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Over the past few years, the British musician Yungblud has cultivated a classic rock-star image, collecting co-signs from originators like Ozzy Osbourne and Aerosmith and indulging in the kinds of tongue-out leather-pants poses that we don't see so often anymore. He has been a major-label artist for his entire career, at least since his time on the Disney Channel show The Lodge, so it's not exactly surprising that there's been a lot of "industry plant" chatter around him. It seems that those accusations have weighed heavily on Yungblud.
One prominent source of that industry-plant talk is past Yungblud collaborator Machine Gun Kelly. On his Fred Durst collab "Fix Ur Face" earlier this year, MGK took a shot at Yungblud: "Mickey Mouse kids turned rockstars/ Leaving private schools, tryna be outlaws." MGK talked more shit to Yungblud in an Instagram comment soon afterward: "you cancelled a tour because you couldn't sell tickets blamed it on mental health then got parazzi'd at Nobu the next day Pinocchio... shut the fuck up you silver spooned preachy wanker."
Last month, Yungblud headlined his own Bludfest festival in Hradec Králové, Czechia. During his set, he got visibly emotional, sobbing onstage and telling the crowd, "Lately, I have been so disconnected from everything. I have been trying my best to wake up every day. I have felt in pain a lot, and I don't know why, for a long time. But every time I find your faces, every time I find your eyes, every time I look at you, I know that I belong somewhere."
Last week, Yungblud posted a video of that moment on Instagram. In a long caption, he commented on the way that negative chatter has affected him:
The amount of hate and disbelief around me from strangers on the Internet or bitter musicians really weighs on my heart as all I’ve been trying to do for the past 10 years is spread love, build something I believe in and unify people in a safe space.
I should really say nothing about this because it would makes me seem cooler and like it isn’t affecting me but deep down but I don’t think that’s who I am or why we all connect to each other.
As Billboard points out, Yungblud's Instagram post got supportive comments from people like SZA, Anthrax's Scott Ian, Exodus' Gary Holt, and actors actors Alyssa Milano and Charisma Carpenter. But Yungblud is still having a hard time, apparently.
This weekend, Yungblud was supposed to play his first show since Bludfest at Calgary's Cowboys Music Festival. In a social media post last night, the festival announced that Yungblud's management had decided to pull him from the festival. Yungblud left a statement, saying, "I'm currently in a place where I'm working on myself and taking time off at home in the UK. I'm taking this extremely seriously and facing head on what's going on for the good of the long term."
Yungblud still has a few US shows coming up, including a stop at Lollapalooza in Chicago.
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