Jankobow is a Dominican dembow artist, born Jean Carlos Nami Encarnación in Santo Domingo on 8 December 1998. He also records as El Criminal.

Guin Guin

The remix of Guin Guin, in August 2018, is what made his name. Bam Bam followed the next April and became the track the DJ pools picked up — it circulated at a hundred and eighteen beats a minute, which is the tempo the genre settled on and the reason it works in a set beside anything else.

He was nineteen when the first of those came out. Dembow is a young man’s genre in a very literal sense: the equipment is cheap, the platform is free, and a track that catches is heard in a week.

Llegó El Criminal

The 2019 album runs seven tracks in under seventeen minutes — Bam Bam, Ella Dice, Sacando La Lengua, Bolita, Tepe. That is not a short album by accident. Dembow songs are built to be two minutes long, and an album is a way of releasing seven singles at once.

Lo Delincuente, produced by La Greña, and Tú Ta Loco came after, and Beautiful Girls put him with Flako Stik.

The name

El Criminal is the persona and it is worn openly — the YouTube channel is called Llegó El Criminal. Dembow has always traded in a swaggering outlaw voice, the same way Jamaican dancehall and American gangsta rap did before it, and the pose is part of the product.

The music itself is dance music. Whatever the name promises, what the records deliver is a hook and a tempo.