Camila Cabello Tries To Be Everything to Every Listener With “Chanel No. 5,” Ends Up Doing a Bad Imitation of Britney Spears in the “Stronger” Video

As promotion for C,XOXO ramps up ahead of its release, so, too, does Camila Cabello’s bid to keep pushing the “rebrand” angle of the record. The “persona” she’s cultivated is, ostensibly, “C”—in other words, a blonde version of herself that likes the color blue a lot, in addition to Charli XCX, Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift. And, with the video for “Chanel No. 5,” it seems Britney Spears has been incorporated into the mix too, what with the chair and snake props that are decidedly “Spears coded.” Something that Billie Eilish knows all about after releasing her very “I’m A Slave 4 U” meets “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” video, “Your Power,” in 2021.

In this case, Cabello knows all about the “Stronger” video and the 2001 “I’m A Slave 4 U” performance at the VMAs. Directed by Paul Geusebroek, the majority of the “Chanel No. 5” video speaks to that iconic moment in “Stronger” when it’s just Britney dancing against a black space with nothing more than her metal chair (and yes, Spears managed to make chair dancing her own even after what Madonna did for chairs in the “Open Your Heart” video). Touting that she’s stronger than yesterday, Cabello, too, tries to channel the empowerment of being a “heartbreaker” a.k.a. independent woman who doesn’t need a relationship—in fact, can take one or leave one; it really makes no difference to her.

This is where the Marina and the Diamonds influence seems to come into the lyricism, with 2012’s “How to Be a Heartbreaker” seemingly all over the lyrics, “If I want him, he’s all mine/I know just how to fuck with his mind/Wrist, wrist, spritz, spritz, make him come alive/Chanel No. 5.” But, of course, let us not forget that Brit herself has a song called “Perfume” and has made a large bulk of the income her family stole for so long off of selling it. In a way, it’s too bad Cabello didn’t reference one of those scents instead (though it’s harder to rhyme something  about “coming alive” with Curious and Fantasy).

While she continues her poor imitation of “Stronger” chair dancing (and yes, Brit’s reaction would probably be akin to the one she gave on X Factor when Fifth Harmony went on to the finals), she also sings, “‘Cause I love you, love-you-not like daisies/But this gloss I got is cute and tasty.” Here, the schizophrenia of the sources she’s imitating gravitates more toward Del Rey-inspired lyricism before the video cuts to an image of a snake. A cobra that also wouldn’t be out of place in Megan the Stallion’s current snake-filled world (cropping up in videos for songs like “Hiss,” “Cobra” and “Boa”). In fact, the way the snake wraps itself around Cabello’s neck also echoes the aforementioned Eilish video for “Your Power.” Though, to be fair, Taylor Swift was repurposing Britney’s snake seven years ago during her Reputation era.

And, talking of Taylor, it was in trying to describe the “world” of C,XOXO in something like earnest that Cabello wrote, “C,XOXO is pink and blue ski masks, never being without lip gloss, coming alive during [the] blue hour, long nails and eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man, crying with your makeup on and texting pics to your friends.” That eyeliner analogy already immortalized in Midnights’ “Vigilante Shit” when Swift opened with, “Draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man.”

In another moment, her DID takes hold in the form of Lil Nas X, almost as though she spent too much time with him for the making of “He Knows” so now she can perfectly imitate his choppy cadence when she says, “I’m a dog, woof-woof, and my tooth is gettin’ long/I’ma hog the mic, take a bite, peek-a-boo thong.” On a side note, she doesn’t seem to fully understand what the expression “long in the tooth” means. And, while we’re on the subject of insulting Cabello’s intelligence, what’s the likelihood she’s actually read a Haruki Murakami book from cover to cover? Which would be the only way someone should be allowed to sing, “Magical and real like Murakami.” A lyric that, of course, gives a very skin-deep “insight” into the nature of the author’s work.

In truth, most of the lyrics for this song come across as Cabello overworking her attempts to sound poetic. This includes likening red chipped nails to “wabi-sabi” (defined as, “A world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection”), among the many other reductive lyrics on the song, with its title that also can’t help but remind one of Lou Bega’s “Mambo No. 5.”

While Cabello was getting along “okay” with her previous two singles, “Chanel No. 5” marks the first one from C,XOXO without a feature. And it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the solo work on the record. To that point, so much commentary about the album has already insisted that C,XOXO is some kind of inauthentic cash grab that some of the publicity Cabello has done for it even builds that criticism into the article. For instance, Complex wrote, “Despite what the internet says, pop star Camila Cabello asserts she isn’t trying to be something she’s not. The 27-year-old has spent the last year and a half morphing into the woman she actually is and documenting that shift on her new hip hop-inspired project C,XOXO.”

Cabello has also gone out of her way to overstress how authentic it truly is based on the title of the record alone, telling Jimmy Fallon, “It’s an album…that feels personal to me and authentic to me and, like, signed by me. It’s kind of like you’re, you know, writing a letter to someone. It’s, like, this is—this is me. Like it or not, whatever, signed by me.” Not exactly teeming with “depth” in terms of a “concept album.”

And, clearly, it’s not only “signed” by her. For the record is rather feature-heavy, with two of its singles banking on those features for success—namely, “I Luv It” with Playboi Carti and “He Knows” with Lil Nas X. In the absence of anyone else to focus on in “Chanel No. 5” both sonically and visually, Cabello falls more noticeably flat. Even if momentarily uplifted and spun around by the metal chair that mimics the one in “Stronger.” But perhaps this is supposed to be the Murakami-inspired “magical realism” portion of the video. Which is at least slightly more “original” than the rest of it.