Ye’s Titanium Teeth: Are Celebrity Teeth What Happens When You Have Too Much Money?
Seems that Ye’s latest stunt that may stunt the health of his teeth and gums achieved its goal of putting the 46-year-old in the spotlight again. Although not for too long, given the glare from his now infamous titanium dental cover, since you can hardly call those two single bands ‘teeth’. Ye may have been inspired by ‘60s Bond fiend Jaws but at it’s at least feasible that the original chowed down on a perfectly cooked steak, chewed on a chicken and coleslaw sanga, or anything more than mashed banana or sucking something through a straw.
It has created much debate since its completely choreographed unveiling. From its cost not being the claimed $US850,000 but rather closer to $US65,000 and whether all his teeth were, or were not removed, or filed down to stumps, to questioning it as a permanent fixture, or found nightly in a glass of nitric acid beside his bed.
It certainly gave him another chunk of Warhol’s designated 15-minutes of fame souped up to millennium standards. It prompts the pertinent question of what he’ll be doing next for a bit of relevancy, since it seems that his Jaws jawbreaker lisps and slurs, slipquips and dehrs his rap slang and speech.
Some thought that maybe his now-not-so-new wife, whose fashion sense makes no sense, might follow up with some kind of matching gnasher befoolery. That’s yet to come to fruition. Maybe Bianca Censori is fine baring all but her teeth.
Celebrity culture is so familiar to anyone in their 30s and younger. For the rest, it’s a bizarro world predicted by American historian and critic Christopher Lasch in the 1970s and wholly unbelieved at the time.
He presented far too pessimistic a view.
The ‘60s counterculture gave new freedoms and expansive social norms that had the ‘70s primed for positive progression. Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ encapsulated the dream of world peace that permeated the decade after the end of the Vietnam War, although it wasn’t a time without its political and social turbulence.
Lasch suggested in his series of books – most memorably 1979’s ‘The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations’ – that capitalism would consume and encroach on social life, individualism would corrode, a liberal elite would surface, and attitudes for more altruistic material change would be abandoned. For the most part it fell on deaf ears: ears convinced they could teach the world to sing in perfect harmony; wanting to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.
This was the zeitgeist into which Lasch appeared. The unenthusiastic father with scarf-and-mittens advice for a Led Zeppelin concert.
Like all good parents, we now know that what he said is true.
Forty years ago he saw who we have become as a culture: people yearning for intimacy, fearful and unable to engage. He saw how social change would distort all relationships: family, friend, sexual, work and commercial. Where people could not and would not distinguish themselves as distinct and separate entities from an ever-reflecting misshapen glass that left tradition and ethics largely undefended, and increasingly disparaged.
Having died in 1994 at the age of 61, mobile phones were unknown to Christopher Lasch.
Yet he described how “Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much of modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors.” His new generation definition of narcissism was that of a fatiguing, and ceaseless search for self-identified flaws in unclear and muddied waters.
A 1954 graduate of Harvard, and swayed by Hofstadter (Richard, not Leonard) Lasch forecast our current age of polarisation and populism. He foresaw parents becoming more like caretakers of their children, who no longer sought family influence, but who would instead opt for a continual and greater connection with outside forces that serve the consumerism model.
Through his knowledge of history, psychology and social structure exploration, with a PhD from Columbia, Lasch knew of the obsession with big business that was to come, and the intellectual bankruptcy it would bring.
And here we are.
Anxiously reverberating alone and self-absorbed, in hollowed, rather than hallowed halls, worshipping celebrity, intoxicated by image and indifferent to insight.
That Ye’s tripped-out titanium teeth has Google cough up almost three million results in under thirty seconds says a lot. For a news service to headline “Will Ye’s Titanium Teeth Function Better Than Ordinary Teeth” says much more than we should be willing to hear.
His dentist is a celebrity, and it’s as difficult as the chicken-or-egg in ascertaining which came first. Tooth decoration is passé in the entertainment industry now; many precious stones have been drilled, glued or grilled onto the dentitions of the madly-monied.
It’s Los Angeles dentist Dr Thomas Connelly whose impressive tattooed guns apparently perform diamond dentistry on a daily basis in his California clinic that changed the meaning of a ‘million-dollar smile’.
He also changed the price: it’s $US1.6 million, if music artist Post Malone’s eight platinum crowns, eighteen porcelain veneers and 6-karat diamond canines is anything to go by.
Rappers are rapt in him. Lil Yachtie has sailed in and out of his dental chair, and Gunna got around to it. Boxer Devin Haney, basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal and baseballer Marcus Stroman are just part of Connelly’s diamond players.
Like Ye, American footballer Odell Becker Jr has been Kim-Kardashianed, but he sports $US2 million in diamond veneers crafted by Connelly rather than a monstrously metal mouth. The dentist insists that the work he does “is not a gimmick.” It is, he says, changing the profession a bit, and pioneering something that made it a little more “mainstream”.
By “mainstream” he must mean the blessed waters in which he swims with the big, deep-pocketed fish, since there have been no reports in the local paper of Sophie at the general store, Louise at the Post Office or Gazza from the Emporium flashing their flashy flush fangs.
In devising the process of how to successfully embed a diamond into a dental veneer Connelly completely destroyed two diamonds totalling half-a-million dollars. All in a day’s work when you have your own platinum veneers, and an estimated net worth of $US1.94 billion.
That’s right folks. Billion.
Hard to wrap your head around. That’s what tapping into rappers heads, and taking a punt on sports stars’ spending can bring. Even Lasch didn’t latch onto that.
Disclaimer: The material posted is for informational purposes only and is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Results vary with each patient. Any dental procedure carries risks and benefits. If you have any specific questions about any dental and/or medical matter, you should consult your dentist, physician or other professional healthcare providers.
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