Cabello’s Miami is a neon-flecked fever dream that she affectionately nicknames “Caribbean Tokyo.” Directed and shot by Rahul Bhatt, the album’s video trailer follows the metallic-bikini-clad pop star as she cruises the MacArthur Causeway in a muscle automotive and stalks the seashore with mates in matching pink balaclavas. It’s Concord Korine’s 2012 cult basic Spring Breakers à la Sofia Coppola—a consummate work of Miami sleaze.
“She likes to drive with the home windows down / So she will hear what town’s saying at evening,” Cabello intones over hypnagogic whirrs of synth. “She likes its damaged English / Its all-over-the-place music style / She likes seeing the neon colours of the Caribbean / And the backdrop of Teslas and skyscrapers within the first world.”
The lowbrow romance of rising up in Miami is throughout C, XOXO. Cabello teased her album by taking up a skate park in addition to the South Miami 7-Eleven that my mates and I loitered at after-school within the 2000s. She’s glamorized female mundanities explicit to town, like freshly airbrushed child tees bought on the metropolis’s Youth Honest or bottle blonde locks blunted by town’s natural mix of warmth, humidity, and sea spray. In distinction to the harried, crime-fueled Miami that folks know from Hollywood blockbusters just like the Unhealthy Boys and Quick & Livid franchises, Cabello lets listeners unwind to ambient party-girl chatter within the interlude “305 ‘Until I Die.”
But on C, XOXO, Cabello’s paean to Miami falls brief on representing its distinctive hip-hop legacy. There’s a obvious omission of Miami bass, the regional sound, accented by brisk 808 beats, that cemented town as a hip-hop vacation spot. The one emcees from the 305 to make the lower are J.T. and Yung Miami, the artists previously often called Metropolis Ladies. Nonetheless, they make a rousing pep squad in “Dade County Dreaming,” a dusky anthem for club-hoppers stumbling down Collins Avenue, clutching their stilettos and sniffing out the following good occasion. Like a typical late evening out on the seashore, the chaos unravels right into a deeply intoxicated outro, during which Cabello slurs, “Orange skies, I’m by no means leavin’” over a telenovela-grade piano outro.