Who Should Play Lady Marmalade-2015?You Be The Judge.

As modern humans forced to live and love in a time of hot takes, one of our most prevalent obsessions is the specter of what could have been —

and not just as it applies to existential realizations of mortality. We ask ourselves “what if?” to ponder what might have happened if certain pop culture projects had adopted different, sometimes grotesque new shapes. (What if Hillary Duff hadn’t turned down “Since U Been Gone”? Seriously, can you imagine?)
One of my personal favorite daydream contemplations has haunted me over the past decade, and its answer morphs every year, to delightful brainstorm degree: What if “Lady Marmalade” had been recorded today? Who would be involved? Who’d be Xtina? Who’d be Missy!?

Perfection was achieved in 2001 when Christina Aguilera, Pink, Lil’ Kim, Mya, and Missy Elliot united to cover the 1975 Labelle bop for Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! Their decidedly naughtier version spent five weeks at No. 1; since then, the closest we’ve even remotely come to that collaborative brand of riffing magnitude is “Bang Bang” or that time Mariah Carey sneezed through two octaves. “Lady Marmalade” is the albatross, the unattainable lightning-in-a-boudoir that taught millions of kids how to say sexy things in French and became the mega-hit earworm you could never quite turn off (or sing on-key). Should a new quartet of singers unite to re-record it? No. But if they did…who would it be?

Well, someone has answered my question, and her answer may be terrible. In an interview with The Sun, Rita Ora reportedly asserted her desire to re-sculpt the David with help from Miley Cyrus, Iggy Azalea, and Charli XCX. (Azalea later tweeted that she wants nothing to do with this idea).

The problem is not only that Ora wants to cover the quartet to end all quartets, but that the “squad” she’s conjured up doesn’t even attempt to do justice to the very specific archetypes of”Lady Marmalade.”Ew