Songfacts®:

• This is a track from Kanye West's "G.O.O.D. Friday" series, in which the Chicago MC released a new tune to download for free every Friday. The song was originally written in 2008.
• West, Pharell Williams and Lupe Fiasco each spit a verse. The three rappers make up the Child Rebel Soldier supergroup, which materialized when the trio collaborated on a cut from one of Fiasco's mixtapes. "Pharrell came up with the idea — 'Let's do a group, Child Rebel Soldiers,'" Lupe told MTV News in 2008. "So I did a song. Took Thom Yorke's 'Eraser,' cut it up, put 'Us Placers' on it, because I was going to do a mixtape called Us Placers and remake Thom Yorke's album [The Eraser] and Radiohead's stuff. I sent the record out, and it was initially supposed to have Kanye, and I wanted [British artist] the Streets. The Streets, I got no response. He asked me to do the song for one of his artists. Then Kanye jumped on it and was like, 'I'm going to send it to P.' Then P sent it back, and it was like, 'This is the first song right here. Let's do it.' That was, like, a year and a half ago, and the whole time we've been figuring out what to do."
• The song dates back to the early days of the Child Rebel Soldier super group. Fiasco explained to MTV News the track was created as a way to gauge the direction the trio wanted to take with their sound. "That song is like a song that we did in the midst of being CRS when we were actually going to put out an album and just really wanted to test records and see if we should do more records like that, or should we do more records like 'Us Placers' or... more down-low records, up-top records," he said. "We were just trying to figure out what should we do and that was one of the experiments that was bananas."