A song that became the unofficial anthem of an NFL franchise without ever mentioning the team, the sport or the city. It also never mentions gold, which is the color the city actually uses.
Here is what the two colors refer to, how a Norwegian production duo ended up making a Pittsburgh record, and why the song is technically about a car.
The Short Answer
Black and yellow are the colors of Wiz Khalifa’s hometown and of his car, a yellow Dodge Challenger Hemi with black stripes. He has said he ordered it in those colors as a tribute to Pittsburgh. The lyric is about the car and about having made it out. The city supplied everything else.
The Story Behind the Song
Khalifa was a Pittsburgh rapper with a mixtape following and no major hit when he recorded this with Stargate, the Norwegian production duo of Mikkel Eriksen and Tor Erik Hermansen, best known at that point for work with Ne-Yo, Rihanna and Beyonce.
Hermansen has said it was the pair’s first serious rap record. They played Khalifa several harder beats first. The one that stuck was the airy synth figure, and he started singing the title phrase over it almost immediately.
Rostrum and Atlantic released it on September 14, 2010 as the lead single from Rolling Papers, which followed in March 2011. It entered the Hot 100 at number one hundred in October 2010 and reached number one in February 2011.
Why black and yellow?
Pittsburgh’s official colors are black and gold, and it is the only large American city where all three major professional teams use the same scheme: the Steelers, the Penguins and the Pirates. Gold reads as yellow on a football helmet and on a car, and yellow is the word that scans.
The song never states any of this. It has no reference to Pittsburgh, to football or to any team. Everything connecting it to the city arrived through the video and through what the city then did with it.
How did it become a Steelers anthem?
Timing. The single was climbing through the autumn of 2010, exactly as the Steelers were working toward Super Bowl XLV, and it became the team’s hype record on the way there. It reached number one on the Hot 100 in the same weeks.
Green Bay fans responded with a Lil Wayne remix called “Green and Yellow.” Dozens of further versions appeared for other teams, in the United States and elsewhere, most of them changing only the colors. A song with no sports content turned out to be perfectly designed for sports, because the only thing you have to swap is two adjectives.
What does the video do?
Everything the lyric leaves out. It was shot in Pittsburgh by director Bill Paladino, and it moves through the skyline, the bridges and the landmarks, with Terrible Towels and team apparel throughout.
They filmed it without permits. Khalifa announced his locations on Twitter and crowds turned up, which is how the video ended up with the scale it has. The city in the footage is doing the work the words never attempt.
Is the song actually about a car?
In its details, yes. The verses are about the vehicle, the money that bought it, and the confidence of arriving somewhere in it. That is the entire narrative content.
Which explains its usefulness. A record about specific pride in a specific place would have stayed local. A record about a black and yellow car, made by a man from a black and gold city, was available to anyone with a reason to shout two colors.
Who else is on the remix?
The official remix, released in December 2010 as the G-Mix, brought in Snoop Dogg, Juicy J and T-Pain, with a new Khalifa verse. It was later added to the tenth anniversary edition of Rolling Papers in 2021.
The G-Mix is a good measure of how quickly the song moved. Three established artists joined a record by a rapper who had never had a hit, three months after its release.
How successful was it?
Number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 2011, Khalifa’s first American chart topper, number five in the UK, and charting across close to twenty countries. It has been certified multi-platinum in the United States and Canada.
Khalifa reached number one again in 2015 with “See You Again,” a very different kind of record. This is still the one Pittsburgh plays.
Why it worked
Because it is almost empty and knows it. The hook is two colors. There is no story to follow, no argument to agree with and nothing to translate, which makes it usable by a stadium, a bar, a marching band or a hockey rink without adaptation.
Khalifa has said in interviews since that he intended the song as his introduction to the world, and that talking about where he is from is the thing he most enjoys doing. He introduced himself by naming two colors, and a city took it from there.
Hooks this short are the easiest to remember and the hardest to search for, because there is barely a lyric to type; when that happens, our song lyrics search gets you to the title.