The Duality of Anitta

Anitta is — quite literally— surrounded by icons. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon at her home in Rio de Janeiro, she glows amid a backdrop of Amy Winehouse, Marilyn Monroe, and James Brown portraits. A painting of her 2019 trilingual album Kisses, which features the singer locking lips with her clone, and a kaleidoscopic rainbow mural forms a halo around the singer’s honeyed hair. It’s this artistic shrine of fan gifts that fosters creativity for the singer — a pop star's paradise, but not exactly a place for peace.

“I got this house seven years ago, and seven years ago I was a workaholic,” she recalls. It’s the antithesis of “a chill house,” as she puts it, the kind of space that recalls her duties as an artist. “Nowadays, I am looking for a house that feels less ‘Anitta.’” A home that makes her feel like a “normal” person, like her property in Miami, which is stripped of anything to do with her career with one exception: a coveted velvet purse with gold detailing that belonged to her musical forebear, Brazilian singer Carmen Miranda.

More than ever, Anitta, the most influential pop star in Brazil with more than 7 billion views on YouTube, 64 million followers on Instagram and 22 million followers on TikTok, is trying to navigate the divide between her maximalist pop persona — a self-assured powerhouse who radiates energy and unabashedly embraces her sexuality — and the woman who has carefully cultivated that image.  

This afternoon, for a day of back-to-back interviews, the 30-year-old megastar leans more toward her on-stage alter-ego, sporting full glam — glossy lips, full brows, an off-the-shoulder mesh halter top and gold triangle hoops. She smooths and flips her hair with the confidence of the “Queen of Brazilian Pop” (which she has, in fact, been deemed).

But Larissa de Macedo Machado, the more subdued woman behind Anitta, is a sweet, shy, chronic overthinker, who grapples with insecurity. A minimalist who “can literally wear the same shit forever.” (Picture her tucked away on an island vacation with no paparazzi: Her suitcase will contain one pair of shoes, one pair of sweatpants, one hoodie, one pair of pajamas and a bikini.)

As Anitta plots world domination, how long can Larissa hide out in jeans and a white T-shirt?

If you ask Anitta when she knew she wanted to be a performer, she’ll say it was when she was a year old. That’s when her mother, Míriam, told her she began singing. Anitta can’t say she understood what manifestation was as a kid, but by the time she was five or six, she would regularly point out to her mom places in Brazil where she knew she’d perform one day. “I could feel that this was going to happen and I could see me doing that,” she says, a sparkle in her eye.

Growing up in the favela of Honório in Rio, Anitta came from a “humble family.” But she never compared herself to her friends; she was too busy crafting her own toys than worrying about not being able to afford Barbies. “I would get [my mom’s] nail polishes or her perfumes and pretend those were dolls and play with that,” she recalls.

At seven, her grandparents insisted she begin singing in the church choir. A few years later, she began taking dance lessons, and by her teens, she was performing at Brazilian funk parties in the favelas. In 2010, just a year after graduating from one of the most prestigious high schools in the country, Anitta began to pursue a singing career. It wasn’t long before her childhood manifestations became her reality. Like Justin Bieber and Lana Del Rey, Anitta was plucked from obscurity, discovered on YouTube by record producer Renato Azevedo. Next came a record deal with Furacão 2000, which helped popularize Brazil’s funk carioca sound. But it was her 2012 single "Meiga e Abusada,” a Gaga-esque synth pop joint with a music video that paid homage to Teenage Dream-era Katy Perry, that helped her land a contract with Warner Music Brasil. Then came a slew of albums: Anitta, Ritmo Perfeito, Meu Lugar, Bang! and Kisses. That means that, for more than a decade, she’s been carefully honing the Anitta character. A polyglot, she’s mastered her native Portuguese, plus English, Spanish, Italian, and French; Anitta will boast that she learned these languages by sleeping with men who speak them (“It’s funnier”) but Larissa will admit she learned them the “boring way” — with teachers. “Not that I didn't fuck guys from these languages and maybe I practiced,” she laughs. Larissa and Anitta; two sides of the same coin.

That dichotomy persists when it comes to style: Anitta may be label-obsessed but Larissa imbues a romanticism to the way she describes each of them. Her favorite — Jeremy Scott — is “a sweet man, and he sees the kindness in everything,” she gushes. She can “feel his emotion” in his looks. “I love the colors, I love the pop,” she remarks. She’s currently “obsessed” with Pharrell and his work with Louis Vuitton. She fawns over the shape of Dolce and Gabbana pieces (“Nothing wears so well as a Dolce; my body feels insane,” she says, drawing an hourglass figure with her hands). For Ronnie Hartleben, who works with Anitta regularly and styled her for this shoot, it’s been meaningful for him “to work with such a strong powerful Latina woman,” he says. “We always have fun taking risks and pushing the envelope with our looks.”

