Songfacts®:

• Bay Area rap collective SOB X RBE recorded this hard-hitting cut for the Kendrick Lamar-curated Black Panther soundtrack album.
  
  "One of Kendrick's partners hit me in my DM on Twitter and I hit my manager Stretch to see if it was real because I couldn't believe it," the group's Slimmy B recalled to Billboard. "Kendrick ended up flying us all out there and we didn't know it was for the Black Panther album until we got there. He had the beat and the first three bars already and told us we can do whatever we wanted to do, so we went in there and did just that."
• SOB x RBE are joined by an uncredited Kendrick Lamar and soul singer Zacari on the tune. The latter pair previously teamed up on the Compton MC's DAMN album for the hit tune, "LOVE."
• "Paramedic!" is from the point of view of Erik Killmonger, the main villain of Black Panther. The first words of the song rapped by Kendrick Lamar are, "I am Erik Killmonger" and the "Northern California" in the hook is a nod to Killmonger's birthplace. Lamar also spat from the point of view of Killmonger in his verse on "King's Dead."
• SOB X RBE made their Billboard chart arrival when "Paramedic!" debuted at #67 on the week following the release of Black Panther.
• SOB x RBE explained to Genius how the track was recorded: "Everybody just writes their verse and go in a booth and record it. While you're recording it, if you come out and niggas like, 'That s--t is crazy', you know you did your s--t. If you come out, or you hear niggas laughing outside the booth while you're in there, you know that that ain't that s--t and you need to redo your s--t."
• I'm a California nigga and I'm heavy in the streets
  .22 or .23, I'm heavy with the heat
  Hit you with this chop, paramedics can't save you (can't save you)
  
  SOB X RBE's Slimmy B explained the lyric in a Genius annotation: "Niggas just trying to be too hard, trying to act too hard, acting hard when it's not needed. Niggas talking way too much about s--t they doing, even if a nigga did do something, they just talking like they want a nigga to know everything. You supposed to do something and not want a nigga to know, do something and be like, 'I don't know what happened, who did that?' These niggas nowadays want to do something, but the s--t everywhere, let everybody know, you feel me?"