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.
Years before his first album, the lovable golden-age goofball Biz Markie had this chain made at a small jewelry store in Jamaica, Queens. “Back then nobody had a lot of money,” says his widow, Tara Hall. “Half of these kids didn’t even have homes. But it was a status symbol. The bigger the chain, the nameplate, the more ‘prestigious’ you were.” Biz was with a friend when he ordered the chain. “They looked at each other and one was like, ‘Do you think it’s real?’” Hall recalls. “The other one said, ‘I think so!’”
This actual hood ornament, seen most famously in the 1986 video for “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!),” set off a global wave of vehicular vandalism. “It wasn’t a good time to have a Volkswagen,” admits DJ Hurricane, the Beastie Boys’ longtime D.J. The chain satirizes hip-hop materialism the way the Beasties initially satirized rap itself: “trying to be the most boastful, the most misogynistic, the drunkest,” says Amanda Pecsenye of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The museum’s collection includes a second VW medallion, which Mike wore to an ill-fated taping of “American Bandstand.”
After Run-DMC’s 1986 anthem-cum-guerrilla marketing experiment “My Adidas” paid off with a seven-figure endorsement deal, the sneaker company sent the group these solid gold shell-top pendants (chains not included). Pete Nice, member of the rap trio 3rd Bass and now co-curator of the Universal Hip-Hop Museum in the Bronx, recalls a night at the Latin Quarter club where 50 Cent — not the rapper, but the notorious stickup kid whose name he borrowed — tried and failed to snatch Jay’s from off his neck. “We always used to have to fight guys off,” says DJ Hurricane, who used to tour with Run-DMC. “Everyone wanted that shoe.”
Herc was known to wear gold chains in the 1970s — Pete Nice even has evidence suggesting he pawned one in 1975 to pay for a club rental — but by the mid-’80s hip-hop fashion had begun to swing from opulence toward the more populist, Afrocentric look of the leather medallion.
Flavor Flav, Public Enemy’s voluble hype man, began wearing a cheap shower clock around his neck on a dare, but before long the look became an iconic statement: at once a mockery of his contemporaries’ extravagant chains and timepieces and a metaphorical public-service announcement, letting suckers know what time it was. The gesture was a canny satirical counterpoint to the weightier political preoccupations of the group’s frontman, Chuck D.
On the cover of his 1990 album “Mama Said Knock You Out,” LL brandishes his name as menacingly as brass knuckles. The four-finger ring, popularized by fellow rappers like Big Daddy Kane as well as Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s 1989 drama “Do the Right Thing,” updates the nameplates of Biz Markie’s era into something a bit more in-your-face, as it were.
As one of the few female acts in rap’s early years, Salt-N-Pepa rocked bling with the best of them: dookie chains, nugget rings, even gold teeth for a brief spell. But earrings like these gold bamboo-textured hoops were the rare feminine-coded accessories in a bizarro culture where even the most macho M.C.s wear necklaces and bracelets without apparent contradiction. “Women were trying to keep up with the men back then,” says Cheryl James, better known as Salt. “Because it was their territory.”
This piece, which swings from Biggie’s neck in the video for 112’s “Only You” remix, is cataloged by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as depicting Aquarius, even though it bears a stronger resemblance to Virgo iconography. (It’s on loan from his mother, who is an Aquarius.) For his part, Biggie was a Gemini. Would he have cared? One remembers his dismissal of rival suitors in the 1994 hit “Big Poppa”: “Who they attractin’ with that line, ‘What’s your name, what’s your sign?’/Soon as he buy that wine, I just creep up from behind.”
Tupac researched and designed this ring himself, inspired in part by his reading of “The Prince” by Machiavelli — a name he adapted for his own use the same year. Packed with cabochon rubies and pavé diamonds, it commemorates both the founding of his own production company and his romance with Kidada Jones. He sported it at the 1996 MTV Video Music Awards, his last public appearance before his murder. Two weeks ago, it sold at Sotheby’s for $1.01 million — to Drake.
“Call me George Foreman ’cause I’m selling everybody grills,” boasted Paul Wall on Nelly’s 2005 hit “Grillz,” an ode to the titular dental jewelry (generally gold or platinum inlaid with precious stones). He was barely exaggerating: Soon after, his partnership with the Vietnamese jeweler Johnny Dang, whose Houston workshop’s clientele now ranges from Beyoncé to Floyd Mayweather, was booming. “Even when you’re wearing a ring, necklace and watch, grills stand out most,” Dang says. “It’s diamonds in your mouth!” The model shown here requires between 12 and 20 of them per tooth.
The Bay Area rap fixture E-40 founded his own label, Sick Wid It Records, in 1988, to shore up a commercially neglected regional scene. His uncle Saint Charles Thurman, himself a songwriter and producer, drew him a logo: a hog eating money out of a crate. “We called ourselves hogs,” 40 explains. “That mean you a beast, that you ain’t no sucka.” This piece is an enlarged version of the original logo chain; new signees to the label got smaller versions. “We’d give them a signing bonus and a chain,” 40 says.
Big Sean’s first-ever chain, a Jesus piece made by the Park Avenue stalwart Jacob the Jeweler and gifted to him by Kanye West, went missing. “Sometimes in a fast life,” Sean says, “you lose things.” This second version was given to him by Kid Cudi onstage at a concert just over a decade ago, and has been with him ever since. It follows Kanye’s original design, with diamonds for hair and crown of thorns and rubies for tears. “People say it’s white Jesus,” Sean told Hot 97 in 2013. “I like to believe it’s just light-skinned Jesus.”
While some rappers use jewelry to invoke their idols, be they divine or cartoonish, others look no further than their own metafictional avatars. (Rick Ross famously owns a chain depicting Rick Ross wearing a Rick Ross chain.) Tyler has always filled his albums with shadowy alter egos; for his 2019 album, “Igor,” he commissioned this elaborate likeness in gold and diamonds from the Los Angeles jeweler Ben Baller. “I got it to see the visual aspect of the album in 3-D,” Tyler says. “The screens and paper feel flat after a while.”
To anticipate the obvious question: Yes, the fork and knife come off. Roddy Ricch has eaten fruit with them. They have caused problems at the airport on more than one occasion. “Hella times I buy jewelry and it just sits on my neck,” says Roddy, who had this piece made by Elliot Eliantte to celebrate his latest mixtape, “Feed Tha Streets III.” Practical as it may be, it’s not everyday jewelry: He puts it on “when I want to feel a certain energy, get back to a certain place. I’m in the studio wearing it right now.”
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.