Presently, I’m researching bands that have succeeded in the music industry using new and novel methods (digital music technology being the primary tool.) Here’s one example of a group that falls into that category, along my thoughts on the matter:

Cansei de Ser Sexy — five exotic, attractive Brazilian women and one handsome drummer. The pulse: electro-infused art-wave sex rock. Not surprisingly, they’re being hailed as music media darlings in glossy fashion and culture mags the world over. Their name translates to ‘Tired of Being Sexy’, an irony in which the press never ceases to riff on. It was in this month’s issue of one such glossy (Nylon) that Cansei de Ser Sexy’s digitally dominant rise to fame captured my fascination. Here’s a taste:

Buzz built quickly for the group at home, thanks largely to the Web… CSS posted a handful of MP3s to their page at Trama Virtual (the Brazilian Myspace, according to [frontwoman] Lovefoxxx. Within a year, “we played the biggest festival in Brazil,” the singer says, “and we didn’t even have an official release.”

In 2005, they signed with Trama Virtual’s record label and released a limited edition version of their debut album with a CD-R included so that the buyer could copy and share the disc. You guessed it: wildfire.

The band also apparently blew up on Fotolog (like Flickr but older and more global), with a weird and raunchy set of gig and after-gig photos. Though they’re still gaining traction on their MySpace page (8,000 friends is a start), this is exactly the type of good-looking, clever-sounding, culture-embracing stuff that is such a virulent bug in the hipster aorta of music culture.

In 2006, all this social networking buzz built into a record contract with Sub Pop (the label that Nirvana royalties built) and now the band is touring the U.S. in support of a new album. Reviews have been positive but not overwhelming (72 out of 100 on Metacritic). It’s too early to tell how far all this viral inertia will push the band, but if CSS succeeds in the States, it will probably be for the same reason they made it in Brazil — they’re strikingly different.

Here and abroad, magazines are eagerly clicking their lenses at these exotic objects. Their fans at home, however, know that it’s the music that makes the band.

No matter how many people want to look at CSS’s faces and bodies (voyeurism keeps social networks alive), the band ain’t gonna have much in the way of a music career if no one listens to their music. Which is not a sleight to their image, because this is a band comprised of graphic designers, fashion designers, cinema majors and such. But on the peer-to-peer networks and on CD-Rs passed between friends, the band is hidden from view. Only the music matters. Nylon is quick to point this out:

[Lovefoxx]… warns North Americans not to think of CSS as being representative of music from Sao Paulo, which she says is dominated — very unsexily — by “a bunch of boys playing emo and hardcore songs… We don’t have bands that we really relate to… We don’t have a scene. So we always say that our scene is the Internet.”

And that’s when it hit me… Sub Pop fished Nirvana out of the same legendary Seattle scene that painfully and regrettably birthed the billion-dollar baby that hideously grew up into Adult Alternative.

But for better or worse, there won’t ever be another Seattle, nor will there be another Adult Alternative. This millennium, our music scene is the Internet. Our music scene is Earth, and our format is Whatever.

Cansei de Ser Sexy probably won’t see widespread popularity — they’re not exactly ahead of their time. But they are refreshingly of their time in a musical culture that still plays by business rules written before the Web browser was invented.