Songfacts®:

• "Persuasive" is pretty clearly a song about marijuana, as Doechii doesn't even bother to hide behind a euphemism:
  
  She's so persuasive, that marijuana
  
  This bucks a long tradition of songs about pot that call it something else. For example:
  
  "Sweet Leaf" (Black Sabbath)
  "Pass That Dutch" (Missy Elliott)
  "Mary Jane" (Rick James)
• Doechii did follow the protocol of assigning a different meaning to the song when asked about it, making it more likely to find a wider audience and show up on playlists. She said she created the song "to uplift people and bring communities together," and said it was inspired by LGBTQ+ community.
  
  "I wanted something that sonically represented the feelings that I feel when I'm around my friends and people who understand me and accept me as a gay woman," she told MTV. "At first I didn't like it because it's not deep. Like, I've got to say something that means something. But then I realized that it does mean something."
  
  "The song is for the rave, gay, Black kid who likes to go to rooftop parties at 3 a.m.," she added. "It's slumber party music but it's also rooftop music. It's just something that brings people together."
• "Persuasive" was the first song Doechii released after signing with Top Dawg Entertainment in 2022. She got the record deal after making a huge impact with songs she posted on Soundcloud and YouTube, particularly "Yucky Blucky Fruitcake," which went viral in 2020 thanks to a TikTik trend. Doechii was a good signing for the label; "Persuasive" and the next single, "Crazy," both earned millions of streams, and in 2023 she had a big hit with "What It Is (Block Boy)."
• The song was produced by Kal Banx, one of the top dogs at Top Dawg Entertainment. "He came to me with this beat," Doechii told MTV. "I was telling him, I want to just really embody all the layers of me."
  
  Banx and Doechii kept working together, including on her 2024 album Alligator Bites Never Heal - he produced the title track.
• Not surprisingly, there was a party vibe in the studio when Doechii was making this song. "It was a fun studio setting," she said. "We were drinking, dancing, having a good time. I wasn't thinking about the lyrics too seriously - I just wanted it to be fun. I wanted it to be something that could bring people in a moment to dance and have a good time."
• The music video was directed by Omar Jones, who also worked on "Young Metro" by Future and Metro Boomin.
  
  "I envision my fans playing this video on their at home projectors during a kick back," Doechii said. "The video is so full of life it can fill a space... like paintings."
• The song was released on March 18, 2022, and on July 22, 2022, a remix featuring SZA dropped, complete with a new video. SZA signed with Top Dawg Entertainment in 2013, nine years before Doechii was on the roster. SZA was the first female artist they signed; Doechii was their first female rapper.
• When she was an independent artist, Doechii did most of the songwriting herself, but with Top Dawg she has access to writers that give her some help. Along with Doechii and her producer, Kal Banx, "Persuasive" was written by Austin Daniel Brown, Leoren Davis, Ivan Jackson and Zach Witness.