Being that the entire crux of the promotion for Camila Cabello’s fourth album, C,XOXO, has been centered on how “authentic” and “personal” the content is (hence, the supposed feeling of it being “personally signed” C,XOXO), it’s no surprise that the album hasn’t lived up to that kind of hype. Especially as such a concept is rather flimsy, and definitely not enough to buttress an album that’s generally lacking in cohesion—except there’s supposed to be a vague “Miami theme.”
The hyperpop stylings of “I Luv It” featuring Playboi Carti are meant to establish that “305 vibe,” along with its accompanying video that is decidedly “Florida trashy”-chic. But the attempt to let listeners feel as though they’re “entering the world” of “C” is mitigated by how Charli XCX-“inspired” (read: directly imitated) the track is. Even the album’s title has a core element of XCX’s name in it (not to mention Charli’s 2014 album, Sucker, also has her wielding a lollipop on the cover). It could just as well be C(harli),XOXO. And yes, Charli was sure to respond to the release of Cabello’s initial “I Luv It” snippet by lip syncing to the very similar-sounding “I Got It” from 2017’s Pop 2. When the internet called her out for the shade, Charli shruggingly replied, “Comee onnn mess is fun! Nothing matters!” As it didn’t seem to matter to Cabello that one of Charli’s most well-known songs also happens to be called “I Love It.”
It appears this is at least part of the reason she opted to have someone with as strong of a fanbase as Playboi Carti join her for the song—that is, to offset some of the inevitable flak. And yet, as soon as Cabello leaves the safe cushion of having a feature with as much clout as Carti, things take a turn for the even more derivative on “Chanel No. 5,” Cabello’s version of “ultra-personal” lyrics in the spirit of Taylor Swift, but with a more “ratchet edge.” Even the way that Cabello has tried to present the album as “personal” work channels Swift’s usual manner with album announcements. Case in point, her most recent one for The Tortured Poets Department that went:
“The Tortured Poets Department. An anthology of new works that reflect events, opinions and sentiments from a fleeting and fatalistic moment in time—one that was both sensational and sorrowful in equal measure. This period of the author’s life is now over, the chapter closed and boarded up. There is nothing to avenge, no scores to settle once wounds have healed. And upon further reflection, a good number of them turned out to be self-inflicted. This writer is of the firm belief that our tears become holy in the form of ink on a page. Once we have spoken our saddest story, we can be free of it. And then all that’s left behind is the tortured poetry.”
Cabello attempted a similar tone that ends up coming across more like a parody:
“C,XOXO is pink and blue ski masks, never being without lip gloss, coming alive during blue hour, long nails and eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man [by the way, a lyric from Taylor’s “Vigilante Shit”], crying with your makeup on and texting pics to your friends. It’s bikinis under t-shirts, it’s sticky hair at dinner after the beach, it’s tan lines and white wine with your girls. It’s living it the fuck up. C,XOXO is doing no harm, but TAKING NO SHIT. It has given me confidence and cockiness and wabisabiness in a world where we all need it. This one is for the baddies, for the dreamgirls, for my recovering lovergirls. I love living in the world of C,XOXO. Meet you there soon.”
The shallowness of the premise is immediately apparent on an album that struggles to find an identity despite insisting that this is the “realest” version of her that fans have ever seen (in truth, that claim is more likely to be believed on 2022’s Familia). And yet, more often than not, she feels the need to hide behind another artist with more personality. This is also true on track three, “Pink XOXO.” The moment Cabello starts to sing, “Please don’t be mistaken, I could think about you all the time,” it’s clear that the “Pink” referred to in the title is none other than PinkPantheress, who does most of the heavy lifting. Even though the song is all of fifty-five seconds (as PinkPantheress recently said, “A song doesn’t need to be long…”). Indeed, it will be the first of a few “filler tracks” on the record—things that are interlude-y but not quite.
But before the next “filler” moment, there’s another song where Cabello hides behind a more personality-laden artist: “He Knows” featuring Lil Nas X. Among the most playful and “sassy” offerings on C,XOXO, its video is reliant on Lil Nas X to create a somewhat antithetical-to-the-lyrics narrative in which Cabello is being pussy blocked from keeping a certain guy wrapped around her finger because of Lil Nas X’s seductive twink ways.
Following “He Knows” is the more slow jam-oriented “Twentysomethings” (not to be confused with Pet Shop Boys’ “Twenty-something”). Here, Cabello does show hints of “realness” in that it seems to be yet another ode to her defunct/on-again, off-again relationship with Shawn Mendes, especially when she calls out the height of the man she’s talking about in the lyrics: “It feels like I’m livin’ in limbo/I’m not yours or mine, I’m somewhere in the middle, okay/You’re so tall you just made me feel even more little, babe.” Part of the reason it might not have lasted, Cabello seems to speculate, is that being twenty-something is a confusing time. For the first part of the decade, you just want to fuck around and not really be serious with anyone, while, for the second part, people get the “thirties scaries” and fear that maybe they should have settled down with that one person they were so careless with in the earlier part of their twenties.