Sartorial choices are also made with a dose of practicality. With funk carioca, Anitta needs jean shorts for dancing — it’s all about the butt. Anitta delivers a magnetic visual lesson with her pearly acrylic nails: She clasps an invisible set of butt cheeks, glides them up and down and in clockwise a square. She — and her invisible butt cheeks — need shakeability, an outfit that definitively shows gyration. She regrettably finds herself explaining and re-explaining to stylists why bodysuits just won’t cut it. “I'm always like, ‘That's not good for showing the movement,’ and they're like, ‘But this singer dude does it.’ That singer doesn't do baile funk. It's not Brazilian funk dance,” she fake cries. She needs to be able to twerk. “Like, hard,” she laughs. To show “the bum bum.”

Anitta knows what works for her. Today, she is both an industry veteran and on the precipice of crossover success. Last year, Anitta dropped her most recent studio album, Versions of Me, a genre-and-language-spanning record that included collaborations with Cardi B and Saweetie, as well as the massive hit “Envolver” — a slinky reggaeton number she claims her label didn’t initially envision as a single. She proved them wrong: “Envolver” exploded and internationally became her most charted single. She also became the first Brazilian to reach No.1 on the Spotify Global chart and earned a spot in Guinness World Records. Her horizontal booty grinding in the “Envolver” music video became a viral TikTok dance challenge. The interest in Anitta surpassed her NSFW dance moves. “I attract the attention with the sexual dances and the sexual lyrics, but then I want them to look at the other side, and that's what happened,” she says.

In the days following the release of Versions of Me, Anitta became the first Brazilian singer to play the main stage at Coachella. Soon, she landed a coveted wax figure at the famed Madame Tussauds in New York City — the first Brazilian singer to achieve that, too — and by August 2022, earned the title of first Brazilian performer to win an MTV Video Music Award.

Naturally, as her popularity has grown, so has the challenge of navigating Larissa and Anitta. “I have a lot of therapy,” she says. For a while, she didn't “admire” the character she portrays, even she would “judge it.” “It's like two different humans in one body,” she explains. Anitta is more than just a pop star to Larissa. For nearly 15 years, she’s worn her brazen attitude and sexuality like armor — a shield for her traumas. In Anitta: Made in Honório, a docuseries about the musician’s life, she revealed that she was sexually abused at age 15 by a boyfriend. “I transformed what happened then into something that helped me come out on top, in a better place,” she shared through tears on-camera. That was the moment Anitta was born.

“Anitta does everything and says everything, is not scared of anybody, fucks everybody, and sex is whatever for her,” she says, with a devil-may-care hair flip. “I just thought that if my personality was like that, maybe [a sexual assault] wouldn't happen with me, because I was going to have so much attitude that nobody was going to have the courage to fuck with me.” She later clarified, "But I'm a woman and I know [that's] not possible in real life. In that moment, I thought it was the best way that I [could get] through my trauma."

Being Anitta has also given Larissa license to tackle subversive topics. In a society where women’s appearances are scrutinized, Anitta boldly flaunted her face in various stages of plastic surgery on the Versions of Me album cover. She doesn’t want to lie to her fans — particularly younger ones who are comparing themselves to everyone else. “They're looking online and they're thinking that what they see online is the truth. Everybody's happy all the time. Everybody has a lot of money all the time, that they wake up with all the energy to work harder and harder, and they don't feel bad, they don't feel sad,” she says, wildly gesturing at the camera. “And I think that can be dangerous for the new generation. So, I like to be honest.”

In her 2018 Netflix docuseries Vai Anitta (Go, Anitta), Anitta revealed she is bisexual. She just needed to be honest. “The reason why I opened about it is because here in Brazil, there was a lot of criticism and a lot of taboos over that,” she says of identifying as LGBTQ+. A few years ago, she was drunk at a party and kissed a girl she liked in front of everyone. “It was a whole job for my security to go there, ask [people] to delete the picture, because people would say I had kissed the girl, and I would lose the brand deals and everything,” she recalls. But Anitta wanted to be able to kiss whoever she wanted, so she told her publicist that she wanted to be open about her sexuality. “Even Larissa or Anitta, both are not hypocrites,” she asserts. “This is one thing I am not, in both characters.” Still, she deals with bi-erasure. “Some people say I am a ‘fake bi,’ because I never dated a girl like a long-term relationship. But come on, even my relationships with guys cannot last more than three months,” she says, cringing.

