Bling-bling

"Bling" redirects here. For the Marvel Comics character, see Bling (comics).

Bling-bling jewelry

Bling-bling (or simply bling) is a slang term in hip hop culture that refers to elaborate jewelry and other accoutrements.

Origins and popularization of the term

In linguistic terms, bling is an ideophone (a sound intended to evoke an idea)—it is not onomatopoeia, because the act of jewelry shining does not make a sound. The form bling-bling is a case of reduplication.

Coinage of the term bling, which came into use in the late 1990s, is often attributed to rap artists B.G. and Cash Money Millionaires. It was used in a song title by Cash Money Records rapper B.G., and in 1998 by fellow Cash Money artist Lil Wayne on the track "Millionaire Dream" ("I got ten around my neck, and baguettes on my wrist, Bling!"), which appeared on the Big Tymers album How Ya Luv That. "Bling Bling", a track from the 1999 B.G. album Chopper City in the Ghetto, further popularized the term.

The use of the phrase became popular, as seen in the skywriting advertisement over this New York summer resort destination of Southampton in 2006.

Though B.G. is often given credit for creating the term, television commercials for dental products and chewing gum as early as the 1970s accentuated the cleanliness of teeth with a "bling" or "pling" sound, accompanied by an imaginary starburst or ray of light emanating from an actor's mouth. During the early 1980s, toothpaste maker Ultra Brite ran a series of commercials stating, "Ultrabrite gives your mouth...[pling]...sex appeal!" Before the words "sex appeal", a bell sound was heard as a young man smiled while kisses were blown at him. During the 1980s and early 1990s, comedians such as Martin Lawrence parodied the "Ultrabrite smile" by vocalizing the sound effect as "bling". The term was used in this way to describe a gaudy piece of jewelry, for example the otherwise rotten gold-toothed smile and stereotypical pimp jewelry of the character "Jerome" on the television series Martin.

While the specific term bling was first popularized in the hip hop community, it has spread beyond hip hop culture and into mass culture. The term was added to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 2002 and to the Merriam Webster dictionary in 2006. Companies such as Sprint and Cadillac have used the word bling in their advertisements. In 2004, MTV released a satirical cartoon showing the term being used first by a rapper and then by several progressively less "streetwise" characters, concluding with a middle-aged white woman describing her earrings to her elderly mother. It ended with the statement, "RIP bling-bling 1997-2004." In 2005, the rapper B.G. remarked that he "just wished that he'd trademarked it" so that he could have profited from its use.

The term has also spread to Spanish: rappers use the term in Latin hip-hop and in reggaeton from Puerto Rico and Panama, although it is usually written and pronounced "blin-blin". The Spanish word blinblineo is also used to refer to bling-bling style.

The term is used in French to describe nouveau riche attitudes; such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy "wearing expensive suits, stylish sunglasses and conspicuously large wristwatches".

During a 2008 Martin Luther King, Jr. Day parade in Jacksonville, Florida, Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney admired a baby decked in dress attire with gold jewelry and said, "Oh, you've got some bling-bling here."

Criticism

Paul Wall wearing a jeweled dental grill. Some of Wall's grills cost nearly $30,000.

The short film Bling: Consequences and Repercussions, shot by Kareem Adouard and narrated by Public Enemy frontman Chuck D, explains how diamonds (a staple of bling fashion) occasionally originate as conflict diamonds, fueling wars, poverty, and killings in Africa.

Bling: A Planet Rock (2007) documents the flashy world of commercial hip-hop jewelry against the significant role diamonds play in the ten-year civil war in Sierra Leone, West Africa. The movie follows three hip-hop celebrities: Raekwon (Wu Tang Clan), Paul Wall (maker of diamond grills), and Reggaetón king Tego Calderón as they visit the capital of Freetown to meet the community and survey the devastation caused by the diamond mines.

Several hip hop insiders, such as the members of Public Enemy and the Puerto Rican reggaeton star Tego Calderon, have made the deliberate choice not to don expensive jewelry as a statement against bling culture. Missy Elliott stated in the aforementioned interview that hip hop artists should act as role models in this respect and encourage young people to invest responsibly and sensibly in stable, long-term assets.

Even more controversial is the value of bling bling in South African hip hop (kwaito) aesthetics. Pre-, during, and post-apartheid, black South Africans have long been exploited for their land's precious metal ("blood diamonds"). Gavin Steingo has stated, "It truly is tragic that many young South Africans have embraced the Western gold fetish: a fetish which prizes gold as nothing more than a label of ostentatious wealth." Conspicuous consumption effect of Black American Hip Hop remains present in kwaito despite its relations to blood diamonds.

See also

• Chav
• Commodity Fetishism
• Conspicuous consumption
• Gangsta rap
• Grill
• Hip hop fashion
• List of most frequently mentioned brands in the Billboard Top 20
• Veblen good
• Materialism