A mother owns her children. Nicki owns these bitches and tells them what to do. Nicki Minaj continued to use her bitch-sons as an extended metaphor ever since this line. Check out all the different ways she’s used that phrase!

This specific line, all these bitches is my sons, seems to have originated from a video response Nicki made back in 2010 on Ustream.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdTEcGqfctY&t=1m35s

Red is a symbol of passion, love, and intensity whereas blue symbolizes sadness, despair, regret, and depression; hence, the common idiom of “I’m feeling blue”. The colour change of love illustrates the transformation of feelings from those that are associated with red to the ones symbolized by blue.

Science Lesson

According to the laws of physics, when the same material is burning, a blue flame represents a more intense, hotter fire than a red flame. So when a fire turns blue, things are actually getting hotter!

The song appeals to the broader connotations of the colours: red is hot, blue is cool. So what’s meant here is that, over time, his love faded from a passionate fire into a dying flame.

But it’s still wrong.

Onika Maraj took on the stage name Nicki Minaj.

Minaj also is pronounced the same way as Ménage à trois, a threesome. The idea is that she named herself Minaj, she must be into ménaging with another woman, which apparently would make her a lesbian.

As she explained in an interview:

How did you come up with Nicki Minaj?
My real name is Maraj. Fendi flipped it when he met me because I had such a nasty flow! I eat bitches!

This also refers to speculation around her sexuality as expressed in her lyrics. E.g., her “steal Cassie away from Diddy” line in “Lil' Freak” and her steady bragging about how much she loves to sign boobs.

The literal meaning is straight-forward: Ke$ha puts on her glasses (probably sunglasses) to get ready to party around the city.

On a metaphorical level, the speaker is clearly impaired and intoxicated as evidenced by her diminished sense of self perception. “Grab my glasses,” in this case, is the natural reaction—her vision is blurred, and she’s dizzy. Despite the fact that these are, quite clearly, the effects of alcohol overindulgence, she attempts to correct her problem with an external tool. She tries to treat the symptoms, hoping the glasses will adjust her debilitated vision, but never addresses the real issue, her inebriation.

Taking alcohol to be a symbolism for an abusive relationship, it becomes easy to understand what the lyric self is going through. This negative relationship has had a such a strong grip on her for such a long time that, even after being rested, she still feels out of place as soon as she wakes up in the morning—she’s no longer who she used to be. She understands the suffering because it is being experienced on a personal level, but perhaps in fear to blame her abusive relationship for her perilous predicament, she seeks out temporary and external remedies, symbolized by the glasses, in order to palliate her impairment. It is even possible that the same glasses, futile in the correction of her folly, serve as mask that conceals the abuse she has experienced.

As the lyrics continue, the profile of the speaker as a victim of abuse becomes even clearer. After she grabs her glasses, she’s “out the door, I’m gonna hit this city.” On the literal level, this is a young woman who, as we find out later on in the song, is destitute (“ain’t got no money in my pocket”) and non-influential in her community. Claiming to hit the city, in its entirety, is a hyperbole that evokes a stark contrast between who she claims to be and who she really is.

This dichotomy, which from the very beginning is a leitmotif, leads the audience to ponder the deeper meaning behind the song. The upbeat rhythm coupled with the “I’m on top of the world” words is nothing but an inflated sense of confidence that serves as a disguise for the unbearably painful environment of abuse in which the speaker currently resides. Though she may look and act like she is about to “hit this city,” this boastful attitude is nothing but an attempt to make up for the sense of belonging she lacks.

The song starts with the iconic statement where the speaker declares she “wake[s] up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy,” a famous rapper.

Ke$ha, the author of the lyrics, takes pride in her country roots that have taught her how to tell a story through music, but the reason for placing this phrase as the opening of the song goes beyond mere chronological order. Much like George Orwell’s “all the clocks were striking thirteen” in 1984, the comparison between the speaker, a woman, and a rich black man is striking enough to set the tone for the rest of the song. This same tone of irony that makes everything seem out of place is what drives the underlying theme of the song, the duality of what is felt and what is expressed. The speaker is hung over from a night of late partying and wakes up confused, hazed, and feeling like a rap mogul instead of feeling like her true self. (and given her possibly hungover status, she’s even puffy, Diddy’s nickname)

In an interview to Esquire, Ke$ha explains the literal, non-metaphorical meaning of her first line:

One morning I just woke up, and I live in this house with I-don’t-even-know-how-many roommates – it’s this Laurel Canyon house with seven rooms and roommates fluctuating monthly […] Well it was the house The Eagles recorded Hotel California in. So it’s just this huge hippy… There are a bunch of hippies who come in and out, and there are all these people sleeping on the couches. I don’t really care, I don’t mind it. But I woke up one day after we went to a party, and I was surrounded by ten of the most beautiful women you’ve ever seen. And I was like, I’m like P. Diddy – there’s no man like this in the entire world. So that became the first line of the new single, and we just went from there.

As is explained in the refrain, this song, as a whole, is a nod to the Beastie Boys' “Fight For Your Right.” The first line of TiK ToK alludes to [the first line in the Beastie Boys' song, “You wake up late for school”. That, in turn, follows a longer-standing tradition of starting lines. Some Blues songs start with the phrase “I woke up this morning” before listing a list of woes/tragedies in a godless, abandoned world. This traces back further to the starting statement “The Lord woke me up this morning” that is recurrent in black gospel music. The book Woke Me Up This Morning: Black Gospel Singers and the Gospel Life explains this trope at length.

It’s no coincidence that both Ke$ha and the Beastie Boys allude to this phrase, along with their own take on it. As they, white artists, are entering a black-dominated music genre (namely rap/hip-hop), having this connection establishes their recognition of hip-hop roots and acknowledges the rich tradition that precedes them.

Zion is the son Lauryn Hill had with Bob Marley’s son, Rohan Marley. Zion was only a year old at the time of the album’s release.

In the Bible and biblical writing, Zion is a location, a place name often used as a synonym for Jerusalem. It commonly referred to a specific mountain near Jerusalem (Mt Zion), on which stood a fortress of the same name that was conquered by King David and was named the City of David. The term Zion came to designate the area of Jerusalem where the fortress stood, and later became a metonym for Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, the city of Jerusalem and generally, the World to Come.

Zion is heaven in the five percent nation; Lauryn Hill’s former group Fugees are closely linked to other groups that are known members (Poor Righteous Teachers, etc). This meaning possibly introduces a subtle subtext to this song.

This line underlines the subtle satire of the partying lifestyle that runs throughout this song and much of Ke$ha’s other music, all while being somewhat serious. Because let’s not forget that Mick Jagger used to be a rock ‘n’ roll sex symbol.

America has a checkered history of supporting puppet dictators in geopolitically important countries and covert operations such as assassinations, coups, and the supplying or creating of rebel and terrorist forces.

“Sponsoring bombs dropped on our children” refers to the US support of Israel’s bombardment of high-rise apartment buildings during the invasion of Lebanon which Osama Bin Laden explicitly cited as his inspiration for the 9/11 attacks on America’s Twin Towers. (twin towers=Destroy two buildings)

This can also refer to America’s history of directly attacking its own people. According to Immortal Technique, it wouldn’t be surprising for America to destroy two buildings when, in the past, is has already done far worse to its own black citizens. The government dropped bombs on Black Wall Street in Oklahoma in 1921 during the Tulsa race riot. So America is the “country that was sponsoring bombs dropped on our children.”