Hip-hop is the ultimate loudspeaker for the inventive language being generated on back blocks, basement parties, and school cafeterias in various corners of Black America. Phrases and terms that, at one point, held significance to a handful of folks in small, local ecosystems, if uttered by the right standout artist, have the potential to enter the wider cultural lexicon. It’s widely understood that calling someone an opp, for instance, means you’re identifying an adversary, even if that opp is just an insufferable guy in the next cubicle. But, just 13 years ago, only teenagers from Chicago were using it to identify people with whom they were in active street warfare. The examples are countless, and, behind the expansion of vocabulary, there is always a foundation that is likely forgotten or plainly unknown by people who adopt it via popular culture. It’s, therefore, necessary to dig into the etymology of these traveling words.
For fans of Mid-Atlantic street music, a word that’s growing in notoriety is bip. As he caught more ears in underground rap circles, in 2023, Washington, D.C., rapper KP Skywalka distinguished himself from the rest of the drill-heavy DMV scene by pushing out an R&B-tinged sound and raunchy songs about pursuing courtship with as many girls as possible. KP, with his distinctive, trembling, nasally wine of a voice, also has a keen understanding of how to manipulate language in a way that makes his music a stimulating experience for prospective fans. Crucially, he used the word bip and, of course, its many inflections, bipped, bipper, bippin in the bulk of his music while rising through the underground ranks. On 2023’s “Bippin N’ Harmony,” he rapped, “She want me bip her. I’m bippin, I’m busy, baby.” Later that year, on “Bip Wit You,” from his Rhythm N Bip tape, he said, “She got the bip from the Walk, now they hate I be poppin’ with her.” And, when he traded bars with DMV rap veteran Lil Dude, they named the song “Bipperz Anthem.” As he ascended, people were genuinely curious about what the hell bip meant, given its ambiguous use in his music.
People familiar with West Coast rap and culture, especially from the Bay Area, have a different, more specific understanding of bippin that has a deep history. There, bippin is the act of smashing the window of a car and quickly grabbing as many valuables as possible. Rap music from Northern California has referenced this act since at least the 1990s. In 1995, the rapper B.A., from popular Oakland trio 3X Krazy (where regional legend Keak da Sneak got his start), boasted about “bippin fools off the weed smoke” in the group’s standout “Sunshine in the O.” In the Bay Area, bippin has become so ingrained in the culture that it’s covered by area news stations as a legitimate crisis in which cars rented by tourists are especially targeted. And the artists don’t shy away from corroborating the fears. A local rapper named OTS Mike Bezel, for one, dropped a song in 2020 called “Bip City,” and it serves as somewhat of an instructional on how to pull off a caper successfully and make the most out of the contraband. It’s maybe no surprise, then, that The San Francisco Standard asked, in 2023, “Why is San Francisco called Bip City?”
Coincidentally, on the other side of the country, that same year, KP Skywalka was asked about the word that he’d been using profusely in his music by street rap-focused YouTube channel Big Mouf Media. The interviewer posed a question: “I was telling my boy, bippers came from the Bay Area.” Before the guy could finish, KP scrunched his face in confusion, shook his head, and murmured, “Naw.” The interviewer corrected the record, “But he told me bippers came from Baltimore.” KP shook his head in agreement. “He know something.”