Thus, Cabello sings on the (non-Miami-oriented) chorus, “Twenty-somethings in love, in lust, in confusion/Twenty-somethings, dancin’ while our hearts are bruisin’/Leave Manhattan, cross the bridge over to Brooklyn/When it comes to us, I don’t know what the fuck I’m doin’/Twenty-somethings, should’ve left the party sooner/Twenty-somethings, gotta have a sense of humor when it comes to us/Don’t know what the fuck I’m doin’.” Elsewhere, she laments the emotional immaturity of twenty-something men when she adds, “‘Bout to lose service, I’m in the elevator/‘If you’re down, maybe we could do somethin’ later’/Fuck does that mean?/I need a translator/I don’t get it, straight up.” Even though, to be honest, that sentence is pretty clear. But the point is, one’s twenties are a confusing time—especially romantically. At twenty-seven, Cabello seems to be getting more reflective about a decade that’s coming to an end for her. And, by the same token, clinging to that “last gasp” of youth (in the eyes of our narrow-minded society) as she transitions to the next song, “Dade County Dreaming” featuring JT and Yung Miami (a.k.a. City Girls).
Opening with a moody intro thanks to production from Jasper Harris and El Guincho (known mostly for his work with FKA Twigs and Rosalía—and, yes, he produced Charli’s “Everything is romantic” for the Brat album), “Dade County Dreaming” is meant to be something like an homage to Miami. Thus, the frequent name-checking of Dade County-specific places like Opa-Locka (where Yung Miami is from), Collins Avenue and Biscayne. And yet, Cabello and City Girls don’t exactly convey a very evocative “sense of place” to anyone who hasn’t been to Miami. At times, it seems even Cabello herself hasn’t been there, instead continuing to rely on her Spring Breakers mood board with lyrics like, “Girl loves the feelin’/Life in her eyes, everything’s fleeting/I can’t feel the ceilin’/Orange skies, I’m never leavin’.” Unless, of course, it’s to New York or L.A. to tend to other party opportunities.
Cabello continues to work with controversial people (Yung Miami has the stain of a Diddy “romance” on her now) by including a bullshit interlude called “Koshi XOXO.” On it, Jewish (that’s the controversial part, these days) rapper BLP Kosher, who hails from Boca Raton, delivers a cornball “love letter” to Cabello and her music by saying, “I was going through like, kinda like a heartbreak, and I, also, uh, my dog that was, like, there for me and stuff, like, he had passed away, and I was listening to Camila, her music got me through it, I’ve been out, the first music, like, album that I actually, like, shed tears to music while it was playing, like, ’cause the song, like, that was, like, uh, Camila, the Camila album, so, like, it’s an honor to just be here and be able to just like, you know, speak on that shit for real. C,XOXO. Water.” Ah, truly the picture of eloquence.
But Cabello’s controversial picks for collaborations don’t stop, continuing with “Hot Uptown” featuring Drake, recently made a fool out of by Kendrick Lamar on a quartet of diss tracks (“Euphoria,” “6:16 in LA,” “Meet the Grahams” and “Not Like Us”). Nonetheless, Cabello lets him have free rein with a fake Jamaican-esque accent as he opens the song with, “Nike mi shoe maker/Benz a mi car maker/Tiffany mi ring maker/Let me grip on your money maker/Grip on your money maker/Hotline, ah gon’ bling later/Trust me, we ah link later, ayy.” But they link sooner rather than later as there’s another Drake feature immediately after called “Uuugly.” Except that it’s not really a feature, so much as a full-on guest track from Drake, with Cabello occasionally remembering to lightly mimic some of the words he’s saying. And so, once again, Cabello appears as though she’s “phoning it in” for a large portion of the album, disappearing into the background despite insisting this is “her” we’re hearing for the first time.
Remembering to get on the mic again for “Dream-Girls,” Cabello incorporates a series of women’s names in the chorus, “It was Keisha, it was Sonia, it was Tanya, it was Monique/It was Niecy, it was Keke.” And yes, this sounds a lot like Drake on “In My Feelings” also calling out a series of women’s names, which starts with, not so coincidentally, “Kiki, do you love me?” Cabello’s reliance on the lyrics and stylings of other artists often cross the boundary between mere homage and outright lack of originality. This also being manifest when she then references Megan Thee Stallion with the line, “Body-ody-ody-ody ‘cause she work out.”
