Finally ... C,XOXO Summer

Camila Cabello and the Art of Failing

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Everyone remembers C,XOXO summer.

You were there … remember?

When Camila Cabello shocked the world with her dizzying rebrand as a hyper-femme Miami cyborg here to wake us up out of our collective pop slump?

Her 2024 album brought us such surprises as “B.O.A.T.,” a piano ballad that sounds like an emo smash was sold and stripped for its parts, returned to us as a rusted, beautiful husk. It samples Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service,” its iconic melody delivered as simple synth line that echoes until it forms into a brand new mass.

It also gave us its lead single, “I Luv It,” a neon blast of bubbles, all fizz and no protein. Its chorus, the song’s title repeated over and over again, sounds like a remedy to doubt or outright hypnotism. I love it??? I love it.

If you didn’t recall the summer of 2024 as such, you wouldn’t be alone.

I though was part of an elite few who can relate. While the world was lost in the Brat-green blizzard, we were harboring a humid heart ache while listening to Cabello’s album-closer “June Gloom,” a song which teeters between an orgasm and a weep.

Last summer, I listened to this album almost daily. I did so because I loved it, but also because I’m spiteful. You see, I staked my meager bit of credibility on the album’s quality and success. I profiled Cabello for PAPER — still, the biggest story of my career—and was the first writer to preview this head scratch of an album for the public. I was feeling confident in my assessments that, while confusing, it would ultimately prove Cabello’s many nay sayers wrong. I wrote: “The writing is both diaristic, bluntly personal, and imagistic, too, offering visual impressions of Miami landscapes rather than always telling a neatly constructed story. And Cabello here sounds playful, often drenched in a robotic autotune that never hides her sprawling range. The album’s mix does not feel necessarily ready-made for the Top 40, though it’s surely set up to zoom past the Top 10.”

Commercially, I was wrong as wrong can be. C,XOXO debuted at #11 on the Billboard charts, and never rose. It produced no immediate “hits.” And culturally, it couldn’t get past the brick wall of Brat’s success, as Cabello’s new alternative sound sparked rumors that she was desirous of Charli’s alt pop throne, just as the British star was reaching her imperial era.

The negative turn towards the album wasn’t helped by the fact that one of its lead singles featured Drake and was released during the peak of “Not Like Us”-mania. It’s a bummer. “HOT UPTOWN,” was perfect “Passionfruit”-era Drake — the type of Drake cut that melts into the air, irrefutable and misty. It was well positioned to be a song of the summer, but the specter of pedophilia that haunted the rapper post-beef and the smell of his flailing made the song’s natural sex appeal feel creepy and loserish. The song failed to launch.

It was always going to be hard for Cabello to reach pop music’s chicer upper echelon.

Cabello started as one fifth of the wildly successful, if unhip girl group, Fifth Harmony. After leaving the group in a tizzy of individual flair she found success through songs like “Havanna,” which worked as a piece of quintessential radio fodder: bright and sexy and different, if not also very on the nose. The song trafficked in the sounds of her native Cuba and contemporary trap, but did so while winking directly at that fact (“Havana, ooh-na-na/Half of my heart is in Havana, ooh-na-na/He took me back to East Atlanta”).

Throughout her career, though, there have been signs that Cabello was capable of pop that elevated mass appeal fodder for something a bit more surprising. Even on her debut album, Camila, she has “Never Be The Same,” a smash success which circles around a clawing falsetto refrain: “Nicotine, heroine, morphine/Suddenly I’m a fiend and you’re all I need,” she sings, squelching up at every ee like a nervous yelp. There’s a delicious hookiness to the melody, something symmetrical and familiar, but it’s also grating, a vocal gesture that stretches past the limit of her agility and towards mess. It was an early signal that her pop perfect veneer could be cracked to thrilling effect.

