While I’ve always been partial to a well-made margarita, the drink is really having a moment as an aphrodisiac right now. At the beginning of the summer, “One Margarita,” a TikTok viral bop by singer, comedian and podcaster Angel Laketa Moore, was inescapable. And it felt good.
If you’re unfamiliar with the song, which is underscored by a catchy beat and what I can only describe as medium-vulgar lyrics that sound equal parts threat and invitation, this is how it starts: “Give me one margarita, Imma open my legs / Give me two margaritas, Imma give you some head,” And yea, you can safely infer what happens by the fourth and fifth margaritas.
While this song has tickled most of us by now, many don’t realize that it was actually written to parody the anti-queer, anti-sex Christian evangelist named Cynthia Smock, also known as Sister Cindy. And if you’re an obsessive TikTok user like me, you might have already come across videos of Sister Cindy, who tours college campuses all over the country and gives speeches that are so unhinged that they’ve become canonical to Gen Z.
That’s where Moore comes in. She was recording an episode of her podcast, “Here’s the Thing,” when she and her co-host Kevin Fredericks came across a video of Sister Cindy preaching at the Louisiana State University campus. In the video, Sister Cindy is giving a word on the dangers of Mexican restaurants to a crowd of students. “If you buy her one margarita, she will spread her legs!” she warns.
Moore swiftly requested a beat from Fredericks and then freestyled the hook to the margarita song over it, per WIRED. She uploaded it to TikTok, and by the following day, producer Casa Di placed it over a new beat, which is the viral hit we’re all listening to now. And, of course, all of this happened in God’s (or Sister Cindy’s) perfect timing: The song was released on May 31, just in time for Pride.
Moore didn’t just upload the song to make fun of Sister Cindy; some of it felt personal. “I grew up Christian, I identify as Christian, but I know there’s a lot of shame put on sexuality and sexual expression,” Moore tells me.
That’s why she was happy the song dropped when it did and inadvertently became a queer-affirming bop. Oh, yea, and about that fifth margarita? It leads to pegging. “To even talk about anal sex in a song — or a woman saying, ‘Ima put it in your bum’ — is not something you hear every day,” she says. “But if that’s how you get down, if you’re someone who is consenting, go’ head! If it’s your style, go ahead and sing about it.”
And this is just the beginning — I feel we’re about to be hearing the “Margarita Song” a lot more. For one, the music video dropped last week, and it’s honestly exactly how I pictured it in my head. But what feels even more iconic is that Saucy Santana hopped on the track for the remix that drops on July 28.
It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate collaborator than Saucy Santana, the artist behind TikTok hit “Material Girl,” who has come to represent unabashed Black queer empowerment. Moore sees the magnitude of his influence and is thrilled about the collab.
“We know how this song was resonating with the queer community, and we did not want to shy away from that. We wanted to actually press harder into that,” she says. “Saucy makes fun music. He makes music that you want to twerk to… He is his true saucy self on here.”
By taking a sermon that represents so much of what is scary and threatening to women and queer people in America right now and transforming it into a hilarious, sex-positive call-to-arms, Moore is giving us permission to have fun in the midst of what can feel like the actual end of times.
If Sister Cindy and others like her want queer people and women to feel bad about themselves, Moore wants us to do something entirely different: Stop fighting fire with fire. When we reject their seriousness, we can give ourselves permission to feel good inside ourselves. We’ll be enjoying our margaritas with the knowledge that, at the end of the day, it ain’t that deep.