How Anitta, the ‘Girl from Rio,’ went global : NPR

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — Brazilian singer Anitta calls herself “Rio girl”. Her local fusion of funk and pop has taken her far beyond her hometown, and she was recently nominated for her Grammy Award for Best New Artist. She is one of the most popular Brazilian music artists in recent decades.

This year, Anitta released her fifth studio album. my version, sings in her native languages ​​Portuguese, Spanish and English. single”concern,” became a hit on social media with the Hip Grind video and reached #1 on Spotify’s global daily charts.

She’s also collaborated with superstars, from Madonna to Snoop Dogg to J. Balvin. And she wears the covers of international magazines. trend To wall street journalnamed her their Music Innovator of the Year 2022.

Anitta spoke to NPR earlier this month at her home in one of the exclusive gated communities west of Rio de Janeiro.

She said she doesn’t get hung up on numbers and enjoys everything. Early in her career, she knew she couldn’t sing in Portuguese alone to go global.

MORE LANGUAGES, BIGGER STAGE

Anitta admits that it is difficult for Brazilian artists to make the international breakthrough.

“To go to another market and learn Spanish and then English, you have to give up everything you have in Brazil. I also learned Italian and French, so it’s a completely different world.” she says.

Anitta has traveled to different worlds before. She didn’t grow up on Rio’s posh beaches. About an hour’s drive from her current residence is Honorio Her Gurgel, the neighborhood where she grew up. Walls covered in graffiti are streets with holes. A barking dog, a salesman running his business, and a man looking for scrap metal provide consecutive outdoor scores.

Funk in the Favela

There, in her old neighborhood, most people know Anitta by her real name, Larissa de Macedo Machado. She was the girl who sang with her grandfather at her local church.

As a teenager, she became obsessed with the local style of vibrant dance music popular in Rio’s working-class neighborhoods, known as funk carioca or favela funk.

One morning in Honório Gurgel, as people headed to mass at the church down the hill from their childhood home, one parishioner told NPR that since the day Anitta sang there, she had “chosen another way.” I am walking,” he said.

He clearly saw her step into the world of Brazilian funk, which was brought to life in the late 1980s with pumping beats drawn from various genres such as Miami bass, hip-hop, samba, and other Latin American and African styles. was hinting at stepping into the By the 1990s, it had become a local art form.

Around that time, Brazilian authorities also began cracking down on funk, linking it with drug use, crime, and sexual immorality. Even in 2017, there were numerous attempts to ban funk.

But Anitta defends the genre. Funk was available to his teens in the slums and resents the stigma attached to it. “People were just singing their reality, so to change what we were singing, we first had to change our reality,” she says.

When funk becomes pop

Anitta infused funk with pop not to water it down, she says, but to get it picked up on the radio and gain wider recognition and respect for the genre and other Brazilian artists.

Brazilian producer and artist Wallace Vianna wholeheartedly agrees. He, who has collaborated with Anitta on several songs, told NPR that while she always brings in local beats, she “loves bubblegum melodies too.”

However, her work has not come without criticism.

She brushes off criticism of her waist-grinding videos and provocative outfits. “I use stereotypes to get attention. …I really use them to the full, but when I get attention, I completely break them. I like to do that,” she says.

You can see it in the video for her hit “Girl from Rio.”She celebrates people of all sizes, shapes and colors, but then she celebrates her love of plastic surgery.Album cover my version Show off her ever-changing array of head shots.

Her fans, like 20-year-old Gabriel da Costa, love these contradictions. “She’s always reinventing herself,” he says. “She was born out of nothing, she conquered the world.”

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