I’ll start with a confession. Last week, and most weeks for the past several years, I’ve racked up a Screen Time average somewhere above eight hours a day, meaning that as a thirtysomething adult with grown up obligations like rent and taxes, I spend as much time staring at my phone as I (presumably) do at work. This makes me uniquely qualified, as someone whose brain is sufficiently gelatinized from algorithmic feeds, to speak on the significance of the numbers six and seven, which make up a meme that seems to be everywhere.
It of course starts with the song “Doot Doot,” by Philadelphia rapper Skrilla, which was a favorite among high school basketball highlight clips last fall. In the rather menacing track, he raps, “Bro put belt right to they behind/The way that switch brrt, I know he dyin’,” before dropping into the now infamous line “67, I just bipped right on the highway.” In an interview with the lyrics platform Genius, Skrilla explains the number’s significance in classically opaque rapper terms. “67 just represents my brain like what comes up in my head.”
Skrilla leaked a snippet from the song last year to gauge fans’ reaction, and the snippet quickly caught fire on TikTok. Taylen “TK” Kinney, a player on the high school basketball team-turned-content powerhouse Rod Wave Elite, permanently etched the line into internet history. There he was in a Starbucks last December, with all the lanky awkwardness of a teenaged college basketball prospect (he’s since committed to Kansas), asked to rate the drink in his hand. “Like a six…six,” he says, loading up the numeric combo like some kind of video game power up. “Six, seven.” According to internet wisdom, this is the origin of the meme, including the necessary hand gesture, where you pantomime juggling as if deliberating between the two numbers, trying to triangulate some specific, perhaps divine, structure. I can’t prove it but I swear I’d seen Kinney make the joke before then, in an earlier video. Even in the Starbucks clip, the gag feels fully formed — practiced. Either way, we have a pretty clear sense of when and where this whole thing started.
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Less clear, however, is what made it take off so feverishly across the web.
You might be familiar with “6 7 kid,” Kinney’s (white) viral counterpart who briefly, and erroneously, was credited for spreading the meme. (That kid’s fame has already seemingly flamed out in the form of a botched meme coin rollout.) Maybe you’ve seen the clips of mobs of children at Five Guys, waiting for the 67th order, cheering with near religious fervor as the cashier announces those holy digits over the loudspeaker. Or the countless videos from teachers lamenting their classroom’s obsession with saying the phrase, or the parents trolling their kids by dressing as “six” and “seven” for Halloween. Or South Park’s uncharacteristically late send-up of the phenomenon last month. Or maybe you’ve read one of the dozens of legacy media explainers on the topic (this one being the most exciting, obviously). Or maybe you were in the crowd at the Cleary University versus Oakland women’s basketball game over the weekend, where the crowd erupted like parishioners in a pentecostal church church once Oakland’s blow-out score reached 67.
Yet, despite how clearly the meme’s lineage can be traced, adults — present company excluded — seem willfully baffled. This week the New York Times posited that perhaps a dada-esque absurdity is the point, that youth culture, in an active quest to bewilder adults, adopts nonsensical humor in an effort towards subterfuge. A nine-year-old from Indiana interviewed for the piece suggests that there isn’t really any meaning behind 67. “No offense to adults, but I think they always want to know what’s going on,” she told the paper of record. In the very next paragraph, though, the writer points directly to the very real origins of the meme. There was even Natasha Bedingfield’s concert in Philly last month where she brought Skrilla out on stage to perform “Doot Doot,” among the few acknowledgements of the meme’s actual origins in all the recent 67 hoopla — though Skrilla did also join Kinney and his team at one of their games earlier this year.
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Even so, when Dictionary.com dubbed “67” as the word of the year, they too opted for ignorance. “If it’s a surprise to you that 67 (pronounced “six-seven”) is somehow newsworthy, don’t worry, because we’re all still trying to figure out exactly what it means,” the official announcement reads. How hard is it, exactly, to say: “It’s a joke from a rap song made popular by a high school basketball player”?
Like Skibidi Toilet and Rizz before it, “67” has become the latest way for grown-ups to confirm their fears about young people becoming difficult to decipher — that they live in an internet-based world they increasingly can’t understand. The Times places the fascination with the term in a lineage going back as far as the Nineties, when a record store employee fooled them into thinking fake slang like “lamestain” were real products of the Grunge era. Except now, we basically live on the blockchain, where the origins of every meme, phrase, and cultural reference are readily available online. Whole websites exist to explain internet humor. Surely there exist teenagers, as confounded by their classmates’ fascination with the number 67 as their parents, who simply Googled it.
It’s easy to look at online trends through the lens of some kind of ineffable youthful spirit with clean generational lines that serve as deciding factors of whether or not one “gets it.” Frankly, this increasingly feels like bullshit cope (to borrow the parlance of Gen Z). There is no youth culture in the world of algorithmic soup, just one never-ending feed where a grown man might find himself invested in the ongoing saga between Rakai and Duke Dennis. In a recent interview, Tyler, the Creator sums up the current moment best. “I don’t know if youth culture exists anymore,” he told T Magazine. “I think a 42-year-old and a 15-year-old could have the same humor and style.”
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The Times article on “67” cleaves to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s Generations Theory, popularized in their 1997 book The Fourth Turning, a favorite of Steve Bannon. In 2000, they published the seminal work, Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, coining the term for my generation in its pages, and placing distinct boundaries between Gen X, Millennials, Gen Z, and the now ascendant Gen Alpha. The two policy wonks pored over statistics, pop-culture anecdotes, and surveys of teachers and high-school seniors from Fairfax County, Virginia — the first county in the U.S. with a median income of more than $100,000, and whose African-American population sat just under 10 percent. Using those data, Howe and Strauss assigned the age group seven core traits: special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving. The word salad of an assessment, based on an overwhelmingly white and wealthy cohort, has since guided billions of dollars in investor capital and serves as a nearly-undisputed foundation for a mainstream understanding of popular culture.
Never mind the ultra conservative tilt of Generations Theory, mystifying the habits of young people online is a pet project of (mostly white) adults who would like things to be more complex than they actually are. Most online humor has roots in marginalized communities, i.e. a rap song, and the real explanation for what it all means is that since the dawn of the internet, culture has flattened into a giant mush of references to stuff Black people have been doing and saying for generations. None of this meme shit is actually that hard to understand. Just look at your phone.
