Mouth Full of Golds: The Forgotten Story of Eddie Plein

There are objects that have entered the collective imagination in such a profound way, that seem to have always been there. For hip hop lovers, grillz is one of them. No one knows exactly the origin of golden dentures, almost as if they had always existed. The question of their origin seemed to have an obvious answer even for Lyle Lindgren, an English video maker and photographer passionate about hip hop, until he met Eddie Plein, a Jeweler from New York and inventor of the grillz as we know it today. Their meeting gave life to Mouth Full of Golds, a book that tells the parable of Plein, from a Surinamese migrant in New York in the 70s, to a trusted jeweler of many of the rap stars who marked the hip hop of the 90s.

We caught up with Lyle Lindgren to ask him a few questions about the forgotten story told within the volume.

The first question is maybe the most obvious: why did you fall in love with this theme? Why the grillz?

When I was a kid, I had an older brother, who was into hip hop and it was the era when we had CDs and when he finished them, he gave me his CDs (all the Gangstarr albums for example) and one time he gave me the Gravediggaz's 6 Feet Deep album. On that cover, you had all the members of the group, and there was RZA with the vampire fangs and his name spelled on them. I remember seeing that image and thinking that it was the coolest thing I have ever seen. Another significant moment was when I went to see James Bond's The World Is Not Enough and Goldie was in it. I was coming of age where, being in London with drum’ n bass and jungle, you would see Goldie around. I remember seeing him in the film, gold teeth and being a Bond villain, and it was mad interesting how someone had that amount of shine.  At that point I was hooked and I started making research.

How did you meet Eddie Plein?

Me and Goldie – who in the meanwhile had started working together – were in New York for a graffiti app. It was the period when A$AP Rocky was blowing up with PESO and Purple Swag. Instagram was poppin, you just hashtagged #goldteeth #goldteethnewyork, and a guy called Sinceremrmula came up – he was making teeth for Rocky and Ferg – and we were going to NY on this trip. I said to Goldie: «I’m gonna meet this guy to take a mold in the lobby of a hotel and get my teeth» and he said: «You are so obsessed with this, we need to meet the guy who invented grillz». And I asked him: «What do you mean? No one invented grillz, it’s just dental industry» and he answered: «No, Eddie Plein invented it, its concept, developed it and, since you are so into it, we should meet him».

We went to Queens to meet Eddie Plein, and I was shocked at how much respect he was getting in the streets. Everybody knew him and loved him for what he made in the ’80s: he was a hero. We went to Brooklyn, in his family house where it all began, and we started filming this interview with him. Very humbling and casually he started talking about his story, the people he made teeth for: Jay Z, Ludacris, Big Boi, Andre 3000, and the list kept going on. And what started as a five minutes interview, seemed like a much bigger story. So we started out making research because up until now there is no research about it. 

Why do you think that Eddie has been forgotten for such a long period? 

We had a lot of conversation about it I think that the world went digital, and he stayed analog.  He didn’t protect his invention. The Colusseum, where he had his first shop, wasn’t a proper store, it was a booth open, and everyone could stand and see the magic happen. When he went to Atlanta, opened his showroom, and raised to the top, it was pre-internet. He comes from a different generation, he is a self-made business person, that promotes his business through word of mouth, t-shirt, from flyers.  When the internet comes and the millennials come, he had a bit of arrogance saying «F**k millenials, f**k internet, I don’t care about computers». And that’s the element, if you don’t protect your legacy and move it online, you can be in Print Magazine, but you don’t exist. Even for me, doing research, I had to go through old hip hop magazines, because those images don’t exist online.

The story of Eddie Plein is reminiscent of what happened with Dapper Dan, a person that made the culture in the 90’s but then was forgotten for a while.

Yes, their trajectory is similar, they created something timeless. Every generation sees that work, we look at Dapper Dan MCM jacket and it is timeless. Eddie has this trajectory because he created something that looks amazing in the ’80s like it does now.  But, again, as Dapper Dan, when the world goes digital and you are analog, you are relegated to be unspoken, and your legacy becomes a whisper. So for me, it was important to tell his story because, if we don’t, the history isn’t done correctly.

The last chapter of the book is called Haute Denture, and you say that A$AP Rocky marked the rise of grillz in this era. Why him ?

What he has done is taking the grillz, an aesthetic very masculine and aggressive, and giving it a softer edge, we can say feminine, more considered by design.  What Rocky did, as an artist, is bringing all this iconography from hip hop, tackling it with high fashion, smashing together, and creating this aesthetic that has never done before.  He wears the bottom grillz, which screams hip hop, but he also wears runway Raf Simons and some crazy Margiela. He is one of the first people to say: «These are my influences, this is how we do».  We know some rappers that get super-rich very quickly but they are not accepted in high fashion, as Rocky is. I think Pharrel has done as well, but Rocky took it on a different level.