Songfacts®:

• "Mona Lisa" features on the soundtrack of the mockumentary comedy film Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping. The song is sung by Adam Samberg, in character as the movie's world famous recording artist, Conner4Real. We hear him dissing the iconic Leonardo da Vinci painting: "The original basic bitch," he sings.
• Needlz and Donut (Bruno Mars, 50 Cent and Drake) produced the track. "They actually reached out to me," Needlz told Billboard magazine. "I had a relationship with them from maybe about three four years now. I did some music for the last album and it was a song called "YOLO" featuring Adam Levine and Kendrick Lamar. I guess they reached out because they were fans of the earlier hip-hop stuff [I did] and when they were talking about the movie, they told me to send some stuff over.
  
  I sent them a track that me and Donut collaborated on and they took it and made it into this crazy, over-the-top song in the movie."
• Needlz had someone else in mind when he first came up with the poppy "Mona Lisa" beat. "I originally did that track to pitch to Bruno Mars," he said. "He's kind of in album mode and doing his thing."
• Leonardo Da Vinci's model for his famous Mona Lisa painting was one Lisa Del Giocana, whose silk merchant husband commissioned a portrait of her in 1507. Leonardo spent so long painting the work that the husband terminated the sitting and refused to pay for the portrait. He eventually completed the portrait ten years later while in the employment of King Francis of France. Other (more serious) songs inspired by the iconic artwork include:
  
  "Mona Lisa" by Nat King Cole
  
  "Mona Lisa (When the World Comes Down)" by The All-American Rejects
  
  "The Mona Lisa" by Brad Paisley
  
  "Masterpiece" by Madonna
  
  "Smile Mona Lisa" by will.i.am