An NYC Artist Turns Rap Lyrics Into 3D-Printed Grillz

Lil’ Wayne’s rags-to-riches story, now in polished gold steel.

October 15, 2014

Roopa Vasudevan is a multidisciplinary NYC-based artist whose work often plunges into experimental realms of interactivity. For her newest project, she made gold steel grillz. Vasudeven picked songs, like Notorious B.I.G.'s "Juicy," that have lyrics about monetary extremes: poverty and privilege in the same song. As she writes in her description of the project, lyrical "mentions in each category are scored according to relative distance from words of the opposite polarity, and the resulting landscape formed is extruded into a 3D shape and printed as wearable grills." Thus, the tension between poverty and wealth are made physical by the crooked irregularities of the grillz. Vasudeven is trying to connect the dots between a traditional symbol of "making it" and the humbleness of a rapper's beginnings. See pictures of the grillz on display below, and read a short interview with Vasudevan on Dazed, here.

All photos via http://rouxpz.com.

An NYC Artist Turns Rap Lyrics Into 3D-Printed Grillz