As Anitta has become more all-encompassing, Larissa has felt the pull of her roots. Her forthcoming album, due next year, is an entirely funk carioca project. Funk Carioca, or “baile funk,” a sub-genre of hip-hop that emerged in Black and poor spaces in the favelas during the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1980s, was severely criminalized. It’s important to her to acknowledge the history of funk carioca and how it marginalized the populations it arose from. She’s using her platform to uplift creatives from the favelas — dancers, choreographers, designers, producers and writers. “We need to have the real people to feel authentic, to feel like I'm doing something more than just using [the culture],” she explains. She wants to be a part of what the future of baile funk looks like. “It already changed so much in Brazil. It's not considered a crime anymore, it plays on the radio, it plays in the clubs, things that didn't happen in the beginning. So, for me it's already a big winning,” she smiles, clearing her throat.

Last month, Anitta shared the first taste of the project with the three-track bundle Funk Generation: A Favela Love Story, featuring her previously booming single “Funk Rave,” as well as the tracks “Casi Casi” and “Used To Be.” The songs together comprise a visual project depicting life in the favelas.

In the steamy video for “Funk Rave,” Anitta twerks, shaves a local’s head, and has her way with a guy of her choosing; the scene is cut with overtly sexual imagery: the singer licking a popsicle, popping champagne, the juice squeezed from an orange. “If it was a guy, people would be like, ‘This guy is fucking awesome,’ and that was the intention for me — boss bitch, sexual. I meet this boy and I go straight-forward to what I want with him.” She shrugs. “Casi Casi” has sass and attitude — Anitta works the front desk of a brothel and drinks while cooling off in a pool with local ladies. By the third video, “Used To Be,” Anitta accepts a proposal from her lover and ties the knot with a giant bow covering her veil — leaving her more promiscuous days behind (“I used to be a hoe, but now I ain’t no more,” she quips on the track).

The song’s meaning, however, grew out of something quite serious. At the end of 2022, Anitta found herself very ill. “I had problems in my lungs, I had a cancer [scare]. I spent months in the hospital. Nobody could figure out what I had,” she recalls. A shaman was recommended to her, and Anitta began a spiritual treatment journey. “I came back completely changed,” she says as her eyes widen. When doctors ran more tests, Anitta was inexplicably healed. Her mental state shifted — she no longer allows herself to suffer or be made to suffer. “Used To Be” became a way for her to reflect on the emotional rollercoaster in a cheeky way — as a self-described “bitch” who takes control of her life and “destroyed hearts” in the process.

For her forthcoming LP, Anitta has 60 songs ready to go. But curating is a process. “We're trying to understand what's the best path for these songs,” she says. She has an idea of her next single, though. Soon, Anitta will release “Grip,” a track that pays homage to another type of funk: Miami bass. “It's more about the beat, the instrumentals and production than lyrics and voice,” she explains. “I wanted to show how Brazilian funk doesn't have many lyrics and many meanings behind it. It's just sexual stuff.”

She also has two buzzy collaborations in the works. One, “Where I Want To Be” with Sam Smith, is about “a fun, easygoing relationship,” and features a music video shot in the streets in Brazil during Carnival. The other is “A Girl Like Me” with Chlöe Bailey. “She's one of my biggest friends in America, and we did [the song] because I [think of] her as a sister,” Anitta says. She notes that the feature wasn’t a marketing ploy. “It was just two friends being like, ‘Let's do something together, let's have some fun.’”

With Anitta returning to Larissa’s baile funk roots, I wonder, will she shed some of the persona that’s made her a megastar? “Maybe,” she says, when I ask if she’ll ever share music under her birth name, before quickly adding, “I could do a song that talks about the two personalities of mine.” Whether or not she plans to release music as Larissa, she envisions the Anitta character evolving to something that’s “a little less explosive and a little less ho.” “Because I think Anitta is pretty much a big ho,” she laughs. Jokes aside, the image she projects has impeded her ability to have it all, a point of frustration. “Right now I want to have family and stuff, but this character doesn't let me,” she admits. For as unrelatable as Anitta may seem, feeling that your career goals and family desires are at odds is a surprisingly relatable experience. Maybe, if she slows down, “Larissa can have a personal life a little bit,” she says wistfully. Which side of the woman will win out? The world will have to wait to see.

This article has been updated to clarify a quote.