Plain Jane

Album: Still Striving (2017)
Charted: 26
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Songfacts®:

  • This Still Striving cut was produced by Kirk Knight, who is a member of the hip-hop collective Pro Era. Both A$AP Ferg's flow and Knight's instrumentation, nod to the Juicy J's lines in the 1999 Tear Da Club Up Thugs song "Slob On My Knob." (Tear da Club Up Thugs was a side project of Three Six Mafia's DJ Paul and Juicy J).
  • Ferg told Genius the story of the song:

    "The name, 'Plain Jane,' actually came later. I wanted to create something on that original new Juicy J joint. That's what I wrote the song to, and then I used that as the skeleton, took it to Kirk Knight and I was like, 'Yo, you got to make something that bumps just like this.' I know the kids, that's their BPM right now is old Three 6. So I was like, 'Yo, this would go crazy.' I'm like, nobody ever did this? Yeah, we went in a booth, and we made it happen."
  • Ferg is the name, Ben Baller did the chain
    Tourneau for the watch, presi Plain Jane


    Ferg explained: "'Plain Jane' means when you ain't got no diamonds or nothing in it. This represents class to me without all of the diamonds and everything in it. It does have baguettes on the inside of it. When you keep it plain Jane, or OG or somebody that's very classic, they be like, 'Oh, yeah, he didn't...' You kept the stock rims on your car, that's what it's like. You didn't have to throw the spinners and all of the trinkets on it to make it stand out. You ruin a watch that way. It's like you buy a car and you just f--k it up with everything else. You buy it stock and keep it that way. The only diamonds that you'll see on my watch is the ones that come with the watch."
  • The old-school style video shows Ferg riding around his Harlem neighborhood on a bike with a few dozen of his friends. They include BMX pros Nigel Sylvester and RR D Blocks. There's also a Rihanna cameo from her Fenty Beauty launch. The clip was directed by the A$AP Mob's creative collective called AWGE.

    "Talking back and forth with Ferg how he pictured the video right then. It was like, 'Yeah, I want 100 bikes in Harlem. It was like, 'Yeah, let's do it,'" co-director and AWGE member Ricky told Genius. "Then he called this guy. That's RRDBlocks. He's real famous for doing wheelies and stuff on Instagram and social media, so he's like a real biker. Any time he says anything about bikes, his social media rings. He made a call to him, then everybody pulled up on the block."
  • A$ap Ferg told Billboard why he decided to rework the Tear Da Club Up Thugs track rather than rapping over a producer's instrumentation:

    "People [usually] send me beats, but this time I was in the car with my uncle, and we were going hard to 'Slob on My Knob.' I was like, 'Hold up, nobody did this song over yet?' That song meant so much to me. Juicy J was one of the first guys to take me on tour. I wanted to make him proud."
  • The song's remix features a rapid-fire verse by Nicki Minaj. The Barbie Queen pays homage to her New York roots during her rhymes.
  • Kirk Knight got one sound for the song's beat while riding the New York City subway. "I was taking the Q train home. It was late as f--k. It was probably 4 a.m.," he recalled to Genius. "These train tracks, the sound of this train was coming but it sounded so f---ing clear that I was like, 'Yo, maybe I could f---ing record this s--t.' And I recorded it on my iPhone."
  • Because Juicy J and DJ Paul still own all the publishing for "Slob On My Knob," they made a tidy sum from this song. Speaking in an interview with Ebro in the Morning, Juicy J estimates they receive around 45% percent of the royalties from "Plain Jane."

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