The 2010s File Feature
Purple Lamborghini
Purple Lamborghini: Skrillex and Rick Ross Deliver the Soundtrack to Suicide Squad "Purple Lamborghini" by Skrillex and Rick Ross was released on July 22, 20…
01 The Story
Purple Lamborghini: Skrillex and Rick Ross Deliver the Soundtrack to Suicide Squad
"Purple Lamborghini" by Skrillex and Rick Ross was released on July 22, 2016, as part of the official soundtrack album for the Warner Bros. superhero film "Suicide Squad." The song was released through Atlantic Records in conjunction with Warner Bros. Records and served as one of the primary promotional singles for a film that generated enormous commercial anticipation due to its star-studded cast and its position within the DC Extended Universe franchise. The collaboration between Skrillex, the Grammy-winning electronic music producer, and Rick Ross, the Miami-based rapper and Maybach Music Group founder, produced one of the most commercially visible hip-hop and electronic crossover records of 2016.
The song was produced by Skrillex, whose production career had evolved considerably from his dubstep roots toward a broader palette that incorporated hip-hop, trap, and experimental electronic elements. By 2016 he had won six Grammy Awards, including multiple wins in the Best Dance Recording and Best Dance/Electronica Album categories, establishing him as one of the most decorated producers in contemporary popular music regardless of genre. His work on "Purple Lamborghini" demonstrated an ability to create hip-hop-oriented production that retained his electronic sensibility while fully serving the needs of a mainstream rap vocal performance.
Rick Ross contributed a typically imperious vocal performance, his deep, resonant voice and his established persona as a figure of wealth, power, and street mythology making him an appropriate fit for a song tied to a film about supervillains and anti-heroes. Ross had been one of the most consistently present figures in mainstream rap throughout the 2010s, accumulating a remarkable string of high-profile collaborative appearances alongside his solo releases. His verse on "Purple Lamborghini" drew on his standard thematic territory of luxury, dominance, and Miami-rooted street culture, themes that translated effectively into the film's morally ambiguous character universe.
The film "Suicide Squad" featured an ensemble cast that included Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn, Jared Leto as the Joker, Will Smith as Deadshot, and several other major stars. Its marketing campaign was exceptionally aggressive and included the use of several high-profile music collaborations on its soundtrack, in addition to "Purple Lamborghini." The soundtrack album also featured contributions from Twenty One Pilots, Panic! at the Disco, and Grace, among others, reflecting the film's strategy of appealing to as broad a demographic as possible through musical diversity. "Purple Lamborghini" was designated specifically for the Joker character's scenes, tying its sonic and lyrical identity to one of the most iconic figures in comic book history.
The association with the Joker gave the song a theatrical, menacing quality that was reinforced by its production aesthetic. The beat incorporated heavy bass, dramatic sound design elements, and the kind of darkly atmospheric textures that fit both Skrillex's experimental electronic work and the visual grammar of a film about criminal supervillains. The song occupied a space between horror-inflected trap music and blockbuster film scoring, a hybrid that reflected both artists' abilities to operate across genre boundaries.
"Suicide Squad" ultimately grossed over $746 million worldwide at the box office, making it a significant commercial success despite divided critical reception. The visibility it provided to the film's soundtrack tracks, including "Purple Lamborghini," was enormous, with the song benefiting from inclusion in trailers, television spots, and promotional materials that reached global audiences. The song's chart performance on the Billboard Hot 100 reflected this promotional exposure, and it performed strongly on international charts as well, particularly in markets where both the film and its featured artists had established followings.
The music video for "Purple Lamborghini" was heavily stylized to match the film's visual aesthetic, featuring imagery connected to the Joker's character design and the broader visual language of "Suicide Squad." This made the video function simultaneously as a music release and as a promotional artifact for the film, blurring the distinction between the two in ways that were increasingly common for major studio soundtrack tie-ins. The video's release was coordinated with the film's marketing rollout, maximizing the mutual promotional value of both the song and the film.
The title referenced a specific luxury automobile associated with conspicuous wealth and status display, continuing the long tradition in hip-hop of using automobile brands as shorthand for achieved success. The purple color added a specific connection to the Joker's classic purple-suit aesthetic, making the title work simultaneously as a hip-hop status symbol and a character reference within the film's universe. This dual function was a neat piece of creative positioning that helped the song maintain its identity both as a standalone hip-hop record and as a piece of film-branded content.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning Behind "Purple Lamborghini": Power, Menace, and the Mythology of the Supervillain
"Purple Lamborghini" derives much of its meaning from the specific cultural context of its creation, as a song written to accompany the Joker character in "Suicide Squad." Understanding what the song is trying to communicate requires understanding what the Joker represents in popular culture: a figure of anarchic intelligence, spectacular violence, contempt for social order, and an absolute refusal to be bound by conventional morality. The song's lyrical and sonic character is calibrated to that figure, and its themes of power, dominance, and theatrical menace serve the character's mythology rather than expressing the artists' personal philosophies.
Rick Ross's verse situates the song within the established conventions of hip-hop wealth display, but the context of the Joker transforms those conventions slightly. When Ross raps about luxury vehicles and financial power, the frame of the supervillain gives those references a sinister edge that they would not carry in a purely hip-hop context. The purple Lamborghini is not just a status symbol here; it belongs to someone whose relationship to status and power is pathological rather than aspirational, someone who enjoys chaos for its own sake rather than seeking conventional success.
Skrillex's production choices reinforce this reading. The beat's dark, heavy, and theatrically aggressive sonic character draws on horror film music as much as on hip-hop production conventions, creating an atmosphere of threat and instability that mirrors the Joker's psychological profile. The song does not sound like a celebration of wealth so much as a declaration of dangerous power, and that distinction is meaningful. Ordinary hip-hop braggadocio celebrates winning within the system; this song describes a character who has rejected the system entirely and is pursuing a different game with different rules.
The color purple has specific associations in the Joker's visual history, from the classic purple suit of his comic book incarnation through various cinematic interpretations. By naming the luxury automobile in the title purple, the songwriters connected the song's imagery directly to that visual tradition, giving the title a layered meaning that functioned both as hip-hop shorthand for a specific kind of status display and as a wink toward the character's iconic wardrobe. This double function is representative of how major studio soundtrack music increasingly operates, needing to work as standalone pop music while simultaneously deepening the fan experience for those who understand the character references.
There is also a broader cultural conversation embedded in "Purple Lamborghini" about the relationship between hip-hop and villainy as entertainment categories. American popular culture has a long and complicated relationship with attractive, charismatic criminals, and the Joker is perhaps the most enduring example of the villain who is more compelling than the hero. Hip-hop, which has explored themes of crime, power, and the rejection of legitimate social hierarchies from its earliest days, provides natural musical accompaniment for that kind of character. The collaboration between Skrillex and Rick Ross acknowledges that connection while giving it a blockbuster commercial packaging that extended its reach to audiences who might not engage with either hip-hop or superhero cinema separately.
Ultimately, "Purple Lamborghini" is a piece of musical world-building as much as it is a conventional song about meaning and emotion. Its primary purpose is to sonically embody a character and deepen a cinematic experience, and measured against that purpose, its aggressive production and declarations of chaotic power function effectively as character statements. The meaning is inseparable from the context, which is both its strength as a piece of commercial entertainment and its limitation as a work that exists outside that context.
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