The 10 Best "One Hit Wonders" From The 1980s
January 9th, 2021
Before the word bling became a buzzword, rap and hip-hop artists were all about fashion accessories such as dookie chains. The dookie chain is a thick necklace that looks like a braided rope. It’s usually made of gold (or gold-plated), but there are some platinum versions floating around. They were worn by rap artists at the time, and the popularity of MTV ensured that every teenager as well as many adult who wanted to look cool would be getting their own dookie chains to. The dookie chain was among the most conspicuous trends during the 1980s, and if you take a look around at today’s crop of hip-hop artists it never really left the fashion landscape. Hip-hop artists are still wearing them today.
A Short History
There’s no point in discussing dookie chains without discussing rap, because the two concepts are really intertwined. Back in the 80s, it was all about Michael Jackson, with Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, The Police, and the New Wave Artists all crowding for the music lover’s attention. Later in the decade, glam rock would enter the scene.
But when you consider that particular side of the music scene, it was just a bit too white and polite. African-Americans have always been at the forefront of musical trends, but the black trendsetters tended to stay away when white artists crowded them out. Black folks in the US invented jazz and rock n’ roll, and the 1980s were ripe for another new trend. That trend was rap, and it would spawn a musical style so massive that even today it still dominates the music charts. It remained huge even when grunge entered the scene, when the boy bands and the girly singers topped the charts, and when country began to become more mainstream.