Fans are Trying to Decode Kendrick Lamar’s “Top of The Morning” on The New Baby Keem Album

Twitter can’t seem to arrive at a consensus on the meaning of Kendrick Lamar’s “Top of the morning” line on Baby Keem’s the melodic blue.

Less than 24 hours into the lifecycle of Baby Keem‘s debut album, the melodic blue, Twitter is already spilling over with half-baked thinkpieces about Kendrick Lamar‘s contributions to the project. But one specific Kendrick line appears to be getting the bulk of the focus.

On “range brothers,” the first of three collaborations featured on the melodic blue, the Compton rapper is mostly just Keem’s hype man. He doesn’t even get a full verse to himself. Instead, Lamar offers some brain-scatching adlibs, splits time with Keem in the track’s third movement and holds down the hook, where he delivers what is quickly becoming the album’s most resonant line, repeating “Top of the morning” seven times before the song’s closing stanza. Many fans laughed it off. But that’s all it took to send Rap Twitter into a decoding frenzy, pulling threads between disparate Kendrick features to make sense of the typically poignant rapper’s line.

Some have theorized Lamar’s line is a reference to his soon-to-be former label, Top Dawg Entertainment. Some took the number of repetitions (seven) to be some sort of statement about his work ethic. And others are just picking up the overthinking gag and running with it, which may have been the actual intention of scattering short, but memorable, Kendrick adlibs throughout their songs together; a feature tailor-fit for rap and r&b’s very clippable TikTok era. One thing’s for sure, though. Wherever you land in the debate, the responses have been wildly entertaining.

Steam Baby Keem’s new album, the melodic blue, below. Scroll on for some of the standout takes on Kendrick’s “Top of the morning.”