Hip-hop is the final word loudspeaker for the creative language being generated on again blocks, basement events, and faculty cafeterias in varied corners of Black America. Phrases and phrases that, at one level, held significance to a handful of parents in small, native ecosystems, if uttered by the correct standout artist, have the potential to enter the broader cultural lexicon. It’s broadly understood that calling somebody an opp, as an illustration, means you’re figuring out an adversary, even when that opp is simply an unbearable man within the subsequent cubicle. However, simply 13 years in the past, solely youngsters from Chicago had been utilizing it to determine folks with whom they had been in energetic avenue warfare. The examples are numerous, and, behind the growth of vocabulary, there may be at all times a basis that’s doubtless forgotten or plainly unknown by individuals who undertake it through common tradition. It’s, due to this fact, essential to dig into the etymology of those touring phrases.
For followers of Mid-Atlantic avenue music, a phrase that’s rising in notoriety is bip. As he caught extra ears in underground rap circles, in 2023, Washington, D.C., rapper KP Skywalka distinguished himself from the remainder of the drill-heavy DMV scene by pushing out an R&B-tinged sound and raunchy songs about pursuing courtship with as many women as potential. KP, together with his distinctive, trembling, nasally wine of a voice, additionally has a eager understanding of easy methods to manipulate language in a means that makes his music a stimulating expertise for potential followers. Crucially, he used the phrase bip and, after all, its many inflections, bipped, bipper, bippin within the bulk of his music whereas rising via the underground ranks. On 2023’s “Bippin N’ Concord,” he rapped, “She need me bip her. I’m bippin, I’m busy, child.” Later that yr, on “Bip Wit You,” from his Rhythm N Bip tape, he mentioned, “She bought the bip from the Stroll, now they hate I be poppin’ together with her.” And, when he traded bars with DMV rap veteran Lil Dude, they named the track “Bipperz Anthem.” As he ascended, folks had been genuinely interested in what the hell bip meant, given its ambiguous use in his music.