attitude at North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre with Wiz Khalifa
Sunday night in Chula Vista is a strange night to host a spectacle this large, but nobody told the raucous crowd who filled the North Island Credit Union Amphitheatre or the fans who had staked out spots along the barricade before the sun was fully up. Inside, the crowd reflected the same energy — fashion-forward, hip, and expressive, with attendees dressed as if the venue had become a runway for alt-pop and rock culture. This was night three of Machine Gun Kelly’s Lost Americana Tour (the second North American leg), and by Chula Vista, the tour machine was humming.
Opening band Beauty School Dropout delivered a reliable set of upbeat dance-rock, mixing songs like “Fever,” “Madonna” and “Scarlett Letter.” The Los Angeles group — which has earned support from Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Mark Hoppus of Blink-182 — fit neatly into the evening’s mix of nostalgia, chaos and crowd-pleasing spectacle. They were loud enough to rattle the lawn and melodic enough to send people back to the lots looking them up afterward. Then Wiz Khalifa took the stage for his 45 minutes, and the amphitheater briefly became something closer to a smoke festival. Five-feet-long inflatable Khalifa Kush joints floated through the crowd while smoke from the audience visibly drifted across the amphitheater. “Who out there smokes weed?” he asked while taking the stage. “Is the West Coast really the best coast?” San Diego answered the way San Diego answers that question. He ran through “Work Hard, Play Hard,” “Roll Up,” “Young, Wild & Free,” and “We Dem Boyz” before the set reached its inevitable climax in “See You Again” — and a capacity crowd doing exactly that in unison under an open sky is one of those moments that justifies the ticket price on its own.
After Wiz’s tight 45 minutes, MGK dropped onto the stage on the back of “outlaw overture,” with a guitar lowering from the rafters for him to grab on cue. The centerpiece of the stage — a half-sunken Statue of Liberty with a cigarette in her mouth instead of a torch, glowing eyes, nose rings, and one arm stretched up to the rafters — dominated the backdrop, flanked by flame boxes that erupted on the downbeats. The stage’s red-and-white color palette evoked a Marlboro pack, while mgk’s microphone stand resembled a cigarette butt. The image is a lot, and that’s the point. Spark-shooting guitar, two dancers, his guitarist Jus Lyons working an actual choreographed bit during “starman” while Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life” sample looped underneath. Sophie Lloyd anchored the rhythm side of the stage with her signature Kiesel guitar. “FIX UR FACE,” “Wild Boy,” “El Diablo,” and “I Think I’m OKAY” came in rapid succession, each landing in a crowd that spanned MGK eras — the old-school rap fans alongside the pop-punk converts alongside the people who found him through Lost Americana and worked backward.
The three-song stretch in the middle of MGK’s set when Wiz comes back out was a perfect way to mix up the setlist. “girl next door” first — the single they dropped on May 12, which had made its live debut at the Wheatland opener two nights earlier. By Chula Vista it had a hook the crowd already knew. Then “tatted,” still unreleased, pulled from the joint album they’ve been calling BEB. And then the moment that landed hardest: “Mind of a Stoner,” their 2013 original collab, performed together live for the first time since 2018. The crowd responded the way crowds respond when something that has lived on a playlist for years suddenly materializes in front of them at full volume. Both of these guys came up out of the late-2000s blog-rap ecosystem — DatPiff, 2DopeBoyz, HotNewHipHop — and watching them trade verses on a song they wrote thirteen years ago, dropped into the middle of mgk’s pop-punk-heartland-rock-arena-pop spectacle, was a sight to behold.
Toward the end of the set, MGK leaned into the pop side of his catalog with “cliché,” complete with synchronized choreography, bursts of confetti and playful pyro accents. The set closed with “papercuts” and “vampire diaries.” Thirty-one songs over an hour and forty, no encore, deliberately sprawling. MGK remains a musical chameleon — none of his individual skills, rapping, singing, guitar playing, or dancing, necessarily dominates on its own, but together they make him a compelling frontman, backed by one of the stronger touring bands currently orbiting mainstream pop-rock. Chula Vista got a real treat in this stop of the Lost American tour.
