Hot Slut Of The Day!
Sometimes my iTunes shuffle does me dirty and shames me on purpose by playing an embarrassing, shitty song that I downloaded while in a vulnerable state (read: drunk, stoned and probably extra high on refined sugar) and wanted to forget. My iTunes shuffle totally gets off on calling me out for the shameful, soul-killing mistakes I’ve made by downloading songs by Selena Gomez, Fifth Harmony, Iggy Azalea and 5 Seconds of Summer. (Yes, when I’m in a vulnerable state I become an 11-year-old girl whose first name ends with a Y, brags that she owns the largest collection of emojis in her school and cried happy, raw tears when she got “the flying bird tattoo on the right” in Buzzfeed’s “Which Harry Styles Tattoo Are you?” quiz.) But sometimes my iTunes shuffle does me right and plays a song that my brain purged itself of years ago.
Yesterday, it played an extra juicy raspberry from 1985: “Everybody Dance” by Ta Mara And The Seen. I forgot it existed. Ta Mara and The Seen was a pop R&B group from Minneapolis and she was one of Prince’s protege’s for approximately three seconds. Ta Mara was born Margaret Cox and anybody with the last name Cox should be extremely proud of it and never ever change it, but she didn’t feel like it had that “Minneapolis pop R&B songbird” ring to it. So Maggie Cox used Ta Mara as a stage name, because a hot stage name is a stage that makes you sound like a lost Mowry sister and a stage name that sounds like what comes out of Marky Mark’s mouth when he says “tomorrow.”
Ta Mara and The Seen’s once semi-hit was “Everybody Dance” and when their second album “Blueberry Gossip” came out and flopped, they broke up. The world just wasn’t ready for an R&B pop star who looked like a young Judith Light and whose songs sounded like Prince’s tangiest queef. But they’ll forever live on in my iTunes shuffles thanks to this:
The best way to work out your hot dog and watermelon-flavored vodka-induced hangover this Fifth of July is to put on a baggy, pink checkerboard blazer and swerve your ass to that.