She has been called the Beyoncé of Brazil, the Queen of the Favela, and the face of a new Latin pop. But Anitta—born Larissa de Macedo Machado in the working-class outskirts of Rio de Janeiro—is not just a singer. At the time this article was written, she was 27 years old, and she had already transformed the codes of Brazilian music, uploaded billions of views, and inserted herself into the political conversation of a country deeply divided under the leadership of Jair Bolsonaro.

Her trajectory is anything but accidental. Anitta grew up in Honório Gurgel, a suburb of Rio far from the country's wealthiest neighborhoods. She was raised by a single mother, began singing at age eight and took dance classes from the age of eleven. The favelas and working-class communities of Rio are not only her origins; they are also the cultural source she always claimed. She understood early that music is an art but also an industry and that she had to learn to master both dimensions if she wanted to escape invisibility.

From the Favela to the Global Mainstream

Anitta achieved national fame in 2012 with “Show das Poderosas”, a song that mixed funk, pop, dancehall, and a fierce feminine energy. Her subsequent works, with titles like “Veneno”, “Medicina”, “Downtown”, or “Loco”, have accumulated hundreds of millions of views. The music video for “Loco”, released at the beginning of 2021, passed over ten million views in less than two weeks. The singer displays in this clip a snow-covered landscape and a series of feminine bodies, including with trans woman La Demi, long before other Latin artists have made this kind of explicit commitment.

Anitta however remains first and foremost a musical phenomenon. She collaborated with Cardi B, Major Lazer, Snoop Dogg, and Becky G. With Becky G, she launched the video “Banana”, a colorful and eccentric work, named after the pop-art aesthetic associated with Andy Warhol. Through these collaborations, she has done what no Brazilian artist had done for years: making baile funk travel beyond the frontiers of Brazil. She said she wanted to export this music genre born in the favelas to show the world that it is art when it is done well.

Unlike many performers who pretend that the commercial dimension is secondary, Anitta has always assumed the financial aspect of her career. At the beginning of her career, she carried out market research to understand

Source: Terrafemina News