Capicua – 20 years taking the feminist fight to the Rappers' boys’ club

Rap music is marked by the variety of its local social roots, and the kind that grew out of the Portuguese city of Porto contrasts with the strand that we covered in a previous article based in the Afro-Portuguese communities across the river from Lisbon. 

Ana Matos Fernandes, the rapper known as Capicua was born in Porto in 1982. She holds a Bsc. in Sociology from ISCTE, where she studied with Dr Jose Machado Pais, and a PhD in Human Geography from the University of Barcelona.

In case anyone thought that rap can only be in-yer-face machista posing, the growing number of female rappers are a sisterhood that’s here to change that image. Capicua holds to the counter-cultural roots of rap, while bringing her left-wing feminist and sociologically aware political stance into her very diverse range of work. This broad vision sees no boundaries between art and social engagement – don’t just rap about social inequality, get involved!

Her collaboration with the Brazilian rapper Emicida led to the 2017 album Lingua Franca, a collaboration between two Brazilian and two Portuguese artists.

Her most recent album Um Gelado antes do Fim do Mundo (An ice cream before the end of the world), has 12 songs and five poems performed alone and with other artists, on the theme of the importance of enchantment in a world seemingly collapsing.

Her eponymous first album came out in 2012, and she collaborated with the noted Fado singer Aldina Duarte, writing all the lyrics to Aldina’s album Metade-Metade (Half-Half) which released in 2024.

She sees herself first and foremost as a writer, from being fascinated by words since her infancy, and the need to diversify her work in order to support her variety of Rap in a niche market has led her to regular contributions to the magazine Visão as well as a weekly column in the Portuguese newspaper Jornal de Noticias, since 2015. Honouring this joyful relationship to writing since infancy, as well as her feminist commitment, she has published a book of bedtime stories for children on the theme of self-respect and equality, and duets with Pedro Geraldes on two albums for children with an eco-theme, Mão Verde.

She has won prizes for her music and her writing.

This is a longer version of the published intro - you can access the interview with photos and Youtube videos here:

https://www.latinolife.co.uk/articles/capicua-20-years-taking-feminist-hip-hop-rappers-boys-club