Camila Cabello’s
This post originally APPEARED on stereogum.com
“Havana ooh-na-na.” That’s some good pop songwriting right there. In six syllables, you reduce the name of a major global metropolis to pure gibberish. Little kids who have never even heard the word “Cuba” can sing along to “Havana ooh-na-na,” fully confident that they understand the song completely, and who’s to say that they’re wrong?
On the one hand, “Havana” is an extremely sharp piece of image-creation and positioning. Camila Cabello, a young singer who’d only just left the girl group Fifth Harmony, could use a song like that to establish something resembling a solo identity, tap into the latest pop wave, and ostensibly pay tribute to the city where she was born. If you were tapped into her story, you could see all the pieces working on the track. But “Havana” wasn’t necessarily a song for the people who already knew who Cabello was. It was a song for the world, for the little kids who would sing along with that chorus as if it was nothing but a euphoric syllable-tumble.
“Havana” succeeded wildly on both levels. For a minute there, Camila Cabello looked like a big star in the making. She’s since cooled to mid-sized stardom, but she made a bunch of hits before that happened, and mid-sized stardom isn’t the worst fate anyway. “Havana” also proved to be an improbable little pop breakthrough for Young Thug, a massively important rap figure who’d previously been considered too weird for pop-chart stardom. But “Havana” probably works best on its own terms, as one isolated burst of giddy nonsense. My kids were in elementary school when “Havana” came out, and they used to sing that hook all the time. At least for me, that’s the song’s greatest legacy. If a pop song makes sense on that little-kid level, then everything else becomes secondary.
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