In the past decade, the singer has earned fame and the respect of some of Brazil’s most lauded musical elders. Now she’s taking aim at new audiences but hoping to hold on to her roots.“Meiga e Abusada,” the 2013 song that first catapulted the Brazilian singer Anitta to fame, begins with a Lady Gaga sample and a cool assertion. “I get everything I want,” she sings in Portuguese. “But it was so easy to control you.”In the song’s music video, partly filmed in Las Vegas, Anitta frolics around the desert in a cropped plaid shirt, drinks champagne and hits casinos in a limo. It’s a declaration of her prowess made all the more brazen by its timing: Only a couple of months before its release, it had felt like nothing would ever happen for her.“I’m a pessimistic person,” Anitta said in a recent interview, speaking in Portuguese. That’s partly because the odds were never strictly in her favor. “Growing up, my father would say, ‘We’re poor, you can’t study the arts,’” she said. “He thought I’d need a plan B.”She didn’t. Since putting out her first album at age 20, Anitta has gone on to become one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars. In the past decade, she has released four studio albums, performed at the 2016 Olympic opening ceremony and racked up numerous Latin Grammy nominations. Anitta got her start singing in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, and success eventually followed her to the rest of South America, where a string of Spanish-language hits featuring stars like J Balvin and Maluma cemented her status as one of the region’s top performers.The United States market feels like the final frontier. This month, Anitta will perform at both weekends of the Coachella festival. On April 12, her new trilingual album “Versions of Me” — her first since signing with Warner Records in 2021, and her first international LP — arrives. A solo female pop artist from Brazil has never become a star in North America, but Anitta’s team and label are intent on making it happen — and it shows. Featuring tracks produced by established hitmakers including Ryan Tedder, Stargate, and Andrés Torres and Mauricio Rengifo (who produced “Despacito”), the album’s sleek hooks, taut melodies and glossy production signal a clear attempt at breaking her in America.Speaking via video chat from her house in Miami in late February, Anitta was barefaced on the couch, dressed in an orange Versace T-shirt. She looked tired, but her posture was flawless. “I got back yesterday from Rio and I was exhausted. I’d been working Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday without a break,” she said, petting her sleepy Italian greyhound, Plínio. (He had great posture, too.)Born Larissa Machado in Rio de Janeiro’s working-class Honório Gurgel neighborhood, Anitta, 29, first rose to fame after she posted a video of herself singing into a can of deodorant. Her stage name, a homage to a character she’d long admired from an old Brazilian TV show, “Presença de Anita,” came later. In the series, she explained, Anita would say that she wanted to wake up a different person every day: “She could be romantic, sensual, intelligent and crazy all at once.” Anitta likes playing with that idea too.“People have always wanted to define women: Is she the marrying type? Is she the type that likes to go out?” she added. “But I can be both things, right?”Anitta made a name for herself performing at parties around Rio’s favelas. Funk carioca, or baile funk, a vibrant rhythm that emerged in Rio de Janeiro’s predominantly Black working-class neighborhoods in the 1980s, is the soundtrack of choice at these gatherings, where sound systems often blast the genre’s signature tamborzão beat. “I started bothering everyone and asking if I could sing at their events, the proibidas,” Anitta said.Proibida is Portuguese for prohibited. In the early 2000s, the police — who deemed these bailes (dance parties) breeding grounds for gang violence — began violently sweeping events in Rio’s favelas under the guise of public safety. While the genre now plays in some of the country’s wealthiest neighborhoods and in clubs popular with arty crowds in London and Berlin, its creators, especially those who haven’t yet risen to fame, are still marginalized.Anitta onstage in Miami earlier this year. Since putting out her first album at age 20, Anitta has gone on to become one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars.John Parra/Getty ImageAt the height of the moral panic around baile funk, even stars like Anitta didn’t walk away unscathed. When she performed at the Olympic opening ceremony in 2016 alongside the national icons Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, critics lashed out against her inclusion in the event, dismissing her as a “favelada.”