How Anita, the ‘Girl from Rio’, Became Global

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazilian singer Anita calls herself a “Girl from Rio”. Her blend of homegrown funk and pop takes her far beyond her hometown, and recently earned her a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. She is one of the most popular music artists to come out of Brazil in decades.

This year Anita dropped her fifth album, versions about meShe sings in her native Portuguese, as well as Spanish and English. the one “to engage,” along with her video, which became a hit on social media and topped Spotify’s global daily chart—a first for a solo Latin female artist.

She also collaborates with superstars, from Madonna to Snoop Dogg and J Balvin. She is dressed on magazine covers of international editions of Vogue magazine to me The Wall Street Journalwhich he named the Music Innovator of the Year 2022.

Anita sat down with NPR at her home in an exclusive gated community in western Rio de Janeiro earlier this month.

She said she never stops talking about numbers and just enjoys it all. She knew early on in her career that to go global she couldn’t just sing in Portuguese.

More languages, bigger stages

Anitta acknowledges that it can be difficult for Brazilian artists to make the leap internationally.

“You need to give up all the things you have in Brazil to go to another market and learn Spanish, and then learn English—I’ve also done Italian and French. So it’s a completely different world,” she says.

Anita has jumped between different worlds before: she didn’t grow up along Rio’s upscale beaches. Approximately an hour’s drive from her current residence is the neighborhood where she grew up, Honório Gurgel. The walls covered in graffiti lined the potholed streets. Barking dogs, hawkers, and men scavenging for scrap metal provide a constant score in the open air.

Funk in the slums

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

As a teenager, she broke into a local style of vibrant dance music popular in working-class areas of Rio, known as funk carioca or favela funk.

One morning in Honório Gurgel, as people headed to the church down the hill from their childhood home, a parishioner told NPR that since the days Anitta sang there, she had “taken a different path.”

He seemed to be alluding to her venturing into the realm of Brazilian funk, whose pulses emerged in the late 1980s, drawing 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.

Around that time, Brazilian authorities also began to crack down on funk, associating it with drug use, crime, and sexual immorality. There have been multiple attempts to ban funk, even as recently as 2017.

But Anitta stands up for the genre: Funk is what was available to teens in the slums, and she resents its stigmatization. “People were just singing their reality,” she says. “So, to change everything we sing…you need to change our reality first.”

When funk goes pop

Anita popularizes pop-funk not to tone it down, she says, but to get it on the radio, gaining wider recognition and respect for the genre and other Brazilian artists.

Brazilian producer and artist Wallace Viana totally agrees. Having collaborated with Anitta on several songs, he told NPR that she always brings homegrown beats but “loves those bubblegum tunes” too.

But her work has not come without criticism.

She shrugs off criticism about her hip-grinding videos and provocative outfits, which she admits made headlines. “I use stereotypes to get attention… I really use them to the fullest, but when I get attention I totally break them — I love doing it,” she says.

You can see it in the video for her song “Girl from Rio,” where she celebrates people of all sizes, shapes, and colors. But then she celebrates her love of plastic surgery. album cover versions about me She shows off a set of her ever-changing head shots.

Her fans, like 20-year-old Gabriel Da Costa, love these contrasts. “It reinvents itself all the time,” he says. “It came from nothing and conquered the world.”

To hear more about this story, use the audio player at the top of this page, and click on the Instagram video below.