Bling Movie 2016

[Stephani Kapnick]

Blingbling, often shortened to just bling, is "flashy jewelry worn especially as an indication of wealth or status; broadly: expensive and ostentatious possessions"[1] such as grills and designer bags. The term arose as slang, but grew into a cultural mainstay. Prominent examples of bling-bling include a large cross necklace or Jesus piece.[2]

In linguistics terms, bling is either an ideophone or an onomatopoeia, depending on the definition one uses, with bling-bling being its reduplication. Some have attributed the term to rappers that came before B.G., or to the old cartoonish sound effects meant to convey the desirability and or shininess of gold, gems, jewels, money, and more.[3]

The word 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, for instance. On the other hand, in 2004, MTV released a satirical cartoon showing the term first being used by a rapper, followed by several progressively less "streetwise" characters, concluding with a middle-aged white woman describing her "bling" to her elderly mother.[5][6]

The term has spread to Spanish speaking countries around the world, with Latin hip-hop and reggaeton artists from places like Puerto Rico and Panama. The main nuance is that, in Spanish, it is often stylized and pronounced as "blin-blin".[10] Furthermore, the Spanish word blinblineo also refers to bling and its style. Similarly, in French, "bling" traditionally describes nouveau riche attitudes; such as "wearing expensive suits, stylish sunglasses and conspicuously large wristwatches" or anything that is ostentatious and can be considered of "poor taste".[11] In German, it is usually used as simply "Bling".[citation needed]

The short film Bling: Consequences and Repercussions explains the troubled backstory of many of the diamonds jewelers often use to make the gaudy jewelry. Explicitly, the film takes issue with the fact that, occasionally, the diamonds were originally blood diamonds, that fuel wars, poverty, slavery, and killings across countries in Africa.[12] Similarly, Bling: A Planet Rock (2007) documents and subsequently contrasts the flashy world of commercial hip-hop jewelry against the significant role diamonds play in the ten-year civil war in Sierra Leone.

I judged again in Houston this fall, and either Texans have dialed it down or the rest of the country has caught up because nothing unusual in the way of sparkles caught my eye. Of course, we are now all pretty much used to seeing crystals on everything except the horse itself. What started with brow bands is now on saddle pads, stirrups, spurs, gloves, jackets, helmets, breeches and even the saddle.

I came close to the bling thing a few years ago when I bought an ear cover at a show that had bad gnats. It was a flat black thus looked a bit odd. So, I took it to the lady at the show who was selling pretty brow bands and had her sew a lady-like string of pearls around the edge. It was quite fetching.

In this essay my aim is to explore how this racially derived notion of decadence always already relies on a perverse association of blackness with excess, upon which is founded an entire analysis of culture. For bling bling not only transcends class as well as gender; it makes it impossible to distinguish blackness from a racist economy of jouissance that, potentially, can invade and submerge every subject, person, or thing. Accordingly, if blackness denotes a profligacy that exceeds the moral economy of the subject, this is because it broaches the limits of being in general.

We could say that black life is the very experience of a life whose bling involves the exhaustion and degeneration of life itself, and one that necessarily involves a gradual separation of blackness and being. And this is why black life paradoxically coincides with a decadence that can only enrich itself as absolute privation, and an enjoyment that can only enslave itself as a discredited imposture of working capital.

The coincidence of decadence and blackness remains unthought in black political philosophy, which continues to offer us an image of bling bling as that without use, or as that which uses up utility nihilistically, unnaturally. The moral traditionalism of this reading, however, opens to a reading of decadence that is itself decadent, or that at least produces a hyperbolic reading that overflows its own limits.

All this derives from the literal casting down of a bucket: the lowering of the bucket into water that miraculously reveals itself as race capital is itself a transformation of metaphor into allegory. When capital triumphs, Washington avers, blackness ceases to be bereft. The stereotype of black abjection is preserved as the history that must be cancelled out even as it is raised up by the manufacture of a mutually enriching ideal of productive self-creation. Never mind the question of how the boat came to be lost, the question of how blackness was rendered abject; the fact is that it is lost. Washington continues:

What that theory still needs to address is how blackness becomes the primary referent of a pleasure that enslaves itself, or that consumes itself as enslaved. In this connection, I would like to turn to a renowned essay by Hortense Spillers in which the reproduction of gender under racial slavery is discussed in terms of grammar, sovereignty, and naming.

What is new here is the idea of black utilitarianism, which Washington and other writers introduced and described.7 In the field of such rhetorical labor, masculinity, conceived as the productive form, is contrasted to the feminine space of thrift, which is the duty of the one who consumes. Here in the spending of thrifts real black men work; they are not castrated sojourners in the marketplace of capital.

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