Songfacts®:

• Over a self-produced beat, Tyler the Creator raps about feeling alone, isolated from his friends.
  
  Bored and getting desperate as hell
  (Desperate, using, texting, amusing)
  Cellular not amusing and I hope someone will
  Message me with some plans that are amusing as well
  Cause I haven't seen the exit of these walls since before this morning
  
  Tyler is stuck indoors on his own and bored by his own company.
• The song features vocals by UK singer Rex Orange County, whom Tyler has praised on social media, and Norwegian-born Anna Lotterud, of the duo Anna of The North. An uncredited Corinne Bailey Rae contributes additional vocals, while Austin Feinstein of Slow Hollows contributes guitar work.
• It was Anna of the North's debut single 2014's "Sway," which first caught the ear of Tyler The Creator. She went on to collaborate with the rapper on this track and another Flower Boy song "911 / Mr. Lonely". Lotterud recalled to HighSnobiety:
  
  "It happened really organically. Taco from Odd Future hit me up on Twitter a couple of years ago. They were playing our song 'Sway' on the Odd Future Radio station. Later that year, I met them at a festival called Øya. They're really cool guys. We kept in touch.
  
  I don't really know why or what happened. Tyler mailed me and said he had some vocal ideas he wanted me to sing. I never met him in the process of making the album – I went in the studio here in Norway, and he liked my vocals and asked me if I could help him out with another song. I never really knew if what I'd recorded was gonna make the album. So when '911' and 'Boredom' dropped I almost fainted!"
• Stevie Wonder's 1968 version of "God Bless the Child" served as the basis of the track. "I wrote that, it was literally 5 p.m. on a Saturday laying on my back looking like so bored. There was nothing to do, nobody was hitting me back," Tyler told The Carmichael Show's Jerrod Carmichael. "I literally wrote that verse in 10 seconds."
  
  "I wrote the song over the chords of 'God Bless the Child' by Stevie Wonder," he continued. "I figured out the chords, looped it, and just had it playing for hours in my room. And I wrote the verse, which was a 40 bar verse originally but I cut it in half because I was like 'The hook needs to come back.'"