Angel Laketa Moore had a hit on her hands. In late May, the actress/creator was about to record an episode of her podcast, Here’s the Thing, and was going through a list of topics from her cohost, comedian Kevin Fredericks. Among them: a viral video of a preacher known as Sister Cindy discussing abstinence on the campus of Louisiana State University. In it, Sister Cindy shouts, “If you buy her one margarita, she will spread her legs.” Moore immediately heard the inspiration she needed for a rap. When she sat down with Fredericks to record the podcast, they started talking about Sister Cindy’s viral video. “Then I was like, ‘Kevin, give me a beat,’” she says.
Fredericks whipped up a rough version of the beat from Clipse’s “Grindin’” and Moore started to rap: “Give me one margarita, Imma open my legs/Give me two margaritas, Imma give you some head … ” Fredericks cracked up. “When the freestyle came out and it was fire, I was like ‘You know what? I’m going to clip this and put it on my Instagram and my TikTok,” says Moore, who goes by the name That Chick Angel and has appeared on A Black Lady Sketch Show. She hoped someone would add a new beat to her vocals.
Within 24 hours, two producers, Steve Terrell and Carl Dixon (known as Casa Di), had put a fresh beat on the sound and posted two different versions on TikTok—one long, one short. As of this writing, they have nearly 13 million combined views, and tens of thousands of people have made their own versions. Earlier this week, none other than Lizzo posted two, one in which she calls the track “the song of summer.”
On June 1, Moore, Terrell, and Dixon released an official version of the song on Apple Music and Spotify. It’s already ratcheting up streams. Even if Lizzo is wrong and it isn’t the song of summer, it still speaks to the spontaneity that crystallizes certain tracks as the anthems of a season. They’re about capturing the energy of the moment. And while songs about sex and booze are far from unique to this particular time, nearly everything else about “One Margarita” is.
This comes to mind because when I’m not scrolling TikTok, I’m thinking about generative AI. As Amos Barshad noted earlier this week on WIRED, AI tools could usher in a whole new genre of music—they could also usher in a genre of very boring, predictable tunes. Yes, AI can mimic Drake or allow producers to create songs where Grimes sings (pretty much) anything. AI can even write lyrics and compose. But most of its inspirations, the sounds these models learn from, come from the past. What the technology can’t do, without very specific human inputs, is make a viral sound that speaks to the moment of sexual moral panic the world seems to be in right now.