Camila Cabello
3Arena, Dublin
★★☆☆☆
Camila Cabello’s show at 3Arena on Wednesday night is a spectacle of pure, unrelenting energy. Everything from the towering set to the booming sound is hyped to be epic.
The stage begins as a kind of white padded cell, a surreal centrepiece that unfolds over the night into something between a nightclub climbing frame and a bouncy castle on wheels, illuminated with seizure-inducing light displays.
The artistic vision is difficult to gauge. Seven backing dancers twerk voraciously, even through the sad ballads. It’s fast, loud, hypersaturated and undeniably fun, engineered to leave you dazzled if not exactly moved.
The set list is expertly structured. Cabello cycles through her hits – Havana, Señorita – and cuts from her latest album, C,XOXO, each song receiving the same tinny, high-intensity treatment. Short videos play between numbers, Cabello looking sultry while delivering snippets of motivational wisdom.
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The whole show is tightly choreographed and visually overwhelming, designed more for TikTok clips than for any real communion with the audience.
The stage banter feels copied-and-pasted, peppered with awkward “What’s the craic, Dublin?” interjections in an unconvincing Irish accent.
At one point Cabello pulls a teenage fan onstage and gets the crowd to chant that the poor girl’s “a 10 out of 10” before launching into a motivational speech about how even depressed people can get the lives they want. It’s oddly humiliating for everyone involved.
At one point the US singer seems to forget some of her lyrics. Not her fault, really. I’d forget them too. The words are stitched together from generic love-as-drug metaphors and tired empowerment slogans. This is pop guided by trend analytics and market-tested themes.
There are borrowings from Charli XCX’s synthetic, subversive pop; echoes of Ariana Grande’s vocal styling; and flashes that could come straight from a Lana Del Rey song. Some tracks aim for introspection, others for euphoric club heat, but all feel strangely impersonal, as if composed by an algorithm crunching data on what should work.
What makes this all more interesting is the audience of overwhelmingly young girls. The last time I stood among such a crowd was just weeks ago, at Lana Del Rey’s show at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin, where, along with all the 13-year-olds, I loudly chanted “Fuck me to death / Love me until I love myself.”
For all the hand-wringing about Del Rey as a “bad influence”, I’d far rather girls grew up with women like her – problematic, visionary, thoroughly distinctive – than with someone like Cabello, who seems so aggressively inoffensive, so corporate and defanged.
Lines about girls “keeping it sexy while we figure it out” feel like a defeat: the kind of feminism that sells well, streams well and says nothing.
Still, there’s something oddly compelling in Cabello’s blankness. Her extreme lack of stage personality becomes, in flashes, almost interesting, sphinx-like. Maybe I imagine it, but at points it feels as if the mask slips a little, and something haunted shows through the bright smile.
