SMS (Bangerz)

Album: BANGERZ (2013)
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Songfacts®:

  • This Sean Garrett and Mike Will Made It produced song features Britney Spears. "She's got one of those voices that as soon as it comes on everyone in the world knows it's Britney Spears, and that's what I wanted," Cyrus explained during an appearance on the UK talk show Alan Carr's Chatty Man. "There's just a whole vibe that's around Britney Spears and what she represented, it's like too crazy."

    Cyrus added that the pair have the same manager, Larry Rudolph, so it was easy to make a collaboration happen and it all finally came together at Spears' request. "Well, we've been trying to work together, and I felt like there had to be that right time. And after 'We Can't Stop' came out, she called and said how much she loved the song," the "Wrecking Ball" singer recalled. "At first she heard the song and she didn't know it was me, and then she watched the video and just sort of fell in love with the video."
  • Cyrus told Alan Carr that Britney Spears was an icon of hers when she was a little girl. "I was obsessed with her 'I'm A Slave 4 U,' video," she recalled. "That was the first head shake I got from my dad when the video came out, as I tried to reenact the whole film."
  • The "SMS" in the song title stands for "strutting my stuff."
  • Initially this was just going to be a Miley solo track, until Mike Will Made It and Sean Garrett decided to make a collaboration out of the tune. "I'm like, 'It'll be dope if we put another female on here' and the fact that it's like a kind of rapping song, it would be doper if we put another pop chick on here that we're not used to hearing rap," Mike Will told MTV News.
  • Sean Garrett told MTV News that Britney wasn't the first person they came up with: "The first name that we tossed around was Gwen Sefani. We were talking about Gwen because you know Gwen got that edge too, but that's how God works. We were throwing around those ideas,"he added. "Nicki (Minaj), we were talking about putting Nicki on there too. That would've been nuts too, but I think that's how God works, this (Britney) was absolutely the right one."
  • According to Garrett, Mike Will looked to pioneering female rappers Salt-n-Pepa's classic 1986 single "Push It" as inspiration. "That was all Mike's opinion. He felt like he wanted to fuse that Salt-n-Pepa," Garrett told MTV News. "It's like five different things, it's hip-hop, it's the girls, it's a female anthem, Salt-n-Pepa, Britney and Miley... people didn't get that. That's what this record is; it's a celebration of pop culture, beautiful women, strong women."
  • This was going to be released as a single, but Britney injured herself filming the video and it was shelved.

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