 ALASDAIR DUNCAN talks to LOVEFOXXX – lead singer of hotly-hyped Brazilian avant-pop group CSS – about the dire state of that nation’s pop charts, and the excitement of meeting your crushes.
It was a connection with the underground art and club scenes in São Paulo, as well as a friendship with guitarist Ana Rezende, that first drew charismatic singer Lovefoxxx towards CSS. She had heard about the group before, and was at work when Ana called her on the first day of rehearsal. “I was bored and didn’t feel like going but went along anyway because I decided I didn’t want to miss the opportunity.”
Upon arriving – dressed in her trusty Mötorhead shirt as a tenuous badge of rock & roll cred – Lovefoxxx realised that she recognised many of the other girls from clubs and bars. When they found out she was unable to play the guitar she’d brought along, they suggested that she sing instead. “That first rehearsal was shit,” she tells me candidly, “and the next one was shit also, but we persevered, which eventually got us to where we are.”
The group – whose eventual line-up would consist of five girls and one very lucky guy on drums – parlayed their brand of catchy, 80s-inspired new wave and punk-funk into a series of singles and an eventual debut album, Cansei de Ser Sexy (translation: “Tired Of Being Sexy”). Their music is partly a reaction against the Brazilian pop charts – “so shitty”, Lovefoxxx assures me, that she can’t even bring herself to talk about them – but also against local underground musicians, all of whom “play only boring shoegazer and IDM and take themselves really really seriously.”
The debut was originally recorded in a mixture of English and Portuguese, although the version released in the wider world is a slightly polished and re-recorded one, created at the behest of American label Sub Pop. One track that survives in the original form is Meeting Paris Hilton – a foul-mouthed and suggestive tribute to the world’s most famous blonde, it was also one of the earliest CSS songs, written and recorded in 2003.
“Ana has an obsession with celebrities,” Lovefoxxx tells me, “following the lives of Kirsten Dunst and Scarlett Johanssen in trashy magazines. She introduced the rest of us to Paris Hilton, who was a relative unknown in Brazil, but who seemed extremely fascinating.” A year or so ago, CSS very nearly met the heiress when she was in São Paulo promoting a new fragrance, but a scheduling glitch prevented this historic event from taking place. Lovefoxxx is still keen to meet Hilton, but stresses that they would both have to be drunk in order to make fun of celebrity culture together.
The group’s idolisation of now defunct Canadian rockers DFA 1979, though, led to a happier outcome. Their song Let’s Make Love And Listen To Death From Above was a shameless tribute to the group, recorded in the hopes that the Canadians would Google themselves and discover CSS in the process. This trick paid off, and the two groups went on to tour together and remain close friends.
CSS have recently played the Pitchfork festival in Texas, and their current live commitments will see them through to the end of the year, although the treadmill has not yet wearied them. “I’m still really excited before every show,” Lovefoxxx stresses, promising also that a new album is hopefully on the cards for next year.
Cansei de Ser Sexy is out now on Sub Pop/Stomp.
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