Camila Cabello Is Leaning Into Those Sabrina Carpenter Feud Rumors in the Funniest Way

Camila Cabello saw an opportunity and she took it—and honestly, can you blame her?

After the release of Sabrina Carpenter’s highly anticipated new album, Short n’ Sweet, revived old rumors that she dated Shawn Mendes just before his viral Coachella hookup with ex-girlfriend Camila Cabello, the former Fifth Harmony member appeared to lean into the discourse. As fans dissected Carpenter’s new tracks “Coincidence” and “Taste” for connections to the “Señorita” duo, Cabello posted a TikTok featuring the song largely believed to tell her side of the story.

You see, while Carpenter’s fans were turning the “Taste” lyric, “I heard you’re back together and if that’s true, you’ll just have to taste me when he’s kissin’ you,” into a viral TikTok audio, Cabello chose to bring her C,XOXO track “June Gloom” back into the chat.

“She’s cool, I heard. Won’t act surprised, I saw the pictures. We’re a house fire, for sure. Hope it’ll burn out, but it just gets bigger,” Cabello lip-synced in a video shared on August 25. “If she’s so amazing, why are you on this side of town? If you like her so much, what are you here trying to find out?”

For the most part, fans were living for the drama in the comments. “Posting this now is so messy,” one user replied to Cabello’s video, while another wrote, “Listen I’d use the moment to promote my music too.” Both comments received over 20,000 likes each.

Of course, there was a lot of unnecessary hate toward both women in the comments as well. To all that, I would like to offer stans a piece of advice: Think before you type. Let’s assume for a moment that Carpenter and Cabello really did write these songs about one another. Isn’t a musician’s job to turn their lived experiences into songs their own fans can potentially relate to? By sending mean messages to Cabello, aren’t you doing the exact same thing that inspired Carpenter to write, “Because I Liked a Boy” after Olivia Rodrigo released “Drivers License” in 2021?

We’re seeing a similar problem brewing right now with Charli XCX and Taylor Swift. Prior to the release of brat, Charli literally put out a disclaimer that her songs about the music industry aren’t meant to be “diss tracks.”

“They’re really just about how it’s so complicated being an artist, especially a female artist, where you are pitted against your peers and also expected to be best friends with every single person constantly, when if you’re not, you’re deemed a bad feminist,” she said. “That, to me is just like, such an unrealistic expectation.”

She continued, “So yeah, these songs are kind of about how as a woman, as an artist, some days you can feel on top of the world, some days you can feel unbelievably insecure, other days you can feel highly competitive. Sometimes you can feel like literal trash. And it’s really emotional and it’s complicated to deal with, and we’re not supposed to talk about it, but these songs do talk about it. And I’ll probably chastised about it, but whatever, it’s reality.”

Even so, Charli had to call on fans to stop chanting “Death to Taylor” at her shows after fans linked “Sympathy Is a Knife” to the pop star. “It is the opposite of what I want and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community,” she said on Instagram on June 23.

And all of this for what? “I’ve been blown away by Charli’s melodic sensibilities since I first heard ‘Stay Away’ in 2011,” Swift recently told New York Magazine for their profile of the British artist. “Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade. I love to see hard work like that pay off.”

Fan culture is currently on a precipice—we need to decide if we’d rather kiki with our favorite artists, enjoying song lyrics and theories respectfully, or risk driving those musicians away. If you keep splashing scalding hot tea back in their faces, they’re eventually going to stop spilling it.