Blingworthy Title: ICE COLD: A HIP-HOP JEWELRY HISTORY
You can find this book on the New Book Display shelf (CCC 130)
In 1976, Ricky “Slick Rick” Walters’s Jamaican British family moved from South London to the Bronx, where he would go on to become one of the most influential rappers of early New York hip-hop. But as he puts it in ICE COLD: A HIP-HOP JEWELRY HISTORY (Taschen, $100), “I’ve been telling stories through my attire and adornments for as long as I’ve been telling them with beats and rhymes.”
The heavy, gleaming chains of Cuban links; the diamond-drenched rings and bracelets and grills — all the jewelry that rappers, singers, D.J.s and dancers have decorated themselves with both onstage and off — have long functioned as more than just shine. These styles were born on the street, taking their first fashion cues from hustlers, pimps and drug dealers; and have since served as a cultural and visual dialogue about art, the artist and Black life in America and beyond.
Alongside 40 years’ worth of photographs of everyone from Cam’ron to Quavo, Rihanna to Roxanne Shanté, the journalist and curator Vikki Tobak traces the role of jewelry in hip-hop culture from the 1980s through the present, “from African kings to the streets of Brooklyn and Harlem.” In this story, she says, “it’s almost impossible to separate the gemstones from the bigger narrative of politics, street savvy and historical complexity.” Tobak presents these pieces not only as forms of self-expression — with contributions from the likes of LL Cool J and A$AP Ferg — but also as evidence of a collective human history, of “our deep psychological need to show up and show out.”
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