Machine Gun Kelly: How a Gangster's Name Became a Pop Brand

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Say Machine Gun Kelly and some people see a tattooed musician on a red carpet while others see a Prohibition era gangster with a fedora and a tommy gun. This episode is the biography of a name instead of a person. The original Machine Gun Kelly was an American gangster who lived from 1900 to 1954, and for his whole adult life the name meant real danger and federal manhunts. Then, only four years after his death, a 1958 Hollywood film carried his name onto theater marquees and turned a threat into entertainment.

Once the man was gone and the movie had made him a character, the name was free to travel. Radio disc jockeys who grew up on that mythology borrowed it to promise rapid fire patter. Basketball adopted it as shorthand for relentless scoring, from an American player born in 1961 to a Filipino-American player born in 1982. Musicians then pulled it in opposite directions, from folk storytelling to punk defiance to modern crossover stardom, until a single phrase had shed nearly all of its history.

• The four year gap between the gangster's death in 1954 and the 1958 film is the hinge of the story: the physical threat was gone, so the name could be sold as a thrill.
• Radio personalities M.G. Kelly, born in 1952, and Shotgun Tom Kelly, born in 1949, used weapon names as a metaphor for fast talking energy on air.
• Harry Kelly and Kelly Williams both carried the Machine Gun Kelly nickname on the basketball court, where it described a style of shooting and nothing else.
• James Taylor recorded a song called Machine Gun Kelly on Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon, and the punk band Angelic Upstarts cut their own track on Last Tango in Moscow.
• The American actor and musician born in 1990 built his early career on the full name, then shortened it to MGK, reducing a century of history to three letters.