Songfacts®:

• It seems Machine Gun Kelly and Willow Smith are both into the same type of girl. During this galloping rocker, the two artists detail their love for this woman, whose attire, makeup and behavior comes from her love for emo music.
• The two artists describe their ideal romantic partner with a grocery list of emo tropes. MGK has fallen in love with a girl in "thigh-high fishnets and some black boots." Willow's rundown of the things she likes includes "eyeliner on her dark skin" and a choker necklace.
  
  While MGK is straight, Smith came out as bisexual in June 2019, stating, "I love men and women equally."
• "Emo" originated in the mid-1980s as part of the hardcore punk scene in Washington, DC, where it was known as emotional hardcore or emocore. In the 1990s, rock bands such as Weezer and Jimmy Eat World adopted and reinvented emo, and in the 2000s other groups such as My Chemical Romance and Fall Out Boy transmuted it further. Here, Machine Gun Kelly and Willow Smith present their uptempo pop-punk take on emo.
• Machine Gun Kelly and Nick "Dark Waves" Long wrote "Emo Girl" with the track's producer, Travis Barker. They sent it to Willow with her verse already written, but she rewrote it to be true to herself. Barker told Willow, "your verse was insane compared to ours."
• Travis Barker has steered Machine Gun Kelly's rebranding from rapper to pop rocker. He also played on three tracks on Willow's Lately I Feel Everything album, which saw her make a similar switch to pop rock.
• "Emo Girl" opens with a soundbite from MGK's fiancée Megan Fox stating she is a god. It comes from the 2009 film Jennifer's Body, in which she plays a possessed teenage girl.
• MGK released "Emo Girl" on February 4, 2022 as the lead single from Mainstream Sellout. The pop-rocker previously titled the album Born With Horns but changed it despite him and Travis Barker both getting the name tattooed across their forearms in 2021.
• The Drew Kirsh-directed video features Travis Barker as a tour guide taking a group of young students round a museum. MGK and Willow's performance of the song in an enclosed concrete room leaves the kids awestruck, transforming them into little emo-rockers.
  
  Kirsh also shot Taylor Swift's VMA-winning clip for "You Need To Calm Down."
• Mainstream Sellout became MGK's second consecutive record to debut at #1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, following 2020's Tickets to My Downfall.