Camila Cabello’s rebranding of her album ‘C, XOXO’ is being a curious disaster. It is her first album to not reach the Top 10 of Billboard and none of the three singles released so far have worked. But, far from abandoning the project or making a U-turn regarding the sound to return to what worked for her, Camila has stuck to her guns and, in fact, has just released a deluxe edition called ‘C, XOXO – Magic City Edition’ with four previously unreleased songs.
It was precisely at the last MTV VMA that she decided to perform the interesting ‘GODSPEED’, one of these new cuts, in a performance that could be a “beginning of the end” of this era. The thing is that this era has not been so bad: on a commercial level of course it has been a disaster, but the album did have its thing, and, although at first it seemed like a desperate move to be relevant, perhaps this “rebranding” is more of a move for her image in the long term. To reinforce her as an artist who is exploring different paths, although the coincidence with the best artistic image of Charli xcx has harmed her. There are good songs in ‘C, XOXO’ that caught my attention from the first listen, especially one of them, ‘BOAT’, where El Guincho, Jasper Harris and Daniel Aged repeat as producers.
In this ballad, we find Camila lying in bed going over moments of a relationship and things that person said to her, reflecting and acknowledging that “just when I think I know how to live without you, I forget why I try / just when I think I could fall in love without you, I forget why I try / you were the best of all time”. Camila is not afraid of making a fool of herself and even admits that she would love to see a little jealousy in her ex: “you’d never ask me who I’m givin’ all of my body to now / you’d never ask me about these nights baby / I pray that you find out”. Her fans theorize that this song is dedicated to Shawn Mendes, so it’s especially funny that the chorus sings at the end “forget about your boyfriend and meet me at the hotel room”. Lyrics that, by the way, may sound familiar to us…
Because, within that honesty and the conviction of expressing what she feels even if it’s not so “cool”, it’s great that the sample of ‘BOAT’ is none other than Pitbull. The rapper, so reviled in his time and who gave us so many great songs, is also inseparable from those 2010s, probably the years where Camila places this relationship, and the use of ‘Hotel Room Service’ gives the whole song an extra touch of melancholy that rounds it out. Curiously, there is more than one Pitbull hit that samples songs; for example, we all surely remember Christina Aguilera screaming her head off in that recovery of ‘Take On Me’ that was ‘Feel This Moment’.
‘BOAT’, in short, is a much more confessional song, where Camila can remind us of Tove Lo for the honesty with which she approaches this story, and the melancholy it gives off. “Like a G pt 2”, says a comment on Genius. I mean, no… but we get the point. In an era where Camila is theoretically selling an image, she is not being herself but pure artifice for a rebranding, blah blah blah, releasing a song like this as a single would be an interesting statement. We doubt she will do it, because she will already go for the deluxe, or simply because this song would surely be a commercial failure. It is also true that, if it is for this, it is a good idea to go for it, right?
