Songfacts®:

• Azealia Banks opens her Broke With Expensive Taste album with this glitchy mid-tempo cut, where the New Yorker both raps and sings about the spirit of a 6-year-old white slave owner's daughter. "Idle Delilah's father is a famed slave owner in the early 1900's (America)," explained Banks. "Delilah is his favorite child. Delilah's mother Lillith knew of the hatred her father had created for himself in the town by a pro-slavery activist. One day, the white man's slaves grow tired of his bad treatment and decide to kill his favorite daughter Delilah as payback. They covered her small body in black tar and a white cloth with two red bows.. She was found dead in the forest by the town drunkards."
  
  "So the dead Idle Delilah, the one I'm singing of in the song, is defined as a spirit of time," Banks continued. "She represents procrastination."
• This cut heavily samples "Pearson Sound" by WAD. Banks explained to NME. "A lot of the songs I just jacked other people's s--t. Pearson Sound has a song called 'Wad' on iTunes. And I downloaded it. And I wrote 'Idle Delilah' over it. And then I wrote him an email saying, 'Hey - I made your song really awesome. Can I have this now?' I always do that. I guess all those guys were just really flattered that I had taken their weird, kooky white-boy things and put rap and soul and singing jazz over it."
• Banks told Nylon magazine the lyrical theme of the album is, "a young girl trying to find it." Asked what she meant by ''find it'', the rapper replied: "Success! Herself! Her path! The young girl trying to make it! That girl who's at the end of her childhood trying to get a job and make some money, you know? She needs to get what she can get! She needs to go out there and show people she knows how to work for it."