There's a song that thousands of Clevelanders know by heart but almost nobody talks about in polite company.
It's a track by Machine Gun Kelly, the city's own Richard Colson Baker, from his 2019 album *Hotel Diablo*, and it's simply titled "Cleveland." On the surface, it's a hometown anthem.
Listen closer and it reads like a diss track aimed at the very city that raised him.
The verses paint Cleveland as a place that chews people up.
MGK raps about friends who died young, about watching the city's opioid crisis swallow entire blocks, about feeling like the only way out is to become someone the city won't recognize.
It's a confession of survivor's guilt dressed up as civic pride.
That tension is exactly why the song keeps resurfacing.
Every few months, a clip goes viral of MGK performing it at a Cleveland arena, and the crowd screams every word.
Outsiders watch the footage and assume it's a party.
Locals know it's closer to a group therapy session.
What makes "Cleveland" genuinely unsettling is what it leaves out.
There's no lakefront nostalgia, no Rock Hall name-drop, no LeBron redemption arc.
Instead, the song fixates on the parts of the city that don't make tourism brochures—the East Side blocks, the foreclosure signs, the feeling that the national media only shows up when something burns.
And here's the part that rarely gets mentioned: MGK wrote it before his pop-punk pivot, before *Tickets to My Downfall* turned him into a Warped Tour revival act. "Cleveland" belongs to the version of him that was still angry, still broke, still sleeping on couches.
That authenticity is why it cuts deeper than any polished anthem could.
Compare it to "Cleveland Rocks," the Ian Hunter song that became a WMMS staple and later a TV theme.
The other wants you to understand what it costs to leave.
There's a broader pattern here worth noticing.
American cities have spent two decades rebranding themselves with slogans and murals, and the songs that stick aren't the ones commissioned by visitors' bureaus.
Cleveland finally got one, and it took a kid from the East Side who never pretended the city was fine.
The next time you hear "Cleveland" blasted from a car on West 25th, pay attention to the faces around you.
It's about everyone who stayed, everyone who left, and everyone who didn't make it out at all. **Our take:** Nostalgia sells, but honesty lingers.
If a city can only celebrate itself through slogans, it's hiding something.
Final Thoughts
MGK's "Cleveland" works because it refuses to hide—and that's a rarer civic gift than any anthem.