Photo: Getty Images South America
On this episode of This Is Paris, Paris Hilton and her co-host Hunter sit down with Anitta, a Brazilian singer and star who is breaking into the Spanish-speaking Latin music world as well as the English-speaking market to become a global star. “I like challenges,” she tells Paris: People were quick to tell her that no matter how big she got in her home country – and she got very big, playing to audiences of five million people – she could never break into the Latin music market and would especially never crossover to America. Because Brazil is the lone Portuguese-speaking country in Latin America, their musical trends tend not to translate (no pun intended). But Anitta was determined to break in, so she started learning Spanish and English. Now she even has songs in Italian and French, joking that “Usually, I used to change boyfriends for whatever language I wanted to learn.” “If you ever need a Valley Boy accent, let me know,” Hunter quips.
Paris loved going to Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, which is basically the biggest street party in the world. Anitta gets a unique, birds-eye-view of the action from atop a roaming stage built onto a truck. “It’s like ten days of parties, nonstop, every single day,” and she spends her time traveling in her stage truck all around the city, performing for up to seven hours a day. She’s seen some crazy things from up there, including a couple who decided to have sex up against her truck for everyone to witness; another time, she saw a man steal a cell phone from a woman, so she waited for him to get close to security before stopping the music and telling them to grab him. “They got the cell phone back and we kept the party going!” For the uninitiated, she recommends a local to guide you: “You’re going to be very lost and not know how to enjoy it,” she says. If you have a Brazilian with you, “they’re going to make you really enjoy it….you go to the safe places and….the best parties.”
They talk about her music video for her song “Girl From Rio,” where she was very proud to have “all types of beauties, all types of women, of bodies. I like giving representation to different kinds of people. I think it’s nice.” She was also glad to sample “Girl From Ipanema,” which she feels shows an image of Brazil as “fancy and chic and rich,” and create a new version that shows the Rio she knows: “A little more hood version, more like reality.” She also talks about her surprise half-brother she recently learned she had (from a one-night stand her father had a long time ago), why she’s so open about her plastic surgeries, and of course answers Paris’s “seven sliving questions,” revealing her childhood crush on Jensen Ackles, her worst date ever, why she hates her astrological sign and more; learn all there is to know about Anitta on this episode of This Is Paris.
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Photo: Getty Images