Thanks to this song, initially intended for Beyoncé, a completely different singer saw her career explode in the 2010s.
There are these global successes that we cannot anticipate. Did Beyoncé pay the price? If Queen B’s career includes countless hits, which have made her one of the biggest stars on the planet, one more hit song could have appeared on her charts. This title, sold more than six million copies worldwide, will remain the third best-selling single in 2013, the year of its release. Its clip, which largely contributed to the success of the song and its performer, was viewed nearly 20 million times on YouTube in 24 hours and has now been played more than a billion times.
It must be said that in the video, the singer appears completely naked, apart from a pair of Doc Martens on her feet, and adopts several very suggestive positions, notably by licking a mass in the middle of the song. A performance that Beyoncé would have been ready to take on too? We will probably never know, but the creation will be banned in around ten countries around the world. In France, we will see the clip with the notice “not recommended for under 10s” on certain channels.
You may have guessed, this song is Wrecking Ball, which made Miley Cyrus a global star, with all due respect to Beyoncé, for whom the demo was originally intended. “Originally, the writing session of Dr Luke and Sacha [the authors of the song] had been reserved to write a song for Beyoncé,” explained a representative of one of the authors in 2014, interviewed by the American site Radar Online. He added, “But as the song Wrecking Ball progressed, the songwriters realized the song wouldn’t work for her.”
So can we conclude that Miley Cyrus owes her career to Beyoncé? Conclusions of this type would be hasty, given the career and immense success that the interpreter of Flowers experienced after the song Wrecking Ball, which is now far from being the most listened to in his discography on Spotify.
Speaking of Flowers, it has since far surpassed Wrecking Ball with some 590 million views on YouTube and nearly 1.5 billion streams on the Spotify platform. And almost ten years later, it is also the triumph of love and self-acceptance that a visibly sobered Miley Cyrus celebrates.
