NPR’s Marco Strel
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil — Brazilian singer Anitta self-proclaimedgirl from rio‘ Her blend of local funk and pop has taken her far beyond her hometown and recently grabbed her Grammy Award nomination Best Newcomer Award. 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”emvolver,” with that hip grind videobecame a hit on social media and topped Spotify global daily chart — The first solo Latin female artist.
She has also collaborated with superstars. Madonna To snoop dog When J BalvinShe has graced the covers of magazines. International version of trend To wall street journalnamed her 2022 Music Innovators.
NPR’s Marco Strel
NPR’s Marco Strel
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.
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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.
NPR’s Marco Strel
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 “been a different road. there is,” he said.
NPR’s Marco Strel
He clearly saw her venture into the world of Brazilian funk, which in the late 1980s revived pump beats drawn from various genres such as Miami bass, hip-hop, samba, and other Latin American and African styles. By the 1990s, it had become a local art form.
NPR’s Marco Strel
NPR’s Marco Strel
Around that time, Brazilian authorities also began cracking down on funk, linking it to drug use, crime, and sexual immorality.there have been many attempts to ban funkas recently as 2017.
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.
NPR’s Marco Strel
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.Has worked with Anitta on several productions songhe told NPR that although she always brings local beats, “she also loves bubblegum melodies.”
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.
NPR’s Marco Strel
You can see it in her hit video.”girl from rioshe celebrates people of all sizes, shapes and colors. love for 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.”
To hear more about this story, use the audio player at the top of this page and click the Instagram video below.