A Brief History of Bling

You can’t hear hip-hop jewelry, technically speaking, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know what it sounds like. The word bling, which entered common parlance at the turn of the century, conjures specific sights: small flotillas of twinkling diamonds, gold layered literally to the teeth, watches so gem-encrusted they barely tick. But it also suggests an expansive range of sounds, from the chimes in B.G.’s 1999 anthem “Bling Bling” to the reverberant pomp of Slick Rick, the otherworldly bounce of Missy Elliott, the diced-pineapple opulence of Rick Ross. One beguiling trick of hip-hop production, whether it’s expensive or ersatz, elegant or gaudy, is to convey musically what jewelry signifies visually.

And signify it does, in a dizzying variety of ways. Rappers wear jewelry to floss and flex, to make a flamboyant spectacle of their disposable income, but also to commemorate and honor, to endorse and advertise. They’ll commission a new piece to mark a milestone, to cement a bond with a crew or a record label, to declare their allegiance to a higher cosmic power or a fellow icon from pop culture — like Gucci Mane’s Bart Simpson pendant, DaBaby’s Stewie Griffin chain or Quavo’s Remy from “Ratatouille.” And beyond the decorative, representative function, many speak of jewelry’s more intimate effect: a private energy, a sense of boundless potential and power — the same one, perhaps, that we hear through our speakers.

Hip-hop has been a lucrative phenomenon for just about all of its existence, and jewelry has been there for the whole journey, its own trends tracing a parallel narrative. The gold rope chains of the 1980s gave way to modest leather medallions by the early ’90s, largely because the gold chains kept being snatched. Bling returned in full force with the “shiny suit era” of the late ’90s, and its iced-down Cuban links ushered in the surreally elaborate custom creations that have made certain jewelers hip-hop celebrities in their own right. Even the fates of individual pieces, a surprising number of which have since been stolen or mislaid, sold or melted down to make something new, echo the unpredictable evolution of the culture itself.

Jewelry also tells a revealing story about hip-hop’s rise through a shifting media landscape, where rap stars learned to celebrate being young and rich and Black while also internalizing the realities of being filmed and photographed almost constantly. Some of the pieces immortalized in music videos and photo shoots are borrowed or fake; the crown sitting on the Notorious B.I.G.’s head in the now-famous “King of New York” portrait shot a few days before his death was made of plastic and cost about $6. In keeping with its endlessly inventive play at the boundaries of reality, though, hip-hop shows us the complexity of the relationship between authenticity and value, and the special magic born of these rarefied objects’ interaction with the larger-than-life characters who wear them. In 2020, Biggie’s $6 plastic crown sold at auction for nearly $600,000.

Prop styling: JJ Chan and William Wesley II

Daniel Levin Becker is the author of “What’s Good: Notes on Rap and Language” and the translator of, most recently, “The Birthday Party,” by Laurent Mauvignier. Jessica Pettway is a New York-based photographer who is known for her use of color, shapes and texture in composing vibrant still lifes.