Grillz
Removable gold and diamond teeth went from Southern hip-hop signature to national obsession, and for a couple of years the shiniest thing at the mall kiosk was dental. Nelly put the moment on wax — "Grillz" hit number one — and every yearbook from 2006 has at least one kid flashing a mouthful of metal.
Grills — decorative, usually removable metal caps worn over the teeth — had deep roots in Southern rap long before the mainstream caught on, nowhere more than in Houston, where Paul Wall made a gleaming mouthful part of his whole identity. The look went national in 2005, riding the year's Houston takeover of the charts, and suddenly gold fronts were showing up in suburban malls and prom photos far from the scene that minted them.
The anthem arrived on November 1, 2005: Nelly's "Grillz," featuring Paul Wall with Ali & Gipp, produced by Jermaine Dupri and built on a sample of Destiny's Child's "Soldier." It spent two consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and went on to earn RIAA platinum certifications for both a million digital downloads and a million mastertones — a very 2006 pair of achievements, since half the point of the song was making your flip phone announce it.
Like most fashion lightning strikes, the mass-market moment was brief. By the late 2000s grills had receded from the mall back to the culture that created them, where they never stopped being worn — resurfacing on pop stars periodically ever since as a deliberate throwback flex. What remains for everyone else is the memory of the era when a top-charting single doubled as jewelry advertising, and the certainty that somewhere there's a shoebox with a $20 novelty grill still in it.
Similar items
Nelly
For the first half of the 2000s, Nelly was pop-rap's biggest crossover star — the Band-Aid-cheeked St. Louis rapper behind "Hot in Herre" and "Dilemma," a run of singalong hits that owned radio, MTV, and the charts.
Lil Jon
Crunk's king — jeweled goblet, dark shades, dreads, and a three-word vocabulary delivered at maximum volume. Jonathan Smith came up through Atlanta's rap scene and spent the mid-2000s making the loudest, most fun records on the radio. He didn't just ride the decade; he supplied its energy.
Ringtones & Crazy Frog
Before smartphones, your ringtone was your personality — monophonic beeps, then polyphonic MIDI, then "real tones," each tier a status upgrade bought from services like Jamster. And looming over the whole era: a CGI frog doing a moped impression, outselling Coldplay.
Shutter Shades
Sunglasses with no lenses — just plastic slats, like Venetian blinds for your face. After Kanye West wore a white pair in the "Stronger" video, shutter shades conquered every mall kiosk, party photo, and MySpace profile picture of 2007–2008, despite being objectively worse than sunglasses at everything sunglasses do.