Me Gusta

"Me Gusta" — Anitta Featuring Cardi B and Myke Towers

The Global Pop Crossover Moment

Picture the pop music landscape of late 2020: streaming platforms had fully broken down the old geographic borders of the music industry, and Latin music was no longer a niche concern on the American charts. Artists from Brazil, Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic were stacking up Hot 100 appearances with a regularity that would have seemed unlikely a decade earlier. Into this reconfigured terrain stepped Anitta, the Brazilian pop superstar who had spent years building the infrastructure for exactly this kind of transatlantic crossover moment. "Me Gusta" was her most strategically loaded single to date, pairing her with two of the most commercially active voices in the American market.

The Partnership and Production

Assembling Anitta, Cardi B, and Myke Towers on a single track was a deliberate piece of cross-market architecture. Cardi B had dominated the Hot 100 since her 2017 breakthrough, and by 2020 she remained one of the most reliable names in pop rap. Myke Towers, the Puerto Rican rapper and singer, had been accumulating credits across the Latin trap and reggaeton world and brought credibility within the urban Latin format that connected the track to a separate audience base. Anitta's positioning between these two collaborators gave "Me Gusta" a triangulated reach: Brazilian funk pop audiences, English-language rap listeners, and Spanish-language urban music fans could all find a point of entry. The production leaned into the bilingual, cross-genre format that was producing the most interesting pop music of the era.

Chart Performance

The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 91 on October 3, 2020, spending one week on the chart. That single-week appearance reflects the highly competitive nature of the Hot 100 in the streaming era, where a significant volume of tracks qualify each week based on streaming thresholds. For Anitta, however, the Hot 100 appearance mattered symbolically as much as commercially: it represented confirmation that a Brazilian artist could penetrate the American chart with original material rather than through remix credit or featured artist status. The track performed more substantially on Latin charts, where its blend of influences was better understood by both programmers and streaming algorithms.

Anitta's Global Trajectory

By the time "Me Gusta" arrived, Anitta had already established herself as a genuine phenomenon in Brazil, with a career stretching back to the early 2010s and a fan base large enough to sustain arena touring. Her move toward English-language and crossover material represented a calculated extension of a career that had already crossed borders within Latin America and between Latin America and Europe. The Brazilian funk style that had anchored her domestic success translated into international contexts with surprising ease, its rhythmic energy carrying across language barriers in ways that more melodically dependent genres could not always manage. "Me Gusta" folded that energy into a format shaped for global streaming audiences.

The 2020 Context

The track arrived during a year when the music industry was operating under significant disruption, with live touring halted and streaming numbers amplified by a global population spending more time at home. Under those conditions, music that offered kinetic energy and a sense of carefree movement carried particular emotional value. "Me Gusta" delivered exactly that: a track built for dance floor energy, released at a moment when dance floors had temporarily ceased to exist. Its appeal was aspirational, a reminder of what would return. The cross-cultural assembly of its featured artists reinforced that sense of global connectivity at a moment when physical borders had become unusually rigid. The collaboration stands as a document of a particular moment in pop's ongoing globalization.

Cue it up and feel the borders dissolve.

"Me Gusta" — Anitta Featuring Cardi B and Myke Towers' singular moment on the 2020s charts.