Songfacts®:

• This reflective and empowering techno-tinged track finds Madonna ruminating on the necessary end to a relationship. Several lines seemingly find the Queen of Pop opening up about her failed marriage to Guy Ritchie, whom she divorced in 2008. "I tried to be a good girl / I tried to be your wife," she sings. "Diminished myself / And I swallowed my light / I tried to become all / That you expect of me / And if it was a failure / I don't give a..." The singer's publicist, Liz Rosenberg, commented to New York Post's gossip column PageSix re the apparently Guy-inspired lyrics, "I have not heard Madonna explain whether the lyrics are autobiographical or not. She doesn't often explain lyrics to her songs, and she did have a few writing collaborators."
• Madonna is credited as a co-producer on this track along with French Eurohouse knob-twiddler Martin Solveig. Speaking with Australia's Channel 5, Solveig said the Queen of Pop contributed as much to the production as he did. He said: "She is as involved as you can be in the recording process. This was a very good and big surprise for me! I was assuming that she would spend only an hour or two in the studio per day and come and see where we were and say, 'Ok I like this, I don't like that. I'll sing this. Bye!' And absolutely not... I mean we co-produced the tracks and it's not just written on the credits 'co-produced by Martin Solveig and Madonna,' we literally co-produced the tracks. I mean, at some point she wanted to choose the sound of a snare drum or a synth and that kind of stuff. She was really in the session!"
• Nicki Minaj contributes a guest rap and she closes her contribution with the swipe "There's only one Queen and that's Madonna. Bitch!"
  
  Solveig and Madonna spent one day in the studio recording Minaj's contributions to this song and "Give Me All Your Luvin'." The French DJ-Producer said to MTV News of working with the Queens MC: "Nicki's very pro. She's like, once she arrives and she spends some time, she writes, seriously, her stuff and then she records very quickly, and she's like bang!."
• Solveig commented to MTV News regarding the references in the song to Madonna's split from Guy Ritchie. "A few days after I finalized the song, she finished the lyrics of 'I Don't Give A,' and I could feel there was a lot of references to her life," he said. "Nothing that I really know of, because you don't know that kind of stuff, but then I saw it was very commented everywhere."