Watching the music video on YouTube sheds some valuable insight into this song. The opening scene features a CBS news clip covering a shooting that occurred, setting the mood for the song.

Lil Poppa was a victim of a Florida shooting that left 2 of his friends dead. As the song starts, you hear him explain the feelings he had following, wondering why he wasn’t hit, why he wasn’t killed. He then states that he still has “visions of em killing me” and how he had “fragments all in [his] arm.”

The song’s title, “purple hearts,” is explained partially by the music video giving the definition of a purple heart, which is “[In the US] A military decoration for those wounded or killed in action.” He is using this to refer to his friends who were wounded or killed in his traumatic shooting.

He then talks about how the investigators interrogated him and tried to blame him for the shooting, making him “wish [he] could take it back to the day that [his] mama named [him].”