Making Sense of Camila Cabello’s ‘Wabi-Sabi’
The first half of 2024 has been for the pop girlie. It seems like every major artist who’s dominated the discourse this year has been a woman, ostensibly making music about what it means to be a woman. There’s Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon,” Sabrina Carpenter’s ode to the female ego, “Please Please Please,” and Lorde and Charli XCX working out a labyrinth of emotions that come with female friendship on the “Girl, so confusing” remix.
With her new album, C,XOXO, Camila Cabello is looking to join their ranks. Historically, Cabello’s work has never been super revealing about gender or anything else. But over the course of XOXO, she finally turns the focus to herself, disclosing what it means to be … Camila Cabello. She sings about the internal and external perceptions of womanhood, namely on the introspective, hyperpop-adjacent “Chanel No. 5” and the reggaeton ode to her community, “DREAM-GIRLS.” Switched on Pop producer Reanna Cruz, alongside hosts Charlie Harding and Nate Sloan, unpacked both tracks at length on their latest episode, discussing how the lyrics and musical cues help us understand the psyche of Cabello.
Reanna Cruz: I think the primary idea of C,XOXO is that Camila is trying to correct the narrative about herself. I think a lot of people write her off as an artist who is shallow or doesn’t really have a rich interior construction.
Charlie Harding: A common criticism waged against those who begin their careers in a boy group or girl group.
Nate Sloan: One thing that strikes me about “Chanel No. 5,” in addition to the hyperpop elements, is that there’s something about the song that is a little bit disconcerting. Where’s the downbeat? Where is the pulse of the song? It’s a little bit up in the air.
C.H.: I feel like part of that ungroundedness comes across in the contrast of these very hypersexualized, confident lyrics against the backdrop of this tape-warbled piano. It feels very dusty, kind of unattractive. And the way that she delivers the vocal is heavily auto-tuned. A little mumble-y. Almost more to create a vibe than to be understood.
R.C.: Yes, but I think the tough nut to crack here is Camila’s lyrics. Understanding the song and the rest of the Camila album feels like solving a cursed Rubik’s Cube — like, every time you’re close to finishing it, the next move sort of gets it away from you. It’s really hard to parse and almost punishing in trying to figure it out. So let’s look at verse one and its lyrics and try to unpack what Camila is trying to say.
Fold for me like origami
Magic and real like Murakami
Red, chipped nails, I’m wabi-sabi
I’m the hеartbreaker, nobody’s got me, yеt
Make you tongue-tied like new shibari
Subtle and complex like umami
Up to me like omakase
I’m a wild horse and nobody’s got me, yet
C.H.: I’m somewhat skeptical of using this extended metaphor of the few things that you’ve seen from Japan. What are you trying to articulate?
One of the things that comes across, I think more as the song progresses, is that there’s a lot of seduction here. It’s about a relationship which Camila calls criminal in the beginning of the song (“He’ll never survive, it’s a crime, it’s a crime”), and I think we might be hearing a bit of the girlfriend experience.
N.S.: I don’t know if I’m ready to go that deep with you, especially as we go through the rest of the song, but at least we have to acknowledge Camila Cabello using the word “origami” properly — which is more than we can say for Tate McRae and her song “Exes,” which has this infamous line, “changed my mind up like it’s origami.”
R.C.: Well, I find this verse interesting because for one, I’ve never heard “origami” rhymed with “Murakami.” But once you dig deeper, past the initial reaction that this is nonsense, each line hints at something bigger. Camila herself spoke of C,XOXO and this song as “a very sensual one,” meaning “of the senses,” and that’s communicated in a lyrical specificity. She says “magic and real like Murakami,” not referring to the artist Takashi Murakami, but the magical realism of author Haruki Murakami.
C.H.: A deeper cut.
R.C.: She follows it by saying, “Red, chipped nails / I’m wabi-sabi.” And wabi-sabi refers to the traditional Japanese aesthetic worldview of imperfection. Each line, which on the surface seems trivial, paint a more imperfect and detailed picture of who Camila Cabello is. “Wabi-sabi,” she is imperfect, you know? Which is interesting when Camila’s big hits look at her in this simplified, almost Latin-fetishized way. Mainly a song like “Señorita,” or her 2018 hit “Havana.”
C.H.: Okay, so rather than being something like a sex object, what we have here is her talking about the seductive confidence of putting on her fancy perfume —
R.C.: “Wrist wrist, spritz spritz.”
C.H.: — But a bunch of the metaphors kind of contradict that confidence. They show that there’s some sort of imperfection, as you said. Perhaps even the vocal styling, the fact that it isn’t articulated in every consonant and instead it’s kind of mumbled — it all paints this larger picture of imperfection.
R.C.: “Chanel No. 5” is painting a picture of the imperfect feminine. And on other songs on C,XOXO, Camila is playing with a similar idea of womanhood, but from an external, rose-colored perspective. I’m thinking of a song like “DREAM-GIRLS”:
It was Keisha, it was Sonia, it was Tanya, it was Monique
It was Niecy, it was Keke
Now you see her at 26, all you can say is “Oh”
And I think she knows she’s the shit, yeah, yeah
Shawty, next to me, is the shit
N.S.: This is a fun track. Her voice sounds completely different here. I feel like Camila is embracing the modes of vocal expression that she can use. On “Señorita,” she’s belting and doing this pop-diva thing. But on this album, she’s making her voice sound weird and mutable and chameleonic. And are these specific dream girls she’s singing about, or is it just generic?
R.C.: I hope these are real people. This song is not about Camila. It’s about her friends and experiencing the world with her friends as a teenager and young adult. Contrary to “Chanel No. 5,” this one is simple and cute and communicates this nostalgic girlhood.
N.S.: That’s a nice departure in terms of the different aspects of femininity we’re hearing explored on this record.
R.C.: It takes this girlhood and female community and puts it on a pedestal as if it’s a nostalgic ideal. That kind of easy female community that, as an adult, perhaps Camila yearns for.
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