Where the 67 Meme Comes From: Skrilla, Doot Doot and 67th Street
The full origin story of 67, from a Philadelphia drill song to a global catchphrase, with every step in between.
· 3 min read · by the 67 team
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Every meme has a birth certificate, even the ones that pretend to come from nowhere. For 67, the paperwork points to one city, one song and one street.
Philadelphia, December 2024
Skrilla, a rapper from Philadelphia's drill scene, released a track called "Doot Doot (6 7)" on the first day of December 2024. The hook repeats "six seven" over a bouncing beat. Ask people from Philly and they will tell you the number is a reference to 67th Street, a stretch of the city's southwest side. In drill music, naming your block is standard. Nobody involved thought they were coining a word.
The sound leaves the neighbourhood
By January the song was circulating on TikTok as a "sound", the audio clip that users can attach to their own videos. Drill hooks travel well on the platform because they are short, loud and rhythmic. But 67 needed one more push to become a phenomenon.
February 2025: the LaMelo Ball edits
That push came from basketball. A creator posted a clip of a commentator describing NBA guard LaMelo Ball, listed at 6 feet 7 inches. The moment the commentator says "six-seven", the Skrilla hook drops and a highlight montage begins. The edit was watched millions of times in weeks and spawned thousands of copies: any tall player, any 6'7" measurement, any scoreboard with those digits became a cue for the sound.
The gesture
Somewhere in spring 2025 the hands appeared: palms up, moving alternately up and down, as if weighing two invisible things. Nobody has a clean origin for it. The best theory is that it started as a visual for "so-so" (a hand-wobble that already existed) and got attached to the words because the timing matched. Once the gesture existed, 67 no longer needed the song. You could do it silently across a classroom.
Summer 2025: the 67 kid
A short clip of a young fan yelling "six seven!" at a youth basketball game gave the meme a face. The scream, the joy, the total absence of context: it was the meme in its purest form. Adults finally noticed, which is when a meme officially becomes a "trend".
Autumn 2025: bans, awards and South Park
Schools started banning the number. News outlets published explainers. Dictionary.com named it Word of the Year, with the honest admission that nobody could define it. South Park wrote it into an episode. Each of these moments would normally kill a meme. 67 absorbed all of them.
2026: it is just a word now
A year and a half after the song, 67 is part of the language for anyone born after 2010. It has crossed into Italy, Brazil, the Philippines, Germany and India, each with its own pronunciation. And it has a game, which is the part we are responsible for.
If you take one thing from this history, take this: the most viral word of the decade was not designed by anyone. A rapper named his street, a basketball player was tall, and a kid screamed. Everything else was the internet doing what it does.