“Prejudice hurts,” Anitta said. “But what artists like Caetano, Marisa Monte, Djavan and Bethânia have always told me is that they were the Anitta of their time,” she said, referring to Maria Bethânia and other Brazilian stars who are mostly over 70 (Monte, the youngest of the group, is in her 50s). “Everyone told them they were bums and now they’re icons.”Veloso, one of the country’s most revered singer-songwriters who has collaborated with the singer in the past, praised her in an email. “Anitta is so competent, sincere, direct and likable,” he wrote. “She has captured the zeitgeist in such an impressive way.”In the mid-2000s, M.I.A. and Diplo began to export funk carioca out of Brazil through songs like “Baile Funk One” and a documentary, “Favela on Blast,” but the genre never made it to the pop charts. Anitta still believes it has the potential to go global, though. And while her new album experiments with a range of styles — the Gaga-inspired electro-pop of “Boys Don’t Cry,” the rollicking reggaeton of “Gata” — “Versions of Me” never completely severs ties with her roots.Still, she knows success often takes time. “The main things are patience and persistence,” she said. “We have to do it step by step.”Ryan Tedder, the frontman for the band One Republic who has written hits for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, agreed to executive produce Anitta’s project halfway through their first studio session. “She’s easily the hardest working person I’ve ever worked with,” he said by phone. “She does not have an off switch.”Tom Corson, co-chairman and chief operating officer at Warner Records, agreed: “Anitta has what it takes to be a global superstar.” The plan? “Obviously we want hit records,” Corson said. “And we’d like to see her as a unique force within the U.S. and global market, toggling back and forth between languages.” The obvious comparison is Shakira.While “Versions of Me” is above all, an international project, Tedder and Anitta were both adamant that Brazilian rhythms had to be a part of it. “I didn’t want to disenfranchise her Brazilian fan base from what she’s already built,” he said.For “Faking Love” — a baile funk-inspired track featuring the American rapper Saweetie — Anitta and Tedder flew the Brazilian producers Tropkillaz to Los Angeles for a session. “The rhythmic movement of an actual funk beat doesn’t use what’s called quantization,” Tedder said, referring to software that makes beats line up perfectly. “You have to program it in with natural human swing.” It took him several tries before he could get it right; Anitta sat and listened until she knew they’d found the one.Anitta is aware that when it comes to her work, she is a perfectionist first. For years, she has worked with a speech therapist to minimize her accent, and even as she was putting the finishing touches on her album, she was rerecording parts of tracks. Would it matter if she sang in English with a strong accent? It shouldn’t, but it does, she said. “I realized that if I spoke slower in meetings or with an accent, people would respect me less,” she said, recalling how she felt when she started doing business in America.Things are different in her personal life, but it’s hard to completely relinquish control when she has lived the bulk of it under a microscope. Anitta, who is bisexual, kept key aspects of her identity — including her sexuality — hidden from the Brazilian press for years. “It was complicated because it was all very taboo at the time,” she said. “Lots of singers weren’t out, and I don’t judge them because I know people really came after me.”It was only after a bodyguard had to chase down someone who took a picture of her kissing a woman at a party that she realized she wanted to stop hiding. “My mom has known that I kiss girls since I was 13, why should I care what other people think?” she said in a second interview, throwing both of her hands up in exasperation as she slouched down on a hotel room couch in Los Angeles.Politically, aspects of Anitta’s life have long been scrutinized too. The singer was criticized in 2018 when she didn’t outright condemn Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro during the early stages of his campaign. But she maintains there’s a reason for that. “I was having my religious initiation,” she said. In Candomblé, which mixes Yoruba, Fon and Bantu beliefs, initiations typically require people to remain secluded for around 21 days: “I had no way of contacting the outside world.”When it became clear Anitta would have to say something, she called a friend, the lawyer, journalist and political commentator Gabriela Prioli, and asked for help. “I didn’t understand anything. I didn’t know what a congressman does or what a councilman does,” she said. “I’m not ashamed to say it because most Brazilians don’t.”In the end, Anitta found the conversation so helpful she decided to start broadcasting political education classes with Prioli on her Instagram, which she hopes to resume ahead of this year’s elections. While she won’t endorse a candidate, Anitta now firmly opposes Bolsonaro. In late March, when lawyers representing the president’s party petitioned Brazil’s supreme electoral court to stop artists from making “political demonstrations” in their sets, Anitta encouraged other performers to defy them. “To my friends who want to speak out: I’ll pay your fine,” she said in an Instagram story.Bolsonaro and Anitta occasionally even butt heads on social media, where the singer boasts 61 million followers on Instagram alone. “He knows his conservative supporters don’t like me, so he uses my name to draw attention to himself,” she said.Her follower count will likely only grow in the coming months. Popularized by the “paso de Anitta” — Spanish for Anitta’s dance move — her TikTok hit “Envolver” is the first song by a Brazilian artist to enter the Top 10 on Spotify’s global chart. In late March, it hit No. 1 there.Anitta’s upcoming Coachella performance on the festival’s main stage marks another first for a Brazilian artist.“I don’t want to think about it,” she said. “It makes me anxious.” But she is thinking about it.Anitta said rehearsals for the show are happening in Rio, where she’s training with one Brazilian and one American choreographer. (“I wanted to combine both cultures.”) And after that? “I’ve only planned my life until Coachella,” she said half-jokingly.“I’m not going to overthink things,” she said. That’s how music becomes formulaic. “I know what I want to do: if things work out, great,” she added. “If they don’t, that’s also great.” She wasn’t always this way. “But I’ve accomplished so much more than I ever thought I would. If I fell asleep now and woke up at 40, I’d still feel like I’d done what I set out to do.” More

#masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskVaccine InformationWuhan, One Year LaterAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Weeknd’s Super Bowl Halftime Show Breaks With TraditionThis time, the field won’t be swarming with fans crowding the stage. In fact, the stage won’t be on the field at all, but in the stands.The Weeknd in concert. He will be headlining the Super Bowl halftime show in Tampa on Sunday.Credit…Hayoung Jeon/EPA, via ShutterstockJulia Jacobs and Feb. 4, 2021, 3:09 p.m. ETWhether it stars Al Hirt, Michael Jackson or Beyoncé, the Super Bowl halftime show has always taken center stage on the field.But for the first time in the 55-year history of the game, the Weeknd, who is headlining this Sunday in Tampa, Fla., will perform on a stage set up in the stands in keeping with strict coronavirus protocols intended to limit contact with the players and coaches; his act may, however, include a brief interlude on the field.In a typical year, a massive stage is rolled onto the field and hundreds of fans pour out to surround it; this year only about 1,050 people are expected to work to put on the show, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 most years. Performers and crew members will receive Covid-19 tests before rehearsals and before the performance.When he strode to the microphone Thursday at a news conference, the Weeknd took in the room and noted, “It’s kind of empty.” His words were perhaps a preview of how the stadium might look to people watching from home. (About 25,000 fans will be in the stadium — less than half its 65,000-person capacity — joined by thousands of two-dimensional cardboard cutouts of fans provided by the N.F.L.)The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye), is a 30-year-old Canadian pop star known for hits including “Can’t Feel My Face” and “Starboy.” His concerts often have a brooding feel and a dark, avant-garde edge. (The music video for his latest hit, “Blinding Lights,” opens with the Weeknd laughing maniacally, his face covered in blood.) He said that his halftime show would incorporate some of his trademark artistic themes but that he plans to be “respectful to the viewers at home.”“The story will continue,” he said, “but definitely we’ll keep it PG for the families.”This will be the second Super Bowl halftime show produced in part by Jay-Z and his entertainment company, Roc Nation, who were recruited by the N.F.L. in 2019. At the time, performers were refusing to work with the league, in solidarity with Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who began kneeling during the national anthem to protest police brutality and racial injustice.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

Mitski moved to Nashville. She’s not quite sure why, because she didn’t really know anyone there, but she liked how specifically weird it was — a town with stories. A local businessman had recently died and left his substantial estate to his Border collie. Bachelorette parties were a surreal and ever-present cottage industry: “There’s always a woman crying on the street and five other women in matching T-shirts comforting her,” as Mitski put it to me. “It feels like such a good place to observe the human condition.” More

Neil Young wasn’t bluffing.Spotify said on Wednesday that it had begun removing the singer’s music from the streaming service, two days after he briefly posted a public letter calling on Spotify to choose between him and Joe Rogan, the star podcast host who has been accused of spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.Young’s challenge to Spotify has become a high-profile, if unexpected, flash point in the battle over misinformation and free speech online. It also raised questions about the power of performing artists to control where their work is heard.In a statement posted to his website on Wednesday, Young called Spotify “the home of life threatening Covid misinformation.” He added: “Lies being sold for money.”His criticism of Rogan — a comedian and actor who has become Spotify’s most popular podcast host, sometimes speaking at great length with controversial figures — came after a group of hundreds of scientists, professors and public health experts asked Spotify to take down an episode of Rogan’s show from Dec. 31. That episode, featuring Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease expert, promoted “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines,” according to the group’s public letter, which was issued on Jan. 10.Spotify said in a statement on Wednesday: “We want all the world’s music and audio content to be available to Spotify users. With that comes great responsibility in balancing both safety for listeners and freedom for creators. We have detailed content policies in place and we’ve removed over 20,000 podcast episodes related to Covid since the start of the pandemic.”