Your hot, hot band

IT takes a marketing genius to come up with a butt-photo promo. The premise alone is crazy: Let someone take a picture of your bare ass and you get something for free. In this case the person taking the photo was Lovefoxxx, the flamboyant frontwoman of Brazil's CSS. And the something for free: a chance to see her and the rest of the band play its first show.

The group posted flyers around its native Sao Paulo. Lovefoxxx charged her camera. Dozens of people showed up and dropped trou, included several gents with backsides that looked like shag carpet -- all just to save roughly five bucks. But it worked. The show was ridiculous. CSS became instantly notorious. And the gimmick -- well, it was just the first in a string of stunts and marketing ploys so oddly successful (despite their sheer lack of logic) that a bunch of graduate students are probably dissecting them at this very moment.

Like the group itself: It defies logic. It's a Brazilian band that sings in English, lives in London, and is quickly and quietly becoming a worldwide phenom. The music fluctuates between Bananarama and The Breeders, depending on the band's mood. The bulk of the members are gay, but Lovefoxxx and co-songwriter Adriano Cintra continual pen lyrics that skew towards an odd, hedonistic, hetero good time. The live show borders on a riot. So do the after-parties.

Even the founding of the band was a little off. Bassist Iracema Trevisan decided she wanted to start her own band. She didn't want a group that was overly concerned with being innovative or cool. She wanted people who liked to party, just get stupid. She wanted to have fun for a while and then move on (she did just that late last year, leaving the band). It didn't even matter if they could really play. She got some friends from art school. They pieced together a silly and sexy New Wave-soaked set full of songs with titles like "Lets Make Love and Listen to Dance From Above" and "Fuck Off Is Not the Only Thing You Have to Show." Then came the butt photo thing. Suddenly Trevaisan was in the coolest band in Brazil -- the last thing she wanted, and the best thing that could ever happen to the band.

And things just kept getting worse for Trevaisan. Her party band quickly became Brazil's party band. First came a massive push by Trama Virtual, Brazil's version of MySpace. Then came spots on a couple reality shows and a song in South American version of The Sims. The group's debut scored the attention of the world press, the band's label issuing a limited edition of the album with a second blank CD-R so fans could burn a copy for their friends. Once word got around after that, CSS went international. Journalists marveled at the band's quirky, clamoring songs. They also chuckled over CSS's odd full name, Cansei de Ser Sexy, Portuguese for "I'm tired of being sexy," which came from a ridiculous Beyonce quote.

But the final thing that both cemented Trevaisan's fate and perked those graduate students' interest: the iPod commercial. It was a total fluke. An 18 year-old kid in England had made his own commercial for the iPod Touch using the "Music is My Hot, Hot Sex," Lovefoxxx's shout out to the power of a good beat. Apple's ad agency saw the clip on YouTube, hired the kid to remake it for worldwide use. It didn't matter to Apple that the song had been used a year before in a Zune commercial; the lyrics, all about live and music and touching, synced up too well to care. So the commercial ran. Soon after CSS was everywhere. The band even charted in the U.S., the song topping out at No. 63, the highest any Brazilian band has ever reached.

And all this -- it came from butt photos. Sometimes you can't underestimate the power of a hairy ass.