In the years that followed her chart smashing debut, Cabello found more success, but she never elevated her image towards that of the pop girls who somehow could straddle the line between artfulness and mass appeal (Lana, Lorde, now Charli at the smaller end .. Beyonce, Rihanna and Gaga at the most gargantuan scale). She continued to mint hits. Her collaboration with her ex, Shawn Mendes, “Señorita,” still remains one of the most streamed songs in the world. It still, though, falls into the same pit as “Havanna” — depicting a scenario and failing to elevate it beyond itself. Here, Shawn, a white Canadian encounters his lover, Cabello, a Cuban raised in Mexico and Miami, and the song they produce goes as such: “I love it when you call me señorita/I wish I could pretend I didn't need ya/ But every touch is ooh, la-la-la.”

Her hits being so hopelessly literal didn’t help to counter the case that Cabello was chronically uncool. In interviews, she seemed, nerdy and earnest. A theatre kid. A video of her singing “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” pronouncing the holiday as “kwis-mars” continues to make the rounds online as a moment of perpetual cringe. Her fans found these moments to be proof of her authenticity, but for those primed to shirk at such public displays of try hardedness, they cemented her image. Meanwhile, conversations surrounding Mendes’s sexuality remained at a near constant, prodding level, the public mining displays of his relative femininity for proof of his secret desires.

In the crude reality of these headline-conversations, there was something abject and familiar in this story. The girl who tries too hard and fails. No wonder so many wanted to look away. Her public fate was our collective greatest fear.

C,XOXO, then, was to be her escape from this cruel status. In its surprising, electronic textures it, she would earn the respect of pop’s snobbish class. In her all around vulnerability, she would earn the sympathy of the public. All in all, this portrait of her, though messy, would earn good will, because there is a nobility in swinging for the fences.

This is the earnest, heart warming story I glommed onto — both in my conversation with Camila and then via my subsequent trauma bond with this strange, strange album. But to most, the album’s initial sputter — its inability to shine amidst BRAT’s omnipotent radiance — meant that Cabello’s wild attempt at self revelation was embarrassing.

The public thought this because they’re terrified of failure. And in C,XOXO’s initial commercial failure, they saw a fearful self reflection. What if you try and the world still doesn’t get it? In our winner takes all cultural ecosystem, that’s a dire fate. But in a more subtle and well tempered world, there’s space to take in failure as a shade, a hue, a feeling, a mere part to the whole.

Cabello certainly approaches failure as a feeling, rather than a destitute end point.

Throughout the record, she contends with the limits of her own self conception, like on album standout, “Chanel No. 5” — a crudely drawn piece of piano-trap whose simplicity makes it truer. Throughout the song, her voice lilts, overwhelmed by autotune. She’s bragging, but the music’s quiet sadness and the unsureness of her delivery renders her boasts as half-hearted. Its chorus goes: “Cute girl with a sick mind/I know just how to play my cards right/Wrist, wrist, spritz, spritz, make him come alive/Chanel No.5.” I don’t believe her in this song. But I feel her intention, I sense her broader aspiration towards untouchability. It makes the song both a therapeutic release and a work of motivational self-talk. And to me it’s deeply moving.

There’s no real need to pit this album directly against it contemporaries. But for me, I find this kind of mess more nourishing than something as self-aware and clear as a BRAT or Lorde’s new single, “What Was That.” There’s an ignorance, and a fumbling quality to this music that satisfies something deep and unspoken.

It’s not a diary page, torn out yet legible. It’s a blurred vision, a flash of the car, a sense memory that stumbles into words. It’s the sweaty feeling of bed rot and drunken car rides home, sprawling out in the backseat with a guilt that’s crawling up your throat. It’s regret. It’s hope. It’s not a story. It’s a feeling.

If the world allowed itself to sit with that, I think they would find something glimmering and meaningful. I think they would hear what I heard, and what many others did, which is a portrait of an artist trying something amidst a spite the size of sky scrapers.

Oh well. She’ll get ‘em next time.

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Also: A part of this story and my deep feelings towards the album is the fact that my dearest friend from childhood, Jasper Harris, co-produced it. That’s a can of worms I get into in my PAPER profile if you’re curious.