Mariangel is a Dominican rapper working in Santo Domingo. She is an emerging artist: the audience arrived before the catalogue did, which is the order things happen in now.

The circle

She works inside the current Santo Domingo rap scene, appearing in the sessions and on the bills that circle brings together, alongside names like Tiare Marte and AVGVSTVS. That scene runs on collaboration and on live sessions filmed for the internet rather than on album cycles.

Dominican rap has a thin layer of women in it, and the ones working now are building on ground that had to be cleared first. She belongs to that group rather than to the urban mainstream of dembow and reggaetón.

What is released

Her released catalogue is very small — a couple of videos on her own channel — while her following on Instagram is considerably larger. She keeps a link page rather than a label.

She carries a line from Mark’s gospel on her profile: what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul. It sits oddly and deliberately on a rap account, and it is the one thing she has chosen to say about herself in public.