Paris
Song Meaning

“Paris” traces Ruby da Cherry’s journey from a chronically rejected outsider into the hardened, transformed figure he raps as, describing the song’s subject as “pretty much my whole life. Being rejected by girls. Being rejected by cooler kids than me. Being rejected by everybody” 6. The turning point came when he formed a pact with Scrim to become a $uicideboy$, which he says is “when stuff started really working out for me, musically” 6, reframed in the song through the suicide-imagery line “bleeding checks” as financial and artistic rebirth 6. Around that core narrative, the verses layer swagger and flexing over the group’s early success 4, graphic violent and misogynistic imagery drawn from the artist’s environment (he says he was stabbed at 12 and grew up around guns) 8, and a broader nihilistic disgust with the world summed up as wanting to “paint the globe black” 7.

The meaning

At its core, “Paris” is Ruby da Cherry’s telling of his own reinvention. He’s explicit that the reject narrative running through the song isn’t a character study but his actual biography: “Being rejected by girls. Being rejected by cooler kids than me. Being rejected by everybody that I came in contact with, in my life” 6. The line “Ruby was a motherfucking reject” isn’t past tense in spirit, since he insists elsewhere that this identity persists even after fame: “I’m not going to change just because my status in society has supposedly gotten higher” 3. Isolation remains part of his present, not just his past, as he notes he still doesn’t “have friends in New Orleans, really” 6.

The pivot point of the song is the formation of $uicideboys$ itself. Ruby frames the pact with Scrim as the literal moment his life changed course: “when I became a $uicide Boy and made a pact with Scrim is when stuff started really working out for me, musically” 6. The gruesome image of cutting his wrists and “bleeding checks” isn’t meant as literal self-harm but as a metaphor for that transformation, using “the imagery of suicide” to represent the money and success that followed 6. That same success is why women who once ignored him now pursue him, a shift he compares directly to Mike Jones’s “back then they didn’t want me, now I’m hot” dynamic 3.

Much of the verse’s swagger, the gold grill, the confident opening bars, is deliberate posturing meant to establish presence: “Tell me what you know about me, motherfucker” 4. But underneath the flex sits real psychological material. The artist describes carrying “a lot of dark shit on my mind... Anxiety. Panic disorders. Addiction” 8, and says the song functions as “a description of that side of me, and you know the thoughts that go through my head” 8. He’s candid that this darkness is what pulls his writing toward extremity: “it draws me to this dark place” 8, and that some lines exist simply because they were “the sickest shit I could think of” 5, an admission that not every image is meant literally.

The violent and misogynistic imagery throughout, stalking, blades, women turned into “problems” 4, traces back to his upbringing rather than pure invention. He grew up seeing “people with guns and shanking people,” and was himself stabbed at age 12, calling it “a regular thing” in his environment 8. That backdrop feeds the song’s broader nihilism, an anger at the state of the world that he’s tied directly to the news: “you hear the news, the things that happen, and you’re just like, ‘Man I really hate the situation that we live in’” 7. The desire to “paint the globe black” 7 and the warning that reaching a breaking point means he’ll “never look back” 7 point toward a persona willing to burn down whatever’s left rather than keep absorbing rejection quietly, even hinting at consequences as extreme as “somebody who goes postal” 7.

Ultimately, “Paris” reads less as a single unified statement and more as a portrait built from real fragments: chronic rejection 6, a life-altering pact that turned pain into a career 6, swagger earned through survival 4, and a mind shaped by genuine mental illness 8 and violence 8. The “cult” he references isn’t sinister in his own telling, it’s simply how he describes his fanbase, whom he considers “brothers and sisters, really” 3.

Last updated 2026-08-28