Counterbias: Bling Bling Ain't A Thing

Bling Bling Ain't A Thing

March 18 2005
Counterbias.com
Robert Furs

Have you encountered this phenomenon yet?

Never mind “shizzle”, found in bad movies as an attempt at painfully lame humor, or in print media, used in a mocking fashion towards rappers and Black lifestyle; Case in point, Mike Ross of the Sun, writing about Edmonton, Alberta's new radio station, The Bounce: “All the playas givin' props to fly shortys spinning phat tracks on the get low, fo'shizzle on da schnitzel. No wangstas in this crib, a'ight? See what happens when white people speak hip hop?”

Yeah, I see it: horrifying, and way overboard. And it happens too often.

The latest media urbanization craze in North America is usage of the term “bling” (or, specifically, “bling bling”—double the fo’shizzle fun!). It started in 2003, when the term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary’s venerable lexicon. Webster’s defines bling bling as “jewelry, often gaudy or ostentatious”, its etymology coming “from the sound it makes”. (No mention of the man who made the term famous in 1999, rapper B.G., who once told MTV that he’d wished he’d trademarked the term "so I'd never have to work again.” Man, you’re already blingin’.)

A search for “bling bling” among 4500 Google News sources turned up 307 articles, while “bling” turned up 1320, all in just the past 30 days. That’s 44 blingin’ news pieces per day—including everything from the Ottawa Citizen and Washington Post (“Stars of India: The Bling-Bling in the Crown”) to All-Baseball.com (“Cain and A-Rod—A Bling-Bling Rivalry”) and the Pacific Business News (“Automakers also burnish their images by shipping bling-bling pre-production models”, states one story).

It’s another African-American invention co-opted by the Mainstream White community and converted into a dull, heartless trend. Elvis allegedly stole rock & roll from Blacks and Eminem is, according to some, still in the process of jacking hip-hop from its originators. Similarly, Corporate America, Thugged-Out Caucasian Mallrats, and the trend-following Dimwit Media have taken another piece of the African-American cultural pie—one whose few remaining pieces are dented with the bite marks of corporate teeth.

CNN has used the word “bling” 50 times on-air in the last year, according to a Factiva search. Carol Lin, Miles O’Brien, Rick Sanchez, Kelly Wallace, among many other anchors, have dropped the b-word so casually as if to be blasting at rival reporters’ entourages outside New York radio stations and shopping’ at Jacob the Jeweler’s with Nas and 50 Cent.

On a personal note, I will admit: I got caught up in the bling-bling trend (not actual cars and diamonds, just the words) years ago. I have an excuse—it was just after B.G. and Cash Money Records made their song “Bling Bling” into a hot single. I loved the catchy track, but thought nothing more of it than the beauty of the bouncy beat and braggadocio-filled, amusingly materialistic lyrics, not to mention the eye-catching video full of women, cars and bankrolls. To this day I use blingbling@telusplanet.net as my primary e-mail address—feel free to hit me up and ridicule my hypocrisy—but do know that the address was spawned six years ago when Cash Money clique’s “Bling Bling” first dropped and transformed the basic tenets of my teenage existence. Unfortunately, I’ve matured since eleventh grade, and am now vivaciously denouncing the term in opinion outlets like Counterbias, while trained journalists have done the opposite and begun flippin’ the “bling” like flapjacks.

When serious journalists start behaving like Flip Dog in an effort to appeal to the urban set and gain “cool” “street” points, I feel an urge to flip off the television, vivisect and torch my dad’s Western Living magazine (whose latest issue, shockingly to me, also contained the term in an article about—you guessed it—sugar), and play my VHS copy of White Boyz (the movie, coming to DVD this month, that Malibu’s Most Wanted tried to be but couldn’t)—because there I can get a potent satirical view of ethnic cultural robbery, racial misidentification, and fake attempts to be “down”, rather than seeing it live and direct during my mid-afternoon CNN sessions.

Said on February 17 by CNN anchor Kelly Wallace: “Ahead in the next hour of Daybreak, judicial nominees. Sounds boring, but we'll tell you why you should care. And Rolling Stone tells us which acts can afford the most bling-bling. You won't want to miss it. We'll be right back.”

Do come back, Kelly. But please, before you return: tell your media associates to leave the bling-bling talk to the hustlers and ballers who originated it. Just because something found its way into the dictionary and is adored by suburban youth (a group who, coincidentally, you’d love to gain viewers from for ratings and ad revenue purposes) as “cool”, doesn’t mean you guys have to be so overbearing, obnoxious and gosh-darned white about it. Like, fo'shizzle on da schnitzel!