There's a reason "come to Brazil" is such a common refrain among internet pop fandom that it's become a meme: Brazilian youth culture in the twenty-first century (like Japanese youth culture in the late twentieth) has an endlessly voracious appetite for pop music from all around the globe, and pop acts who cultivate that audience are often richly rewarded.
RBD, a Mexican pop sextet formed in the 2004 telenovela Rebelde (a teen soap in the Degrassi or 90210 tradition with a students-forming-a-band plot like The Heights), cultivated their Brazilian audience early and often: every one of their Spanish-language releases was closely followed by a Portuguese-language version, years before anyone though to have them record in English.
Like many a "manufactured" pop act before and after them, they released material frequently: "Ser o Parecer" (in Portuguese "Ser ou Parecer") was the lead single from their third album in three years. And the video, although released in Spanish, was shot in São Paulo, with the addition of very Brazilian CGI making the urban landscape even more colorful, fantastic, and otherworldly.
The young women, Anahí, Dulce María, and Maite Perroni, trade off the lead vocals, with the young men (Christian Chávez, Alfonso Herrera, and Christopher Uckermann) only joining in for the terrace-chant chorus. A mixed-gender pop group is such an atypical formation that it's hard to say whether it's unusual for the format for the song to be sung from a female point of view (there are no genders in the lyrics, just the eternal "you" and "I"), but it's notable anyway: the strained vocal fry of the female half of the group is far more distinctive here than the smooth anonymity of the male.
Anahí and Maite Perroni have both remained major pop stars in Mexico since the band broke up in 2009; the rest of them (save Herrera, who was always more of an actor) continue to release music to less fanfare. For all RBD's success between 2004 and 2009, this will be their only appearance here: their playful fashion and innocuous sentiments are very much tied to a time and place. Rebelde (the show) was set in an exclusive private school in Mexico City, an embrace of privilege and whiteness that the concurrent reggaetón revolution is, if not actively rejecting (reggaetoneros gotta make money), at least complicating.
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