Moore, by her own admission, never had a “ho phase.” But she understands why someone would, and she wanted to shift focus from the abstinence messages in the original viral video. (“If I wasn’t married, honey,” she tells me over Zoom, “I would be deep in that ho phase right now.”) As “One Margarita” has spread, she’s been delighted to see that people of all genders and all sexualities have made lip syncs to her song. Many haven’t even shied away from the chorus’ nod to pegging: “Give me five margaritas, Imma have some fun/Give me five margaritas, Imma put it in your bun.” Given the many backlashes the LGBTQ+ community has faced recently—boycotts over queer beer, hundreds of rights-stripping bills, threats made against drag brunches—she’s happy her song celebrating sexuality dropped at the start of Pride month. “I feel like there’s something of a revolution coming around, especially for women,” she says. “That was one of the reasons why when I heard the lyrics in my head as I was freestyling, I wanted to change the perspective.”
The success of Moore’s song also speaks to something else: a creator getting their due, specifically a Black woman creator. There’s a long history of the trend and meme machine separating Black creators from the culture they create, but as “One Margarita” proliferates, the track Moore made with Terrell and Casa Di—and their names—have spread with it. It hasn’t become a dance challenge that took off separate from their song, leaving them uncredited. As my colleague Jason Parham has written, TikTok is often rife with cultural appropriation. Tech, as we’re now seeing with AI, has a way of scraping people’s creative labor and then cutting them out. So far, that hasn’t happened with “One Margarita.”
“I’ve been a content creator for 13 years, and most of the time the stuff I do resonates with people that look like me,” Moore says. “This was one of the first times that I felt like some of my content was resonating a lot with people who look nothing like me. I’m seeing all these white girls, I’m seeing a bunch of queer people, I’m seeing fraternity boys. I was like, ‘Wait, oh my goodness!’”
Dixon and Terrell, who have been making music together since childhood, say that right now, their goal is to find someone else to add another verse to the song. “People are, like, pitching their favorite artists. They’re saying ‘Oh, City Girls! Megan Thee Stallion! Lizzo!,” says Dixon. “The next phase is to have an artist on the song to take it to that next level.”
As he says this, Moore bobs her head smiling. There are, she says, a lot of female rappers she’d like to have on the song, Lizzo included. “If any of them was like, ‘Can I get a piece of this?’” she says, “I’d be like ‘Come on, we have more margaritas.’” If the algorithms can help with anything, let’s hope they get that message to the right MC.
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