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CSS Got Tired of Being Sexy Back In 1983

We spoke to the Brazilian foursome about the sell by date of sexiness and cleared up those rumours about a thieving ex-manager.

If you were otherwise unaware, Cansei De Ser Sexy can be directly translated as "I got tired of being sexy". Sexiness, it seems, has a sell by date.

The Brazilian electro-punk troupe – who now reisde in the US – are already three albums deep into their discography and are getting ready to release their fourth which drops today via Sub Pop. In the run up to Planta, we got them into the Noisey office to bust out some Brazilian dance moves, inbetween chat about said sexiness, foreign films and fantasising about Beyonce.

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Noisey: Hey CSS. Just for the record, was there an actual date that sexiness started becoming exhausting?
Lovefoxxx: Like, November 15 1983, when I was like six months old.
Ana: There’s Beyonce though, I think she’s the only person that can’t get tired of being sexy.
Lovefoxx: That’s how we got our name, it was a Hotmail piece. I logged on Hotmail.com and it was there. I didn’t even read it but I was just like ”look at this”.
Luiza: Imagine if she wasn’t still sexy…
Lovefoxxx: We’d be so dated…
Luiza: We’d be like, there’s this singer who was really big back in 2003 and had this song called “Crazy In Love”.

The world without Beyonce would be weird, right?
Carolina: No, let’s not go there.
Lovefoxxx: She’s such a good force.
Carolina: She’ll be around forever.
Lovefoxxx: The thing I love about her – I know you didn’t ask – is that we watched her play in 2010 and all of her band were tall and beautiful and that doesn’t happen too much with pop. They get ugly, busted dancers. Beyonce celebrates women.
Luiza: How could you not be confident if you’re Beyonce?
Carolina: It’s good to see a woman breaking so big.
Ana: Also, if you’re a corporation, who would you get to be your spokesperson?
Lovefoxxx: You could get Lovefoxxx?! Just saying.

Agreed. I see that you guys are big tea drinkers.
Carolina: [While sipping tea] I drink every night.
Luiza: Sometimes you make the tea and you fall asleep.
Ana: I don’t drink tea, I'm not against it.
Lovefoxxx: Something we don’t drink is hot chocolate.
Ana: I like mulled wine.

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Moving onto your music, CSS love to make tracks you can dance to, but how would you describe your favourite dance move?
Ana: [Does clapping, leg moving type shuffle]
Lovefoxxx: There’s a video we know that will tell you everything about dancing. You go on YouTube and type in "This Is Hip Hop" and that’s it.
Carolina: It’s mindblowing.

So is the new album staying true to the "get up and dance" trend that you’ve done before?
Loveboxxx: We have always been a bit all over the place. It's not like there’s one more spacey or one with more of a band set up with keyboards but it’s definitely more dancey and upbeat. It’s like freestyle.
Luiza: We had to leave some songs behind. We couldn’t put like 40 songs on it.
Carolina: It’s a tough thing where you have to think about what makes the most sense for the group and the flow of the album. Sometimes one song, even though we love it, doesn’t fit.
Loveboxxx: It’s always pretty sad to leave them behind.

But it sounds like it was a really fun album to actually put together, amirite?
All: Yeah!
Carolina: We were out in LA, just the whole experience of making it was amazing.
Lovefoxxx: I wish we could only play this album. It would be great for this album to reach as many people.

What is the reception like when you return back home to Brazil?
Luiza: The last show that we did was pretty fun. We had this ultra long show and that was fun.
Lovefoxxx: It’s become a bit weird now because we don’t play there as much because we’re all based outside of Brazil.
Ana: Brazil has a state now where they’re bringing in lots of shows that are really expensive and we don’t wanna go there and be charging loads of money. So we'd have to do it independently and have to put together the show ourselves but that doesn't leave us much time to promote it. We still want to do a South American tour for this album. Everytime we go back there it’s really cool.
Lovefoxxx: We always do a different show. Like, we’ll play songs from our first EP that are one minute long.

Bit off topic but speaking of Brazil City of God is one of my favourite foreign movies. What do you guys like to watch?
Carolina: There’s a film that I think Nick Cave dedicated a whole record to. Pixote was an 80s film and is kind of what City Of God wanted to be.
Luiza: City Of God was it’s own film but this is the first Brazilian film to talk about heavy shit like that. Crazy violence.
Lovefoxxx: There’s a good documentary called Dzi Croquette and it’s about this group of men in Rio that would do crazy yet amazing musicals.
Luiza: It wasn’t like a drag queen show, it was a mix of everything.
Carolina: It was also made during dictatorship which was crazy.
Lovefoxxx: They wouldn’t stop with the dictatorship, it wouldn’t even go on their radar and then they came to Europe.
Carolina: They came because they were famous and people like Liza Minnelli would come to see them.
Lovefoxxx: The show was so good and funny, pretty amazing and well choreographed. Big production, but low budget looking.

Nice. Finally, can we clear up the case of your manager robbing your money once and for all pretty please?
Luzia: We were young and out of Brazil. We didn’t know what we were doing, but we were basically doing shows every single day. We wouldn’t stop and we didn’t really pay much attention to the business side of things. We had this manager and he was taking care of our stuff. He was Brazilian.
Carolina: He would say loads of shit things to us and we didn’t know any better so we believed him.
Ana: We’d be like yeah, “we’ve played a lot of shows so we must be making some money and he would be like, “the money’s stuck”. Then we came to a point where we thought it was crazy, so we started investigating.
Carolina: I went to a booking agent and they had obviously sent the money to his account.
Luzia: Not only that, but people who were working for us weren’t getting paid so we felt awful about that.
Lovefoxxx: This was 2007 when we found out so we fired him, did another tour to pay everyone back. We were playing out for like six months to pay back the debt.
Suzia: It was a tough time, but the good side of it is that we learned and now we know how to do stuff. I felt really stupid but then I met a lot of musicians that had it happen to them. We spoke to someone from New Order and they said to us “welcome to rock and roll”.
Carolina: I hope not to be welcomed there.

Amen to that.

CSS are also putting together a bunch of webisodes in the run up to their release of their new album. Watch the latest one below! Cansei De Ser Sexy release their fourth studio album Planta on June 10th.