
Entertainment
At the Altar of Anitta
Brazilâs biggest pop star is a multiracial, multilingual, multi-genre supernova beloved by everyone from Mariah Carey to Madonna. Soon youâll love her, too.
You canât hear it, but there are few expressions of fandom more rapturous than âCome to Brazil.â The phrase, typed over and over in Twitter replies and Instagram comments in a torrential display of Brazilian hospitality, has taken on a mythic quality in the United States. A chorus of Internet strangers begging you to play in their country is a sign youâve made it. It also means that when Brazil produces its own global superstar â the biggest since Astrud Gilberto sang âThe Girl From Ipanemaâ nearly 60 years ago â you better believe theyâre not whispering. Theyâre screaming. Theyâre screaming for Anitta.
The day I meet Anitta, born Larissa de Macedo Machado, in the living room of her suite at the swanky Mondrian Hotel in Los Angeles, sheâs just flown in from Paris Fashion Week. Well, actually, sheâs just woken up from a nap. But before that, she was sitting front row at Valentino next to Vanessa Hudgens and posing for pictures with Colombian singer/actor Maluma, her collaborator and star in the Jennifer Lopez rom-com Marry Me. (Anittaâs beloved there: Last summer, her Francophone song âMon Soleilâ with French singer Dadju debuted in the Top 20 charts.) In person, a few feet away from her bed, the 28-year-old radiates ease and confidence, as if glowing with the absorbed adoration of the most effusive music listeners short of K-pop fans.
Five-foot-probably-nothing, Anitta is dressed down in a white tank top and blue Gucci joggers she threw on for this conversation. âBefore you came here, I was naked,â she says. She laughs but does not break eye contact. âPanties only. Thatâs how I am!â
Sheâs ebullient and practically jumps at the opportunity to detail her plans for Coachella, which will be her most important American gig to date. She pulls out her iPhone, swipes past pictures of her many dogs to show me a 3D blueprint of her stage set. It's a massive favela (or Brazilian barrio), an artistic rendering of the crowded, impoverished neighborhood she grew up in. With real motorcycles.
âI was watching this documentary of Disney World and I saw this guy Joe [Rohde], he built the Animal Kingdom park. There is so much fantasy â nature and magic,â she smiles. âI managed to bring him to this stage. Walt Disney was a dreamer, and thatâs how I am⊠Iâve got to bring my country [to Coachella]. Somehow.â
Hereâs what you need to know about Anitta: Sheâs been one of the most famous people in South America for a decade now, with four studio albums under her belt â making her the kind of global pop phenomenon without household recognition in the United States. (Thatâs next.) Sheâs decided to start her career over again, in English, which she speaks fluently (in addition to Spanish and her native Portuguese). Versions Of Me, her new album expected this spring, is an eclectic mix that reflects her cosmopolitan palette: reggaeton, pop, funk; everything from the Panic! at the Disco inspired pop-punk powerhouse âBoys Donât Cryâ to the the bed-squeaking club banger âRather Have Sex.â It also serves as her formal introduction to American audiences. On the English-language hit âGirl From Rio,â a clever interpolation of âThe Girl From Ipanema,â she sings, âHot girls, where Iâm from, we donât look like models / Tan lines, big curves, and the energy glows.â
âIâm not trying to play with âthe American Dream,ââ she says. âIâm a Brazilian girl, doing what I like.â
Other people like it, too. She boasts 93 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and her YouTube videos have been viewed more than 5 billion times, which makes her one of the most influential musicians on social media, according to Billboard. It tracks: At the time of our conversation, her legendary booty-shaking has inspired the âEnvolver'â TikTok trend, in which fans drop into a plank position and twerk the Brazilian way â âel quadradiñoâ â ass athleticism to the highest degree. Sheâs performed at the Olympics opening ceremony in Rio, at a Formula One grand prix, and led Carnival parades.