“We regret Neil’s decision to remove his music from Spotify,” the service added, “but hope to welcome him back soon.”Young’s most popular songs, like “Heart of Gold,” “Harvest Moon” and “Old Man,” have been radio staples for decades, and have attracted hundreds of millions of streams on Spotify. In his statement on Wednesday, Young said that Spotify represented 60 percent of the streams of his music around the world.Young’s music was expected to be fully removed from Spotify within hours. The news that the service was removing his songs was earlier reported by The Wall Street Journal.In his original letter, which Young addressed to his label, Warner Records, and his manager, he said: “Spotify has a responsibility to mitigate the spread of misinformation on its platform. I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform.”He added: “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both.”That letter was removed from Young’s website soon after it was posted, though it drew wide news media attention.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 4Omicron in retreat. More

His albums and performances with Apollo Sound brought new complexity to the genre in the 1970s. His group was still getting the crowds dancing decades later.Roberto Roena, a dancer who became a bongo player who then became a bandleader, along the way establishing himself as a leading figure in salsa and some of its best-known bands, died on Sept. 23 in Puerto Rico. He was 81.Andrés Waldemar, a singer in Mr. Roena’s orchestra, announced his death on social media but did not specify a cause. Local news reports said he died at a hospital in Carolina, outside San Juan.Mr. Roena was best known as the founder of Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday. He was also a member of the Fania All-Stars, a group formed about the same time to showcase stars of the Fania record label, which was often described as the Motown of salsa.Onstage Mr. Roena was a whirlwind, dancing out front while banging a cowbell when he wasn’t playing bongos. Apollo Sound was still getting crowds dancing decades later.“The music always darted forward, driven by the sound of metal being struck by wood,” Peter Watrous wrote in The New York Times in 1998, reviewing an Apollo Sound show at the Copacabana in Manhattan. “Mr. Roena’s placement of notes, the way they fit into patterns, brought the audience and the musicians together in a form of personal rhythmic transcendence. Mr. Roena has that kind of power.”Pedro Pierluisi, the governor of Puerto Rico, where Mr. Roena was born, declared last Saturday to be a day of mourning in Mr. Roena’s honor. He called the death “an irreparable loss for Puerto Rico and the whole world, but especially for salsa lovers.”“Iconic songs like ‘El Escapulario,’ ‘Cui Cui,’ ‘Mi Desengano,’ ‘Marejada Feliz’ and many more transcended generations,” the governor said in a statement. “His musical legacy of more than 60 years will remain with us.”Mr. Roena started Roberto Roena y Su Apollo Sound, which released a string of well-regarded albums in the 1970s, salsa’s heyday.FaniaRoberto Roena was born on Jan. 16, 1940, in Mayagüez, on the island’s west coast. His family later moved to the Santurce district of San Juan, where as a boy he and a brother worked up some cha-cha and mambo dance routines that garnered enough acclaim to get them onto a local television show.After catching the act, the Puerto Rican musician and bandleader Rafael Cortijo invited Mr. Roena, who was only 15 or 16, to join his orchestra, Cortijo y Su Combo, as a dancer and chorus member. Mr. Cortijo, a percussionist, began schooling him on the bongos, and soon Roberto was part of the band.When Mr. Cortijo’s group dissolved, Mr. Roena became part of the salsa orchestra El Gran Combo, recording and touring internationally. It was in 1969 that he formed Apollo Sound — named, some versions of the tale go, because its first rehearsal coincided with the launch of Apollo 11, the first mission to land astronauts on the moon. The group almost had a different name.“First I wanted to put Apollo 12, because we were 12 musicians,” he told La Opinión in 1996, “but then I thought, if the United States launches Apollo 13, we are obsolete.”With Apollo Sound, Mr. Roena took salsa to a new level of sophistication, working in two or even three trumpets and a complex rhythm section to create a propulsive sound that drew on the music of jazz-rock groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears. Its live shows were wild, with Mr. Roena setting the tone, and its albums for Fania were steady sellers.In an interview with The Times in 2014, when he was part of the lineup for a Fania Records tribute concert in Central Park, Mr. Roena credited the label’s founders, Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci, with creating the salsa phenomenon.“Jerry and Johnny gave you the freedom to do your own thing,” he said. “They allowed the musicians to express themselves the way we wanted, and that led to a lot of hit records.”His survivors include his wife, Antonia María Nieves Santos, and four children, Brenda, Gladys, Ivan and Francisco.Mr. Roena was still performing well into his 70s. He had a minor heart attack in 1995, but, he said in the 1996 interview, that wasn’t going to keep him off the stage.“I get tired,” he said, “but when I climb onto a platform, I am a different person.” More