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Music

These 3D Printed Grillz Are Made From the Sound of Rap's Struggle

This artist has used the music of Biggie Smalls, a homemade program and a 3D printer to create the most conceptual grills imaginable.

Hip hop embodies the brightest and darkest corners of the world. Songs feature lyrics about getting a private jet out to the Bahamas on one verse; and shivering in the Brooklyn winter on the next. It’s not that the contrast is a little schizophrenic, but rather most rap songs are rags-to-riches stories, littered with references to both luxury and poverty.

Roopa Vasudevan is an NYC based artist who was inspired to explore this idea through physical art. She saw this duality of rag and riches in grills (or grillz: a diamante version of dentures), which she felt was a grandiose metaphor for the desire to impress, while contrasting with the desire to stay true to the more realist values one grew up with.

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Thinking of how best to present this socio-dental paradox, Roopa created a computer program to examine the lyrics of certain classic rap songs - like Rick Ross’s “Hustlin’” or Biggie’s “Juicy” - to find mentions of poverty and wealth. This information was then turned into 3D models, featuring peaks and troughs illustrating the high and lows of the lyrics. Roopa then undertook a 3D printing course to construct these models into grills. The message of the piece comes through in the contours of the golds; showing how the same song can concurrently reference growing up with nothing and living with everything.

Roopa has been exhibiting the grills (of which only five were made) at exhibitions in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, and people are invited to examine the patterns on them, while listening to the song at the same time. Before you ask, they’re just for the exhibition now, so there’s no fronts for sale just yet.

I called Roopa to chat about wealth and poverty in hip-hop, her grills' place in culture, and what songs looked best as a pair of golden chompers.

Noisey: What was your first thought when you saw grills?
Roopa: It was really weird for me to see that people would spend so much money on jewellery that looked super uncomfortable to wear and were for your teeth, which seemed really excessive. Looking back now I realise that this was the point and that grills were more a symbol of status than anything else but, initially, it seemed like such an odd place to wear jewellery.

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Can you tell me more about your project?
The project came from my interest in exploring some of the tropes I have seen as a hip-hop fan over the years. Namely, the juxtaposition of extreme poverty and extreme wealth, often within the same song, verse or lyric. I'm taking rap lyrics and going through them with a computer program I wrote - looking for key words or phrases that either reference poverty or wealth in the rap lexicon.

How did you get into hip-hop?
I grew up in a suburb of Cleveland that was 50% black and 50% white. As a result I got exposed to a lot of cultural influences that I don't think I would have otherwise (being from an Indian immigrant family). I love hip-hop as an art form and culture, especially as someone who's been interested in the art of remix and generating new artwork from existing content.

Did any music videos hit you visually?
The first rap video I remember vividly was Biggie's "Hypnotise". I discovered him maybe 2 or 3 months after he was killed (I was 12 or 13 at the time) and I remember being really upset that I hadn't found him earlier.

How so?
It's a genre that i think speaks to the current state of the country far more accurately than most others. But because I also came to self-identify as a feminist, I also found inherent problems with the industry's treatment of women, which gave a kind of tension to my appreciation of the music for what it was. That kind of led to where I am now, which is enjoying rap, but listening to it with a much more critical ear.

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What were the songs you chose for the grillz project?
I actually ran the programs on a whole bunch of different songs, but since I only was able to print 5 for the first showing, I stuck with the songs that generated the coolest landscapes. those were "Juicy" (Biggie), "Hard Knock Life" (Jay Z), "Hustlin'" (Rick Ross), "Make It Rain" (Fat Joe ft. Lil Wayne), and "Been Around the World" (Puff Daddy ft. Ma$e and Biggie).

Why did those songs work particularly well?
The thing about the way I'm analysing text is that there has to be a good number of references to both poverty and wealth, and they have to be relatively close to each other, in order to make a good landscape for the grill. I wanted to select a diverse group of songs that varied the amount they discussed both, so there was a range in what was shown.

What song worked particularly well?
Well "Juicy" is an entirely rags to riches story so the landscape is nice and even throughout (meaning that the peaks and valleys look relatively even compared to the others). But "Been Around the World" is mostly flat with the exception of a couple of spikes, because all Diddy does during the song is rap about how rich he is.

What have you got planned next for the project?
It would be cool to analyse one artist's work over the course of their career and see how the landscapes change. Someone like Jay Z would be perfect for this, how have his lyrics changed from Reasonable Doubt all the way through to Magna Carta Holy Grail? So that's the potential next phase of the project. Thanks Roopa!

Follow Dan on Twitter: @KeenDang