Music Is My Hot Hot Sex

Cansei de Ser Sexy is Portuguese for "I got tired of being sexy," and the Brazilian band that wore the name played music that suggested they hadn’t tired of it at all—that they were in fact deeply committed to being exactly as loud, chaotic, and relentlessly physical as their songs required. CSS showed up in 2006 and quietly rewired the way I understood what pop music was allowed to do. "Let’s Make Love and Listen to Death From Above" and "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex" hit me in a way that’s hard to explain years later. Not just good songs—a kind of permission. Permission to be dumb and smart simultaneously, ironic and sincere, to dance and not be serious about any of it.

Lovefoxxx was a large part of why it worked. She belonged in the same sentence as Natasha Khan and Kate Nash—all three of them making music that felt entirely their own, assembled from nowhere except themselves—but Lovefoxxx had something stranger going on, a feral pop energy that made you want to dance and possibly break something in the kitchen.

VBS.TV put together a short documentary on the band for The Creators Project, a platform they ran in partnership with Intel, and it’s worth watching—CSS talking through the role of technology and the internet in their story, which tracks, since they essentially spread via early music blogs before the industry had figured out what a music blog was. The film sits somewhere between Donkey and whatever was coming next, a good document of that in-between period. For the record: I thought Donkey was great. The argument that it didn’t live up to the debut never made sense to me. Both records were exactly what I needed at exactly the right time, and I’m not sure I can say that about much else from that year.