What do you call a style of music that includes elements of everything from chill-room trip-hop beats and druggy, dubby funk to sensual European striptease and syncopated South American party rhythms; one that incorporates lyrics sung in four languages — German, French, Italian and Spanish — in addition to English?
Brazilian Girls don't particularly care what you call their music, so long as you don't saddle it with that cheesy multi-culti label that might first spring to mind.
"I really don't like so-called world music," chides vocalist (and sole female Brazilian Girls member) Sabina Sciubba, in a throaty accent that's impossible to pin down to any one European country.
"It's not that I'm opposed to its existence," she continues with a laugh, "but I don't like it when people take a sitar and put it into some kind of fusion. To me, it's people trying to be somebody else. In our case, we really come from all over the place, and have played with people from all over the world. It's really an organic thing. None of us are trying to be anything we're not. I don't think any of us listens to what people consider to be World Music."
Fit for both the height of the party and the after-party, Brazilian Girls produce a soulful, groovy signature. It doesn't belong with the esophagus-popping monks of wherever, nor does it deserve association with some anonymous compilation of arcane, indigenous instruments ladled over drum-machine loops. For all its exotica, the band's sound is a very hip and metropolitan one, and distinctly evinces both the sophistication and melting-pot backdrop of New York City, where it originated.
Following a less-than-satisfactory two-album dalliance with the jazz world, the Italian-born Sciubba sequestered herself in France, where she began to compose her own material. Before long, the itch to play, and to be neck-deep in one of the world's most eclectic and inspiring music communities, got the best of her.
"[The south of France] was beautiful, but it was boring," she remembers, laughing. "When I moved to France, I started concentrating on writing and playing my own music. It became almost an obsession. It had to be something nobody had sung before. I wanted to express my own feelings and realities.
"I was pretty interested in spending some time in New York, so I came over with some savings, and pretty quickly slipped into this whole scene."
The scene to which Sciubba refers was a still-coalescing coterie of cultured players and music fans who were bored with traditional club and band sounds. Their clubhouse was a young NYC nightspot called Nublu. It was there that Sciubba fell in with Argentine keyboardist Didi Gutman and Americans Jesse Murphy (bass) and Aaron Johnston (drums), and where Brazilian Girls — not Brazilian at all, you see — played their first sets.
"It totally came naturally, there was really no planning," Sciubba remembers. "Didi was playing at Nublu a couple of times — he was playing in different projects, and wanted to do a solo thing. Then he got bored playing by himself, and invited me to sing a couple of songs. Then Aaron came by [and played], and it clicked immediately."
In short order, Brazilian Girls were packing Nublu out. A deal with noted jazz label Verve's more pop-minded imprint, Verve Forecast, eventually followed; the teaser EP Lazy appeared last October, and the group's eponymous debut full-length was released this past February. Since then, Brazilian Girls have taken their onstage party — equally noted for both encouraging crowd participation and Sciubba's striking, multilingual and often masked presence — on the road, alternately wowing and perplexing audiences around the world.
"The better audiences are the ones that already know our music," says the singer. "The first-timers are a little confused, I think. They don't know what to make of it. For a lot of people, the fact that it's in a different language makes them think it's all over the place musically, and it really isn't — it's really very cohesive."
When asked why she made the decision to vary languages, ostensibly making it tougher to break through to more mainstream American audiences, Sciubba is ambivalent.
"It is just kind of my reality, you know? I lived in four different countries, and obviously you make friends everywhere you live," she says. "That's kind of my e-mail reading, my answering the phone. Even within my family I speak different languages. It felt really unnatural to not sing in different languages. It's just not fucking who I am."
But despite their myriad eccentricities — or hell, given the amount of banality in music these days, maybe it's because of them — the cool, uninhibited charisma of Brazilian Girls and Brazilian Girls has captured the attention of a wide swath of discerning listeners, from club kids and punk-scene hipsters to yuppies and adventurous parents.
And while the playful sexuality of tunes like "Pussy" and "Don't Stop" may have some would-be arbiters of pop-culture morality up in arms, it's also lent the band a titillating sort of added attraction, which Brazilian Girls exploit to the fullest. It's part of everything that defines the group, it seems — the idea of confronting people with sounds and themes and freedoms that they didn't know they needed to hear, in the hippest, most ass-moving way possible.
"I grew up in a very liberal family," Sciubba says. "There was very little restriction on what we could talk or joke about. I don't think there's a lot of taboos in our heads, you know? I mean, none of us could've been born if there were no pussies.
"We all tend to lose our sense of humor when things get tense or stressful. It's great to remind us that that's kind of what makes life worth living, to be able to laugh a lot."
This article appears in Oct 12-18, 2005.