One time, Anitta met Mariah Carey at a shop in Aspen, and she says they both cried, each womanâs admiration bringing the other to tears. (âImagine!â she gasps.) Sheâs the subject and star of two Netflix docuseries, 2018âs Vai Anitta (which introduced the world to her âfakeâ husband â more on that later) and 2020âs Anitta: Made in HonĂłrio (an intimate look into her unusual relationship with celebrity). Sheâs collaborated with Cardi B; Diplo; J Balvin; DJ Snake; Snoop Dogg; hell, even Madonna. âHaving the work ethic she does, there are no limits for what she can do,â says DJ Snake. âThe world needs to know that what you see is what you get. No Hollywood stuff. She is really a dope girl from Rio.â
Diplo agrees. âIâve never met someone who works as hard as she does,â he says. The producer, who collaborated with Anitta on several Major Lazer tracks, emphasizes that the singer is not simply crossing over between two overlapping markets. He says that unlike, say, Latin rhythms, Portuguese-language music doesnât often travel beyond Brazil, so many Americans know nothing about it. Anitta had to start from scratch. âNo other artist has that much independent spirit and that much confidence to do that on their own.â He pauses. âAnd sheâs sexy as hell.â
The daughter of an artisan mother and a car battery salesman father, Anitta was born and raised in the HonĂłrio Gurgel favela of Rio de Janeiro. She slept in the same room as her mother and brother because thatâs where the air conditioning unit was, a luxury they could only afford to turn on for a few minutes at night. Theyâre still close. âFamily is the thing that makes me feel grounded,â she says. âWhen I come back home, Iâm treated as the same motherfucker as always. I speak to them literally every day.â
In 2010, when she was 16 years old, she went locally viral. Dressed in a bright, striped minidress, she filmed herself singing into a deodorant stick and put it on YouTube. The video caught the attention of FuracĂŁo 2000, a Brazilian record label that specializes in funk carioca, and her career began. She started using the stage name Anitta (inspired by a Lolita-esque Brazilian miniseries) and became known as Hurricane Anitta around the neighborhood.
âIâm not trying to play with âthe American Dream.â Iâm a Brazilian girl, doing what I like.â
âFunk in Brazil was like hip-hop in the â90s in America â it came from the poor peopleâs communities,â she explains. Or, more recently, like reggaeton in Latin America: demonized for its lyrics about everyday realities. âDrug trafficking, sex, guns. Society wanted to criminalize the rhythm. The rhythm is not guilty. If you change the reality of society and bring opportunity, the lyrics are going to change.â
Anitta couldnât wait for reality to change, so she changed the lyrics to reflect society as she wished it existed. She educated herself on optimistic ideas of âempowerment, feminism, being independentâ â the kind of ideas BeyoncĂ© was espousing at the same time, 5,000 miles away â and added them to funk music. Her music became a pop-funk hybrid, which meant it got radio play, even though funk was prohibited from the airwaves. The blend, it could be argued, also mirrored the push and pull of Brazilian society, where gay marriage has been legal in 2013 yet violence against women and LGBTQIA+ people is rampant. (Anitta is openly critical of Brazilâs far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro.)
Against this cultural backdrop, itâs no surprise that, as Anittaâs star rose, she became known for stirring the pop feminist pot. In 2017, when she released the music video for her song âVai Malandra,â filmed atop the roofs of favelas and featuring gorgeous nude bodies of varying shapes and sizes, for example, she failed to edit out her cellulite. âVai Malandraâ was touted as a feminist rebellion by some, as cultural appropriation by others (Anittaâs dadâs family is Black and her mom is white). In reality, she says, she was working as her own manager at the time and found the technology to remove the cellulite would be too expensive.
âIâve done hundreds of plastic surgeries, but I couldnât find one that took out my cellulite,â she says, throwing her head back. She laughs like a singer, loudly, and with a rasp so deep it falls silent. âSome women came to me, like, âNow I feel confident to go to the beach because you are a sex symbol, and you are so full of cellulite and you donât care. I shouldnât care, either.â Iâm like, âYes!ââ
To be clear, if there were a magical cure for cellulite, Anitta would be the first to admit to getting it. Brazil has the second-highest plastic surgery rate in the world, and Anitta has had her fair share: rhinoplasty, jawline reshaping, and multiple breast reductions, among other procedures. âI wonât be pretending Iâm some type of way that Iâm not,â she says. Itâs clear that she takes embracing her contradictions â fake and real, objectified and empowered â as a feminist vow. âThereâs a lot of machismo [in the world],â she explains, âAnd itâs crazy how people need to describe [women like,] âThis is a woman to marry; this is a woman to party [with].â Fuck that. I want to be âthe marryâ and âthe partyâ woman.â
She pauses. âGirls donât need men for shit. We got vibrators, we got friends. We got gay friends, which is way better than any other fucking husband. Trust me.â
Five years ago, in a private ceremony in the Amazon rainforest, Anitta married her then-boyfriend, businessman Thiago MagalhĂŁes. She was hosting a Brazilian television show called MĂșsica Boa, and he was there with her business partner. He thought she was too sassy, she was persistent, and they fell head over heels.
