yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Secret History of Grillz | Explorer


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

Deep in an underwater cave on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, a team of archaeologists made a groundbreaking discovery: the skulls of ancient Maya, who ruled over a 4,000-year-old civilization. Perhaps most surprising was that these skulls reveal the ancient history of grills, a little-known story that modern-day fans are mostly unaware of.

When grills are in your mouth, you get a sense of power and dignity. What people don't know is that grills have an unexpected history, one that goes back literally thousands of years. These grills want to demonstrate status; it’s like saying, "I am successful in life, that I can just show my teeth now I have money, so look at my teeth." It doesn't sound so different than what grills stand for today.

So why do they get such mixed reactions? When grills first emerged in the U.S. in the early eighties, it was through immigrants from the African Diaspora who were going through tough economic times. Ironically, gold is one of the cheapest ways to fill cavities, so many Black neighborhoods in Brooklyn suddenly had all these people with gold teeth. Native New Yorkers started to get gold teeth as a fashion statement, and the rise of hip-hop in the eighties led to a reclaiming of what they could represent, turning a sign of poverty into proof of empowerment.

Grills gained mainstream attention around 1996 when Vietnamese immigrant Johnny Dang began making his own blinged-out version of them.

"My name is Johnny Dang; they call me the king of bling, a.k.a. the grill master. I will say that a lot of people out there have a misconception of grills. It's been a big part of our culture. Okay, so I remember being very small and seeing my grandma with gold caps right here in my mouth. I have no felony criminal history. Just because somebody chooses to show them by putting them in their mouth makes them no different from the person that has eight cars but is cheap. So you got to be a hard worker to get something like this, you know what I'm saying?"

"Yeah, not cleaning the grill can cause bad breath, so make sure you still brush your teeth two to three times a day. Keep it polished, keep shining, keep smiling." [Music]

More Articles

View All
The Stock Market Just Flipped
What’s up, you guys? It’s Graham here. So hold on one second, I’m going to invest some money really quick. [Applause] Oops! Well, that’s basically what investing felt like this week after the inflation data came out. That’s right, in the last week we’ve …
Power dissipation in resistors in series versus in parallel
A student builds a circuit with a battery and two light bulbs in series. Then the student builds a second circuit with two light bulbs in parallel. Which battery runs out of power first? Assume all bulbs have equal resistance. Assume both batteries have …
The Ancient City That Mastered Water
It’s a cold, rainy night in the walled city of Cordoba, medieval Spain. Watchmen guard the city, unaware that an entire army of Christian soldiers are about to launch a surprise attack. In a single night, they conquer the entire city, bringing the Muslim …
Genetic Evolution Was a Prelude to Memetic Evolution
In fact, I’ve got behind me Popper’s book called Objective Knowledge and it’s subtitled An Evolutionary Approach and that’s no accident at all either. There’s symmetry between the theory of epistemology and the theory of evolution as we understand it. Be…
Would You Walk Into a Room With Millions of Bees? | Expedition Raw
What in God’s name were we thinking? I swear that comes a point we have to draw the line, and I think we passed that somewhere in between bees crawling up my cameraman’s leg and me screaming like a twelve-year-old girl. I am in the foothills in Uganda wi…
See Why Sochi Is One of Russia's Best Vacation Spots | National Geographic
[Music] There have been a lot of problems coming out of Sochi. There’s con anxiety among, it’s still a ghost town. Stories such as these have dominated American media, but to me, the portrait seemed incomplete, and I wondered if there was another perspect…