As though remembering that Miami was half a theme for the record, Cabello incorporates another interlude called “305tilidie,” designed to remind listeners that this is a “girly girl” record with Spring Breakers-style friendship and looques as she incorporates the “surreal” girl talk sequence, “Here we are, strollin’ down the streets of Miami. Ayy. Brown top, little skirt. I barely have any time to do my makeup, let’s just not even look. I’m gonna put sunglasses on. Okay, mwah. It’s so fucking dark. That’s it, we have to hold hands. We go to Nikki Beach, we might not make it. This is like a candy store. And then the g-g-girls, yeah. You know what they say, that’s why he knows. It’s so pretty, I’m obsessed. Malibu Bar—no, Miami Barbie. Ooh, rainy. Did you get that right?” The answer to that question with regard to C,XOXO itself is generally a no. Though, to be fair, there are moments of, let’s say, acceptability, including “B.O.A.T.,” which “obviously” stands for “Best of All Time.”
As the lone true ballad of the record, it’s laden with piano instrumentation and soft electronic flourishes produced by Daniel Aged, Jasper Harris and El Guincho. Once again, it appears as though Cabello can only be “herself” when Shawn Mendes is the muse, as this is yet another overt exploration of why things went wrong between them (hint: it was mostly his fault). Ergo, she belts out, “Lyin’ in bed/Replayin’ the shit you said/Ever regret all the messin’ with my head?/‘Cause I’ve been thinkin’/You’d never give me peace of mind, so I had to give it to myself [or, as Selena Gomez once put it, “I needed to lose you to love me”]/You never think it’s the right time until I’m good with someone else/You’d probably have me for a lifetime if you didn’t need some help.”
In many regards this particular track is something of a companion piece to Familia’s “Everyone At This Party” (also number twelve on that album), a regretful rumination about a particular failed relationship. Granted, “Everyone At This Party” has a “sweeter” bent than the more accusatory “B.O.A.T.,” with Cabello offering a sad-angry tone when she sings, “I wish, I wish you’d say, ‘You werе right/That I want you when you’re not mine/And just whеn I think I know how to live without you, I forget why I try/You were the best of all time.’”
In another verse, Cabello makes peace with the idea that trying to get back together again will only have the same disastrous result, accepting, “Texts I won’t send, we both know how that shit ends/Tryin’ again, too jealous to just be friends/‘Cause now I’m thinking/You never ask me who I’m giving all of my body to now/You never ask me ’bout these nights, baby/I pray that you find out/You couldn’t give me your heart, boy, go and eat your heart out.” That last line being something that’s supposedly very “C,XOXO” in that it could easily be envisioned as a handwritten sentence in some journal entry or Dear John letter.
After “B.O.A.T.,” Cabello takes things to a mid-tempo pace with “Pretty When I Cry,” and all at once seems to home in on a cohesive theme just as the album is coming to a close. That theme being, needless to say, heartbreak. And sure, “Pretty When I Cry” is a good title to convey such an emotion—even if it’s no secret that Lana Del Rey has the monopoly on that phrase, what with it being one of the signature tracks not just of 2014’s Ultraviolence, but of her entire career. Olivia Rodrigo at least had the “decency” to only use it as a lyric on “all-american bitch” rather than naming a song that on Guts. But hey, Del Rey ostensibly gave her “sealed with a kiss” approval of Cabello’s C,XOXO era by inviting the latter to join her onstage for an awkward performance of “I Luv It” during her second weekend of headlining Coachella back in April. Even so, it’s impossible not to think of Del Rey (regardless of the song’s faster tempo) when Cabello chants, “At least I’m pretty when I cry/Pity you don’t want me/Pretty in this light/Glitter fallin’ off me [also, that’s Kesha’s thing]/Pink and blue, diamond eyes [Lana loves mentioning colors and diamonds, too]/Look at what you lost to me/I’m still pretty when I cry/Pretty when I cry.”
As if that weren’t uninventive enough, Cabello sees fit to conclude the album with “June Gloom.” Not just a title that Allie X employed on 2020’s Cape God, but also a song that cops Ariana Grande’s record theme from earlier this year: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (with Grande’s album shortened simply to Eternal Sunshine). That’s right, Cabello actually dares to sing, “I might as well say, ‘Meet me in Montauk’/Cold beach, you walk” as she once again taunts Mendes throughout the coda. This includes her deliberately “eat your heart out” chorus, “Does she get this wet for you, baby?/Talk to you in poems and songs, huh, baby?” This, too, is a Lana Del Rey line—for she’s the one who demanded, “Talk to me in poems and songs” on 2021’s “Let Me Love You Like A Woman.” Cabello then continues, “Little kiss make your head go hazy?/Is it really love if it’s not this crazy?/Does she move like this for you, darlin’?/Toyin’ with me now, you know when I want it/I don’t lie, you’re the best, iconic/I know that I haven’t, but I hope you top it.” Meaning she hopes Mendes manages to top her/their relationship/the hot sex they presumably have (or had).
For her sake, though, it’s best if she doesn’t top it, because Mendes seems to remain the only source of “good songwriting material” for Cabello. That much is cemented on the often patchy and disjointed (when it’s not about Mendes) C,XOXO.
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