22 Years Later, Pink Recalls “A Lot Of Fuss” On The “Lady Marmalade” Set

In 2001, the first Harry Potter movie hit theaters, trucker hats were all the rage, and Pink joined a group of “badass chicks” to put a new spin on “Lady Marmalade.” Since then, the three-time Grammy winner has added more than two decades of performances and 50-plus music videos to her repertoire. However, when Pink ranked her top 12 clips for BuzzFeed UK, she placed her iconic Moulin Rouge! soundtrack collaboration with Lil’ Kim, Mya, and Christina Aguilera firmly in the bottom spot. Her reason for ranking their Patti Labelle cover last, she explained, had everything to do with the filming experience.

“It wasn’t very fun to make; I’m all about fun, and it was a lot of fuss. There were some personalities,” Pink elaborated to the British outlet on Feb. 17, adding, “Kim and Mya were nice.” As for the video’s place in the larger pop culture canon, she added, “I guess it is iconic, but I remember I kept crying because my skin didn’t like the makeup. It was just… There was some annoying things happening that day.”

Adding that the early 2000s shoot “feels like two lifetimes ago, eight even,” Pink joked, “But did you see my booty and my abs back then?”

Some speculated that Pink was shading Aguilera in the interview, given both their complicated history, and the fact she named only Lil’ Kim and Mya as being nice. (Producer Missy Elliott also served as the video’s emcee.) When one user tweeted on Feb. 18 that Pink “should be kissing [Aguilera’s] legendary ass for allowing” her to even be on the track, the singer didn’t hold back in setting the record straight.

“Y’all are nuts Xtina had sh*t to do with who was on that song. If you don’t know by now — I’m not ‘shading’ someone by telling it over and over and over what actually happened,” Pink responded. “I’m zero percent interested in your f*cking drama. If you haven’t noticed- I’m a little busy selling ... And by selling— I mean tickets and albums and bake sales and sh*t.” In a followup tweet, she concluded, “Also — I kissed xtinas mouth. I don’t need to kiss her ass.”

This is hardly the first time that the subject of “Lady Marmalade” drama — or the women’s friendship in general — has come up. In Pink’s 2009 VH1 Behind the Music special, she recalled how label executive Ron Fair once walked into a room and demanded Aguilera get the prime part. “He didn’t say hi to any of us and said, ‘What’s the high part? What’s the most singing part? Christina’s going to take that part,’” Pink claimed at the time. “And I stood up, and I said ‘Hi. How are you? So nice of you to introduce yourself. I’m Pink. She will not be taking that part. I think that’s what the f*cking meeting’s about.’”

Bad blood between the women escalated, and Pink even alleged that Aguilera swung at her in a club. “We were super young and super new at the whole [fame] thing,” she said during an October 2017 appearance on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen. “I think I’m an alpha and she’s an alpha, and I’m used to taking my altercations physical and she’s used to having them verbal. We just are very different.”

Even so, she added that they made up while working together on NBC’s The Voice earlier that year. “She’s so talented. And deep down — I’ve had bad days, too — she’s a really sweet person,” Pink shared. “I mean, it was funny. I laughed. It was just funny. I hadn’t seen her in years and years and years. We became moms and we grew up and we hugged it out. It’s that simple. I feel so good about that.”

Aguilera, for her part, appeared on WWHL two years later and denied she ever threw a punch at Pink. “I’ve seen her Behind the Music [special] and I know she had some feelings or whatever about how the recording of ‘Lady Marmalade’ went down and all that,” she said in 2019. “I know [during] the actual video, she intimidated me a lot because she was heckling me in the audience behind the director, and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ But, that’s what she did back then. She’s a different person now.”