It feels like it was only yesterday when you couldn’t get within a ten-foot radius of anyone born after the year 2000 without hearing them mumble “six-seven,” the now immortalized digits from Philadelphia rapper Skrilla’s single “Doot Doot,” which functionally took hold of everyone’s brain at some point last year (and maybe a little into 2026, too). Now, just as quickly and seemingly out of the blue, another rap song has snuck an earworm into the zeitgeist. YoungBoy Never Broke Again‘s “What You Is,” released in September, has spawned the next viral craze, sure to befuddle parents and teachers worldwide. Why, they’ll ask, is she gon’ call me baby boo?
Some backstory: On YoungBoy’s “What You Is,” featuring Florida rapper Mellow Rackz, the beat goes quiet towards the track’s end, save for the rhythmic sounds of hands clapping—the kind of clapping you might hear on an adult film set—as YoungBoy repeats the line “she gon’ call me baby boo” in the infectious and elastic New Orleans twang that’s made him one of the highest streamed rappers of his generation. The moment already stands out in the song, a kind of sonic intermission that makes the lines stand out even more. Users on TikTok quickly took to the lyrics, turning them into a meme featuring a dance where you mimic, uh, spreading the pages of a large book open before diving in.
Things really took off, however, at the start of this year when a rash of remixes interpolating the lyrics over everything from Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari” (a true meeting of opposites if there ever was one) to Drake’s “Hotline Bling” and Zara Larsson’s “Midnight Sun.” By now, there are hundreds of thousands of remixes of the song, each growing increasingly absurd, floating around TikTok. As such, the phrase “Baby Boo” has become weirdly inescapable and, if one isn’t careful, easy to get imprinted in one’s brain. The phenomenon has gotten so bad that it’s birthed its own sub-meme, something called “Baby Boo Syndrome,” which appears to be wreaking havoc across American high schools as kids inexplicably and uncontrollably burst into the Baby Boo dance at inopportune moments.
This all feels like the eerie calm of December 2019, before a lingering virus floating in the air changed the world as we knew it. Or, more aptly, like when an unsuspecting rapper from Philadelphia decided to alter the brain chemistry of every child on the planet by saying the numbers six and seven. As with that now infamous meme, there is typically a user who can be identified as a patient zero of sorts, the catalyst for its spread across timelines and, eventually, into our collective consciousness. In the case of “Baby Boo,” all signs point to a TikToker named @selenaaa.dta posting a dance to “What You Is” in September and running with it.
As often happens on the internet, the Baby Boo dance itself is an amalgam of a few things, notably the dance associated with “Innit,” the viral hit from last summer by BunnaB and YKNIECE in which you pantomime diving, well, in it. Creators Haskell and Diddybop, both popular in underground rap circles, gave it a somewhat absurdist spin towards the end of last year before it all mushed together into what we see today. The production of the remixes is more important to the meme than the dance itself, and makes Baby Boo a new kind of brainrot variant. With every new remix — from cartoon melodies to the ice cream truck jingle — the meme gets new life and even more traction.
It should come as no surprise that, once again, the internet’s most popular tropes have been mined from the world of hip-hop. The trajectory of both “6-7” and now “Baby Boo” shows how instrumental rap and rap culture remain in the current online zeitgeist and how, no matter what the streaming numbers might suggest, hip-hop isn’t going anywhere.
