Songfacts®:

• This song tells the story of a woman who gets back at her man by shopping with his credit cards, not paying his bills, and selling all his stuff. Cantrell said it isn't something she ever did, but a "fantasy that I wish I had acted out," adding that it only applies to guys who cheat on their girlfriends. While she never took this kind of revenge, she said one of her girlfriends did something similar.
• Blu Cantrell (real name: Tiffany Cobb) is the daughter of a jazz singer named Susi Franco. Her father left when she was young, so Blu and her five siblings were raised by Franco. After being spotted in a hospital waiting room (she was there to see her sister), she auditioned to be a singer and ended up signing with Arista Records. She did work as a backup singer for artists like Puff Daddy and Faith Evans before issuing "Hit 'Em Up Style (Oops!)" as her debut single when she was 25 years old.
  
  It ended up being her only hit, although her collaboration with Sean Paul, "Breathe," made #70 in 2003. Her 2003 album Bittersweet had just modest sales, and she left the industry soon after. In 2012, she emerged with a single called "S.O.S."
• Dallas Austin, an Atlanta-based hitmaker for artists like Madonna, TLC and Gwen Stefani, wrote and produced this song. The musical inspiration came from an unlikely source: a 1936 Merrie Melodies cartoon where a little owl named Owl Jolson sings a song called "I Love To Singa." Owl Jolson is play on Al Jolson, who sang the original version of the song in the movie The Singing Kid.
  
  Owl Jolson sings:
  I love to singa
  About the moon-a and the June-a and the spring-a
  I love to singa
  About a sky of blue-a or a tea for two-a
  
  Austin used the same melody:
  So I went
  To Neeman Marcus on a shopping spree-a
  And on the way I grabbed Sole and Mia
• Cantrell's label boss at Arista Records, LA Reid, teamed her with Dallas Austin, who asked him to write a soul song along the lines of "Missing You" by Case. They got together in the studio but nothing was working. After Cantrell left, the Owl Jolson cartoon came on the TV and Austin got inspired. He wrote the song that night and played it for Cantrell the next day, but she didn't like it.
  
  Austin was also working with TLC at the time, and that night he met with Reid to play him some of those songs. "I played him the album, he loved everything," Austin said in an Instagram Live. "I got into my car and he was like, 'Didn't you work with Blu Cantrell last night?' I was like, Damn. So I played him the record and before we even get to the hook he's like, 'What the f--k is this! This is a smash.' I played it again and he said, 'This is the first single.'"
• Britney Spears started the coy "oops" trend a year earlier with her song "Oops... I Did It Again," which was the title track to her second album. In 2002, Tweet had a hit with "Oops (Oh My)."