What ‘6-7’ Can Tell Us About Memes

I’m going to be real, I thought ‘6-7’ was funny. I don’t know why I thought ‘6-7’ was funny. Before writing this, I had no idea what it meant or why, in particular, it was funny. People had tried to explain it to me, and it didn’t matter. I was unbothered by the abject low-browness, reductiveness, and repetitiveness of the meme. But some people are. Due in part to its popularity among children, ‘6-7’ has been panned as the final frontier of brainrot. Just as Mondrian’s boxes or Rothko’s rectangles were condemned as a lazy attempt to strip art of its objectivity and replace it with the cold imposition of pure thought, so has ‘6-7’ been damned as a mind-numbing chasm of a thing- a meme as stripped of richness and quality as the world we fear it has been birthed into. I absolutely have to contest this idea. To do this, let me explain in detail what ‘6-7’ means. My intent is not to make ‘6-7’ funny to you- there is not much that I can do there. Rather, I’m curious to uncover how subtle facts of a meme’s origin can galvanize it with meaning, and how that meaning can be flipped, rearranged, and transformed into something wholly different. I’m going to try not to miss a thing here. 

‘6-7’ originated as a lyric in the song Doot-Doot by the Philadelphia rapper Skrilla. It is likely a reference to 67th Street in Kensington, where the rapper, born Jemille Edwards, grew up. Due to Skrilla’s almost comically evocative performance style, and the fact that the line comes in at a break in the music, followed by a bass-filled hit and Skrilla’s uniquely behind-the-beat flow, the moment in the song became a popular backing track for NBA highlights TikToks, and in particular, for highlights of Hornets Point Guard LaMelo Ball. In many ways, LaMelo Ball was engineered for the highlight reel. The son of two former basketball players with colorful personalities, LaMelo, the younger brother of Lonzo Ball, quickly became a high school sensation whose notoriety was exploded by his father Lavar Ball’s Facebook Watch show Ball in the Family. Yes, Facebook Watch is a thing. The show ran 116 episodes from 2017 to 2020. Lavar Ball later garnered criticism for the failure of the Junior Basketball Association, his attempt to create an alternative league to the NCAA for high school and college-aged players. The league lasted one season, and many of its players were not paid, while losing their eligibility to play for the NCAA. LaMelo Ball was the league’s only player to be drafted to the NBA. In the JBA’s first and only season, his team, the Los Angeles Ballers (every team was called the Ballers), conveniently won the championship. In the NBA, LaMelo is viewed as the league’s most talented player to have never touched the playoffs. Within all of this context, the wonky smoothness of Skrilla’s performance serves as an ambivalent, almost goofy counterpoint to LaMelo’s flashy play. In a way, the joke is on LaMelo, with the song landing in a shaky middleground between ridicule and respect. TikTok user matvii_grinblat’s video, commenting that LaMelo Ball moves like he’s 6’2” but he’s 6’7”, followed by the beat drop, set the song as LaMelo’s official theme in December 2024. That’s right, 2024. There was ‘6-7’ during the Biden administration; we’re not as cooked as we thought. 

The phrase’s functional meaning didn’t really take hold until it was picked up by High School basketball player Taylen Kenney. Taylen Kenney plays for the Overtime Elite league, which is another private, pre-professional basketball league for 16-20 year olds. Whenever asked a question by a reporter from Overtime Elite’s ostensibly robust press junket, Kenney developed a habit of sneaking ‘6-7’ into his answer. “How would you rate this win?” “Like a 6, 7.” Phrasing the answer as an estimation, Kenney developed the famous “more or less” hand motion. The phrase signaled Kenney’s laid back confident attitude. Not only was he not responsible for specific figures, but he felt unburdened by a need to engage seriously with the journalistic might of the Overtime Elite circuit. When Lebron James used ‘6-7’ in an interview with a meager SportsCenter reporter in March of 2025, the phrase’s meaning was cemented in gold.

Based on this background, the phrase holds a clear manifest meaning. Saying ‘6-7’ signals a laid-back indifference and a casual confidence. It is a way of explaining that one is like TK, unconcerned with answering to authorities, providing specifics, or explaining themself, and like the Ball family, unapologetic. It signals the rough-guess attitude that it only makes sense to employ in a moment in history where information can be more easily known than ever before, and yet hard facts elude at every turn.

