“It’s rare that a Brazilian goes international in pop,” Anitta told Rolling Stone in 2018, hours before she headlined a stadium show in southern Brazil. She had spent seven years building a career at home and one year working abroad. “It’s a matter of putting in the work,” she said.
Born Larissa de Macedo Machado, she was 25 at the time. Her mix of funk carioca, reggaeton and dance-pop had made her a household name across much of the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world. Her 2017 single “Paradinha” knocked “Despacito” off the top spot on several Brazilian Billboard charts. She had recorded tracks with J Balvin, Maluma, Alesso, Major Lazer and the drag star Pabllo Vittar.
She told the magazine she had been in the studio with Pharrell and Rita Ora and was talking with Dua Lipa.
From church to the web
Anitta says she announced she would be a singer as soon as she could talk. From age nine into her teens she sang during her grandfather’s sermons and drew people into his church.
By 2018 she had 30.2 million Instagram followers, the biggest social media following of any woman in Brazil. She had sold out arenas at home and played a night in London. Vogue had named her a top 100 influencer.
Her stage name comes from the Brazilian mini-series Presença de Anita. The title character, she said, refused to be one kind of person: one day Ane, the next María, the next Ashley or Jennifer.
What she was working on
Her last album, Bang, came out in 2015, and she had released singles since. She said she resisted the pressure to deliver “12 songs” on a deadline. “Art is art,” she said. She managed her own business in Brazil.
Netflix scheduled a docuseries about her path to international fame, Vai Anitta!, for fall 2018. She was also shooting a video for “Veneno” in which she was covered in snakes, and she planned to work more in English that year, after first getting solid in the Spanish-language market.
Her song “Medicina” has a wordless chorus, which she said was deliberate so that children from any country could sing it.
