The Complete History Of “Bling Bling”
In the early 2000s, an animated MTV spot cheekily illustrated the strange life of “bling bling.” First we see some anonymous rappers on stage, chanting the infamous, irreplaceable phrase; then we see the term wind its way through pro locker rooms and TV interviews and high school hallways until, finally, it shows up at the tea-time table of a white suburban woman and her matronly mother. Pointing at her new earrings, the woman chirps: “Bling bling!”
Indeed, we long ago murdered “bling bling.” But since its death, our fondness for its source material — the 1999 radio hit of the same name — has only grown. Officially credited to B.G., but widely associated with the entire illustrious Cash Money crew, it both defines an era, and represents its possible high-water mark. On both the track and the indelible video, we got a massive, preposterous, joyous chunk of stunting — a level of stunting we may never see again.
Thanks to his manifold latter-day successes, “Bling Bling” can at times feel like a footnote in Lil Wayne’s career. But the truth is, “Bling Bling” — and what was, for a time, its all-pervading presence — is elemental to a proper understanding of Wayne. Which is to say: a once-in-a-generation megastar whose very words shape our cultures and our lives.
As part of FADER’s Lil Wayne Week, we present: the oral history of “Bling Bling.”
In 1991, the brothers and entrepreneurs Bryan “Birdman” and Ronald “Slim” Williams formed the New Orleans-based Cash Money Records. After enjoying regional success in the mid-90s, the label broke through nationally on the strength of its star, the charismatic Juvenile, and his fellow Hot Boys: B.G., Turk, and the fresh-faced Lil Wayne. By the end of the decade, Cash Money was churning out material at a rapid pace
TURK (Cash Money artist): Back then, we were recording like it was a job. We’d get these titles and concepts from Baby — we called him Baby ‘cause back then he wasn’t Birdman yet. He’d come with a list of songs or something. Me and Wayne used to always be together, and he’d just give us songs and tell us to write and we used to just write every day. He always was in the studio, like every day. He’d be like, “Y’all, come to the studio.” Man, we’d drink, we’d eat chicken, we’d shoot dice, and we’d gamble. That’s what we did every day.
LIL WAYNE (Cash Money artist): “Bling bling, I know/ And did you know I’m the creator of the term?” — “Hollywood Divorce,” Outkast feat. Lil Wayne
MANNIE FRESH (Cash Money producer): Wayne had already used the word “bling” in a song prior to that but the word had already stuck to me. I don’t know exactly which song, but I know his line was, “Tell me what kinda nikka/ Got diamonds that’ll bling, bling ya.” That was like, damn, that bling word could be something.
DINO DELVAILLE (Universal A&R): It was either Wayne or Juvie or one of the Hot Boys who [first said “bling bling”]. It was on a Hot Boys album. Every time they talked about their jewelry, their ad libs would be “bling! bling!” in the background. It was just a funny ad lib. It was cute.
UPTOWN ANGELA (New Orleans Q93 personality and programmer): The first time I heard “bling bling” being said as a phrase was from Bryan Williams. I met him in maybe ‘96 at the radio station and he would always just say it in his every day terminology. Everytime he would talk about jewelry, he would just say “bling bling.”
TURK: I don’t remember how the word “bling bling” came up. We used to always be playing around in conversations. And we always used to be in the studio so somebody might say something and somebody else might be like, “Aw man, that’s a song!” I believe B.G. ended up saying “bling bling” and we were like, “Man, that’s a song.” That’s why it’s known ‘til this day that B.G. is really the originator. But it really was our lifestyle and how we lived. We was always stuntin’ — throwing money, the jewelry, the cars.
We used to always record in a studio on St. Charles Street in New Orleans. Either that one or we’d be on Canal. We had like three studios we recorded at. And I believe that song came from St. Charles Street. We didn’t think it was gonna be a hit or nothing. We just was recording music.
RONALD “SLIM” WILLIAMS Ronald (Cash Money co-founder): We was in the studio [starting] from the evening time, ‘cause Wayne was going to school. So we’d go from four o’clock to as long as we could go. If we was in rhythm, we would do three, four songs a night. If I’m not mistaken, Wayne said the word “bling” first. And we just went from there. We just heard that and it created what it did from there.
MANNIE FRESH: So I’m sitting around listening to old school hip-hop shyt one day and this song comes on and it’s got these little “bling, bling” sounds and I’m like, “Oh shyt, that’s it.” I said, “We need to record that shyt tonight.” I did the beat and had everything done by the time we get to the studio. That was one of the songs that was probably a 10-minute song. No more than an hour.
The word bling was something that Wayne had already said. But “Bling, bling everytime I come around your city bling, bling” — I wrote the hook. The whole entire hook. I wrote it to the music. It had to be two words because I put these two stabs in the beat while I was doing it. I wanted to match the kick. That was the reason why I didn’t just say “bling.”
shyt, it was a lot of liquor involved in that song. It was just a party atmosphere because once I did the hook and Wayne put the lil’ fill-ins, everybody was like, “This shyt is genius.” In certain cases, Juvenile would have a verse ready. He wrote some incredibly cool shyt where he was just waiting for that right song and I think “Bling Bling” was one of those songs. You didn’t have to pull out your tablet or nothing — you really was ready. So he does his verse, they do their verses. Baby did what he normally does, his lil’ rambling thing, but it works.
TURK: Every song that we ever did, I didn’t think nothing was gonna happen to it. When you love something and you do something, you weren’t working for a hit record. I never just set up in my mind like, Aw man, I'm gonna try to create a hit. Hits don’t get made like that. The people determine if it’s a hit or not. So, we just do what we do. We work and that’s it.
