Songfacts®:

• Speaking to Beats 1's Zane Lowe. Anderson. Paak revealed that Jhalil Beats produced the instrumental for this tongue-in-cheek rumination on the trappings of wealth and fame.
  
  "Jhalil sent me a pack of beats, you know 50, 60 beats. I loved them all. I was just writing to all these beats and that was one of them that I just loved off top," he said. "It sounded like some black 007 action adventure high speed chase type of music."
• "Bubblin'" is a solo Anderson. Paak track, but that wasn't his initial intention as he wanted British MC Little Simz to spit some rhymes.
  
  "Originally I was trying to get Lil Sims to rap on it first because she was in the studio too," Paak said. "I remember trying to get other people on it, then eventually I just wrote on it. It took me a couple of days. I did it. I started it in LA and I finished it in New York. And it was just one of them ones. It gets the energy going, gets the blood going."
• The song starts off with Anderson Paak recalling his younger days when he wasn't very smart with his cash.
  
  Yeah, one in the hand, one in the bag, bubblin'
  Look at the cash, look at the cash comin' in
  
  Paak explained to Genius: "'One in the hand, one in the bag' just means to save up. The way I learned about that was the hard way. I blew money, like all the time. I never had any good role models to show me what to do with my bread, and as soon as I got it, I was trying to spend it."
• After the second verse there's a clip from the 1973 Al Pacino movie Serpico. Paak explained:
  
  "It's an incredible scene where Pacino is having a complete meltdown and just going AWOL on this fool. He's had it up to here with this crooked cop s--t, and he's trying to keep his cool, and he just can't keep it no more. And if you go to YouTube, you can find it, I think it's called, like, 'Pacino Meltdown' or something.
  
  I remember the label, my management, was all like, you ain't never gonna be able to clear this, man! Nah, take this out. I was like, just try, bro! He might f--- with the song! And I know Dre knows him, so maybe try to pull some strings. And they got it back to him, and they were down for it, like, it was cool. So it was like, see?
  And we got it in there. I love that part of it, man. And again, that hip-hop element too, bringing in those interludes and samples and just giving it a breather, and I just feel like, that was really what the energy was, too."
• The song's musical video shows Paak spending a seemingly endless stream of cash from a magical ATM. The clip was directed by Calmatic, who also created the visual for Paak's 2016 song "Come Down."
  
  "I had to meet with Dr. Dre to get the okay on the video," Calmatic recalled to Genius. "After I left his house, maybe like two hours later, he was like, 'I don't know, man. I'm not really feeling it.' In order to be a great director, you have to be able to tell a story. So I think one thing that stuck out to me was the ATM scene and I was like, 'Yo, so what if we did all this stuff, all these crazy scenes, but just somehow implemented the ATM into it?'"
  
  "When I first wrote the treatment, I honestly didn't think that this would be possible," he continued. "My boy Carlos was able to team up with this practical FX crew that basically built a malfunctioning ATM from scratch." He further elaborated on the concept, stating, "When you first get that big check, you kind of wild out. I feel like the money spitting out represents that."
  
  "The obvious thing is if you spend too much money, it'll kill you," Calmatic concluded. "But I think when we decided to put the ATM on top of Anderson, we wanted to represent that it's not necessarily killing you, but it'll f--k you up."