Next came marriage, except, she says, not really. â[He] was not actually a husband. It was just because I needed [him] to sign a prenup,â she says. Their lives were entangled and she wanted to keep their finances apart, so she organized a romantic agreement. âI set it up. I was in love, but I wanted to separate my money â I was rational. I knew he wouldnât sign if I didnât set up the love thing.â There are virtually no photographs from their wedding, but in Vai Anitta, sheâs shown being very affectionate with her husband, frequently referring to him as her esposo â happy and tender.
âIf youâre in love,â she says, leaning into the recorder and giving off a diaphanous, expensively soapy smell, âjust make sure you sign a prenup. No matter what.â
Marriage advice aside, Anitta â who is openly bisexual (âI hate hiding things,â she says. âYeah, I fuck girls, tooâ) â admits she does currently have a boyfriend. Itâs an open relationship, which is ideal for her jet-set lifestyle. âI have 15 million boyfriends, whatever,â she says. (One of them, she told Jimmy Fallon, played in the Super Bowl.) But the main boyfriendâs name she keeps to herself. âIf the guy makes me feel respected and amazing, I donât give a fuck if he fucks another girl,â she explains. âIâve had boyfriends that never cheated on me but treated me like shit. Thatâs an unloyal person.â
In the first episode of her 2020 Netflix show, Anitta, barefaced and dressed down in a green polo, sits on a barren-white hotel bed and films herself. Sheâs on the verge of tears. âWhen I was 14 or 15 years old, I met someone. I was afraid of him,â her eyes travel up, away from the camera. âHe just kept doing what he wanted to do. When he was done, he went to grab a beer and I just stared at the bloodstained bed. It was only recently that I stopped blaming myself for what happened.â
Then she looks directly into the lens: âFor all of you asking yourselves how Anitta was born, thatâs how. She was born out of my desire and need to be a brave woman, who no one could ever harm. Thatâs how.â
Talking now about the decision to publicize her sexual assault, she leans in close â a gesture of fearlessness or to ensure I donât misunderstand her. Perhaps both. Journalists were circling the story, she says, and she felt threatened. âThatâs why I opened up about my abuse when I was a teenager. I knew it was going to come out, and not through my mouth⊠Iâm going to tell my own shit. Iâm scared of nothing.â
Typically, when a musician records under a moniker, itâs a shield, but Larissaâs Anitta is more a weapon than armor. âAnitta is a person I call every time I need to be strong,â she says. âIf I didnât have this character that goes for it, and that I can turn off and be myself, I would be lost.â
Near the end of our conversation, I notice Anitta is sitting with her hands on her thighs, palms turned slightly up â something Winona Ryder told this magazine back in 2016 helps her to âfeel vulnerableâ and communicate vulnerability. Anitta comes to the United States a fully formed star, but being here in Los Angeles is something like a trip back in time, to when she was still Larissa, could still go out without being totally mobbed, a freedom that sheâs bound to lose again through her own success.
âMy mom tells me a story. When I was a teenager, I started to go out, I loved to party. She said, âDaughter, you got to stay home.â And I said, âThereâs going to be a day [when] youâll beg me to go out and I wonât be able to because I will be so famous.ââ
You see where this is going. â[Then] there was this day when she told me, âYouâve been working so much. Go out with your friends.â And I looked at her. âI told you that date was coming.ââ
Top Image Credit: Melitta Baumeister dress
Photographer: AB+DM
Stylist: Jan-Michael Quammie
Hair: Jesus Guerrero
Makeup: Adam Burrell
Manicure: Tom Bachik
Set Designer: Carlos Lopez
Talent Bookings: Special Projects
Video: Sam Miron