UPTOWN ANGELA: Next thing you know, B.G. put the song together. I wanna say the first time I heard it, we were traveling from one of the concerts they were doing. Sometimes Bryan would play new music, so he played the song and I listened to the whole album before it dropped. And I was like, “Wow, that’s gonna catch on.” B.G.’s sound was just so organic of New Orleans, and his tracks with Mannie, when you put them together … I wasn’t totally caught off guard that it took off like it did. It was in the very beginning stages of Cash Money growing and becoming who they are. For me, when I heard it, it just stood out.
SLIM: We felt it was special [right away]. Fresh, and my brother, they really was messing with the bling bling. Wayne started to bling. The word was special. It was coming together. You know the concept — when it’s on you, you bling. You got it going on, you bling.
DINO DELVAILLE: Maybe a year or so after [their historic $30 million deal with Universal] was done, they came with this record. They had just played on the ad libs that they were using on previous records, just using the slang. When I first heard the record, I knew that that was gonna be a monster. It was the hook, and also some of the synth sounds that Mannie Fresh was using. You know which sound I’m talking about, before the drums come in, it’s like, plink, plink, plink! Hearing that sound and the hook and the energy of the record, I knew it was gonna go.
MANNIE FRESH: The crazy thing is Wayne came in so energetic. I said, “Dude, wait, it’s not your song.” Originally the song was a Big Tymers song but B.G. was so street that we decided to give the song to him because it was like, “How do we get the masses to like this album?” It was gonna be a family song on the Big Tymers album. But after I listened to B.G.’s album, I was like, “This shyt is so heavy and dark you need at least two songs that’s completely different from any of that.”
TURK: There was different versions of the song. My verse was on the first “Bling Bling,” the street version. And when Universal wanted us to do a radio edit of it, I wound up missing the studio session. Birdman was calling me and everybody had done did their radio edit, the clean version. I was in Magnolia Projects. It was a rainy day, I’m chillin’, me and my homeboys. Then I get the phone call, “We waiting on you at the studio.” The truth of the matter is I was high, and I ain’t used to want Baby and them to know. I mean, they knew I was getting high but I ain’t used to wanna go around them and I was real high that day. I ain’t even wanna go in front of them because I’m having fun, I’m getting loaded. And I missed it. They had to put somebody on there, so they winded up putting Wayne on there and replacing me.
DINO DELVAILLE: It was like that sometimes in those days. He was the one who really had the [addiction] issue. There was times when we couldn’t find him for days. We’d have video shoots and studio sessions set up, and we’d have no idea where he was.
BIG TIGGER (host, BET’s Rap City, 1999-2005): I remember the first time hearing it and thinking, This is kinda cool. But I never thought it’d be the phenomenon that it was. It was cool, energetic, very braggadocio. There’s a bunch of songs that you thought were gonna be really big that never got big, and there’s a bunch of songs that you think are cool and then they blow up. That song blew up. I mean they named the whole era off that: the Bling Era.
MANNIE FRESH: We were just trying to find our making in hip-hop. What I’m saying is you had Slick Rick who was the storyteller, Public Enemy who was educating on whatever was going on in the black neighborhood, and you had the gangsta rap which was NWA. You had west coast sound, east coast sound, and then you had Cash Money. We had categories. It wasn’t a bad thing that the category was like, “OK, they’re kinda flamboyant.” It was just something that fit in hip-hop. We had no choice but to think that way, you know? How do you get out of something like, Goddamn, this shyt is crazy? Sometimes it’s a fantasy of, like, shyt, I want this so bad. That’s why everything is big.
UPTOWN ANGELA: “Bling Bling” was one of the biggest records that we were playing at the time. It had saying power. Normally when we put a song in rotation, we develop the song, let it grow a little for maybe four to six weeks. But this one jumped out out of the gate. People from the streets of New Orleans were already huge B.G. fans. So when we put it on, and it stayed in our power category for at least six months. And then it was still a strong recurrent song after that. Even ‘til this day it’s one of our top records.
TURK: I was mad at myself once I realized that Damn, this is a hit record. That song, I think, affected my career as a solo artist. My solo album came out a little later than everybody but it didn’t reach gold. It just showed my lack of responsibility, it set me back, and I learned from that. I learned how to be more responsible, hold myself more accountable because you never know when your big break coming. You could miss it. I regret not being on the commercial side of it ‘cause, that woulda crossed me over. It still ain’t hit me [how big it was] ‘til a lot of people just started requesting it on the radio and I started seeing it on MTV. I had slipped, but I was in the video, though.
MANNIE FRESH: We were thinking that the average hip-hop show is just some dudes with mics and they just run around. So I said, “We gotta do it bigger than everybody.” The whole props, the helicopter, and all of that, was us saying you gon’ get a better show when you come see Cash Money. We not just gon’ talk about it, we gon’ really be it. It was like, “Who else could do that?” When we did the “Get Your Roll On” video we were doing donuts in Lamborghinis. It was that whole shock value of, “They did that? They actually did that shyt.” The helicopter was another They Did That moment.
RON MOHRHOFF (producer, “Bling Bling” video): We shot three videos as one big package. We shot “Bling Bling” as the first video and then on Saturday and Sunday we shot Juvenile, “Back That Azz Up,” which is another seminal video for the time, and then we shot Hot Boys, “We On Fire,” on Tuesday and Wednesday the following week.
We went to New Orleans and shot all in around the area. [“Bling Bling”] was shot near a harbor in Slidell, Rigolet’s Marina. There’s a house out on the point, at that point it was called the Smith Mansion. It was situated right on that point, right on the harbor, and it was pretty bling bling.
I'll be damned!"