The song starts with the iconic statement where the speaker declares she “wakes 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.

i always had a feeling ke$ha was just the beastie boys in disguise