Songfacts®:

• Travis Scott's Astroworld album was named after a shuttered Houston amusement park. He told Rolling Stone that Six Flags AstroWorld was, "a way of life - fantasies, imagination."
  
  This song finds the Houston rapper and guest vocalist Frank Ocean recounting being under the influence of an assortment of different drugs, which presumably makes them feel like they're on a carousel spinning around and the world is spinning with them. (The word "Carousel" does not appear in the lyrics).
• Scott and Ocean first collaborated on the latter's Blonded track "Lens V2."
• The song uses a sample throughout from Big Tuck's 2008 single "Not A Stain On Me." The Dallas rapper also supplies the intro in which he endorses the track.
• The song was produced by Chauncey "Hit-Boy" Hollis, Jr, whose other credits include Lil Wayne and Eminem's 2010 single "Drop The World" and Jay-Z and Kanye West's 2011 Watch the Throne track "Niggas in Paris." He recalled to Genius:
  
  "Travis had played some of Astroworld and Frank was playing records and then they told me to play beats. 'Carousel' was like the third one or something like that, so I played a few after that and they was like, 'Go back to that one.' I literally saw them freestyle the whole song."
• "Carousel" also samples the Beastie Boys' "The New Style," which was released as the third single from their debut album Licensed to Ill. Hit-Boy got the Beastie Boys sample from his friend, a producer named EY.
  
  "I literally just pitched it down one semitone. When I pitched it down, that always is just going to add dirt to it and just make it more grimy," he recalled. "After I looped that up, I had this VST. It's called OVO RnB, and we started going through sounds and I came up on this bell."