Songfacts®:

• Lil Wayne gets knocked out by Nicki Minaj on this track, and vice versa, as they play the role of satisfied lovers. It was the first chart single for Minaj, who was signed to Lil Wayne's Young Money label. Wayne championed Minaj when she was just starting out, and appeared on her mixtapes before signing her in 2009.
  
  At the time, female MCs were hard to come by - rap was thoroughly dominated by guys. That changed when Minaj came on the scene. With "Knockout," she showed that she could punch up tracks from a sorely lacking female perspective, and did so with features for the likes of Ludacris ("My Chick Bad"), Usher ("Lil Freak") and Jay Sean ("2012 (It Ain't the End)") before releasing her debut album, Pink Friday.
• "Knockout" is part of Rebirth, Lil Wayne's rock album. It didn't do nearly as well as his previous album, Tha Carter III, but it broke new ground in the way it melded rock and hip-hop.
• Wayne's opening lines, "Hey Barbie, are you into Black men?" are a call-out to Nicki Minaj's alter-ego, Harajuku Barbie, a polite girl who sings quietly. She stays in this character for most of the song before letting loose at the end, giving us a portent of the flow that would later crown her the Queen Barbz.
• "Knockout" was produced by the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League team and co-written by two of their members, Erik Ortiz, Kevin Crowe. They've worked on a lot of tracks for Rick Ross, including "Magnificent" and "Sixteen."
• David Rousseau directed the video, which finds Wayne and Minaj in the ring with the magic of compositing. For many, this was their first look at Minaj, whose unique look made her very compelling in music videos.
  
  Birdman, who helped Lil Wayne get his start, also shows up in the video.