There’s another piece, though. Eventually, Taylen Kenney’s ‘6-7’ answers don’t even fall in where one might estimate a number. He slots in the catchphrase in a move that has been deemed “clip farming.” He is referencing the line as a reference to the established prominence of the line. In doing so, he puts into play a principle that is central to understanding memes- that repetition creates humor in its own right. The very idea of a meme, in its original conception, is a unit of cultural exchange. The theory of memetics would posit that these units operate in a Darwinian economy, where favorable traits aid survival and reproduction. ‘6-7’ floats right over this economy and dunks on its ass with a big smile. It is a super-predator capable of being broken down and built again, prowling in and out of language. It can sneak up on you from behind a tree. Have you ever counted to ten? This meme will eat you alive. It has already been created, and done so in the legitimate conditions that make a meme meaningful. Now it is having its moment in the wild. We find ourselves in a time where little bones of referential meaning can be dug up between the thickets of language and telegraphed as an assumed understanding with other prime internet dunces, or more broadly, other socialized products of a complex information wilderness. ‘6-7’ lives to exploit this dynamic in a way that many memes have tried to, but few have. 

I cannot talk about ‘6-7’ without talking about another layer that reveals an even greater power of this meme. An important piece of the ‘6-7’ equation sits in a March 2025 vlog from basketball YouTuber Cam Wilder, game centered around an Amateur Athletic Union basketball game (once again, pre-professional basketball factors in to the ‘6-7’ story). In what is perhaps the most famous moment associated with ‘6-7’, the camera pans to a fluffy-haired kid in the stands named Maverick Trevillan who delivers the ‘6-7’ line with a crazed look on his face. The clip ran the junket around cringe compilations, and was a source for ridicule on the basis of the boy’s stereotypically gen-alpha appearance. Viewers seemed to cast their negative feelings towards ‘6-7’ and the generation that has created it, onto this boy. The internet’s relationship with cringe, especially when the subject is a child, is fraught, but Maverick “the ‘6-7’ kid” seems to have taken the fame in stride. 

After a few months, Meme accounts introduced a layer of strangeness to the figure of the ‘6-7’ kid by portraying him as a frightening monster called SCP-067. Here he is menacing the barbershop haircut guy. The animations are all in good fun, and they get their humor from absurdity more than from antipathy, but I never give the internet memes the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their attitude towards their subject. The monstrous portrayals are not necessarily mean-spirited, but they definitely would not be effective if the original clip did not generate such an adverse reaction from viewers. In fact, it is not abnormal in the evolutionary scale of memes for a piece of content that elicits a feeling of cringe to be paired with an absurd or frightening coda. The first time I ever saw the famous internet duo AJ and Big Justice, it was in TikTok Tok their famous “we’re Costco guys” video, which many found cringe, was interrupted with creepy early AI visuals. Or in an older example, a TikToker named Bentellect, who would read off less than funny jokes, bringing himself to laughter, would eventually get his videos paired with frightening, even threatening visuals. While I don’t sense quite this level of antagonism in SCP-067, the same sort of digital tomato-throwing™ is at play here. In the short-form video landscape, the internet has found a new language for calling something cringe, one where the scary and strange end up oddly funny. By late summer 2025, audiences of all ages were resonating with visual representations of the revolting, self annihalating cringe that they have felt around ‘6-7’ and everything it represents. Just as SCP-067 reproduced the image of 6-7’s main visual to represent cringe and annoyance that was consuming the trend, everyday people can take part in this same gross act of parody, by just…saying ‘6-7’. Unfortunately, it’s that simple. At this stage in the meme’s lifecycle, saying ‘6-7’ in the right tone or the right (wrong) context can now be an act of parodying the very idea of it. Slipped in an overtly inopportune moment or in the right gravitas of ironic detachment, saying ‘6-7’ can be a subtle commentary on the idea of ‘6-7’ itself, a mode of demonstrating the simplistic nonsensicality of the joke, or an effort to evoke a reaction of playful disbelief and distaste that the purveyor can then share in with the recipient. Any of these subtexts seems too simple and obvious to require explanation, but they are rarely unpacked when we talk about memes. At some point in the lifecycle of a meme, it will become a vessel with which to mock the idea of the meme itself. 

By the time you are reading this, ‘6-7’ will probably be past its prime. Everything must die. But there will be another to replace it, and that meme will mean a lot. It will say something and suggest more. And then, in all likelihood, it will start to comment upon itself. Sometimes it’s okay to say something while meaning absolutely nothing. I’ve tried it, and it’s a worthwhile exercise. Referencing internet memes is absolutely not a way to do it.