Bippin has its own meaning in Baltimore. According to Gen Xers who are either from Maryland’s port city or frequented the area, bippin was a covert way of saying you snorted heroin in the ’80s and ’90s. But somewhere around the early 2010s, the definition was remixed and the word was ascribed a few different meanings. Primarily, in its contemporary context, bippin means you’re conducting illicit transactions, driving around smoothly while conducting those illicit transactions, or just masterfully driving in general. Lor Stackks rapped about bippin on 2015’s “My Woe,” and YGG Tay—one of Baltimore’s foremost street rappers in the mid-to-late 2010s who also goes by Lor Bip Bip—did the same on 2016’s “Errday.” Soon, bippin would pop up more and more often in the music of artists blossoming out of the city’s drug dealing–focused rap scene. At the end of the 2010s and into the pandemic, a West Baltimore rapper named Bipmoney Luv started dropping standout mixtapes, not only rapping about the practice, but also turning “we bippin!” into an ad lib he used in just about every one of his songs. You could argue that the trend hit its apex locally when, in early 2020, a Baltimore crew called the Back Block Bippers was arrested in a major drug bust, further adding to the term’s lore. In its other, more benign definitions, getting “bipped up” means you’ve gotten a fresh haircut or hairstyle. (A popular barber named Bippleyipsnipp has gone ultra viral on social media multiple times for uttering a funny, but ridiculous kind of Pig Latin he created while showing off his clients’ new cuts.) But, sometimes, a handgun is also referred to as a bippy.
As a D.C. rapper with a Baltimore connection through his father’s side of the family, KP Skywalka sensed the ambiguity of bip and used it to his advantage, adding a little extra sauce to his songs. And, in the process of obscuring its meaning, he influenced rappers in Philadelphia (nearly two hours north of Baltimore) to mutate it to a place of boundless fluidity. KP had already started using bip in a way that implied having sex, and then it sometimes seemed to be a pet name for a girl he liked—on top of its original meanings. Somewhat disappointingly, kids in Philly don’t seem to be fully clear on what it means, but they really enjoy how it sounds. At the very end of 2023, popular Philly drill rappers Hood Tali and Skrilla dropped “I’m da Bip” over Shawty Lo’s “I’m da Man” beat and, throughout the hook, repeated, “I’m a real bipper.” In interviews, they claimed not to have gotten it from KP’s influence and denied they had any issues with him over “ownership” of it. Then, in 2024, Tali took to his Instagram stories to make a case for his claim over the word. “Hood Tali is the reason every Philly rapper use the word ‘bip,’” he wrote. “Pay me my homage. I’m like Gucci Mane. I set the trends and y’all follow.” But all that seemed to do was open the door for all the young guys in Philly to fall over themselves to define what bippin meant, even if plenty of people from the city thought the whole thing was ridiculous, not hesitating to fry dudes in comment sections.
Things are continuing to move further and further from the source and closer to giving bip a permanent spot in the underground street rap lexicon on a national scale. Skrilla has blown up more than most other newcomers from the Mid-Atlantic street rap universe. So, naturally, as he continues to experiment with what bip can and should mean in his music, he’s the face of one of rap’s new favorite words. Across his latest album, Zombie Love Kensington Paradise, he lets it fly quite a few times, and he’s also recently been collaborating with up-and-coming and established drill rappers out of Chicago who are getting fully bip-ified. The Midwesterners have gotten comfortable enough with bip that they’ve highlighted the word without Skrilla’s aid. Drill icon G Herbo put his stamp on it with rising Chicago rappers VonOff1700 and Rockout Danny for “How to Bip” Hearteningly, they actually use the word in the way that Baltimore intended, as Danny raps, “Hop in this ride and we gon teach you how to bip.”
This is how language travels. Very rarely do the originators get credited with their contributions and, maybe, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter a whole lot. Unfortunately, Baltimore has yet to produce a bona fide rap star, which is why KP Skywalka was able to use “bip” in the way he did before it was ultimately adopted elsewhere. At this point, it’s likely that “bip” won’t belong to anyone in particular if it keeps trending the way it is right now. It’s too fun to say, too malleable to be confined by state borders. Not in the Bay Area, not in Baltimore, or anywhere in between. I mean, who could have predicted white people in rom-coms would be unironically referring to jewelry as “bling” when the Hot Boys dropped a song in 1999? This is just how it goes. But a prophecy proceeded all this when, in 2017, on his song “Blame,” YGG Tay declared: “All these niggas think they bippin, I’m to blame.”
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