Rocko & Fara-On are a Dominican urban duo. Their debut album, Los Verdaderos Tígueres, came out in November 2014 on EVT Music and Sony Music Latin after ten years of working underground.

Ten years to the first record

El Caribe put it plainly at the end of that year: a decade of underground work and several proposals in the shadows came before anybody was listening. That is the ordinary shape of a Dominican urban career and it is rarely written down, because the story only becomes worth telling once the label signs.

The album went out exclusively on Spotify for its first week — a distribution decision that in 2014 was still novel enough to be reported as news — and carried guests from across the field: Ilegales, Vakero, Fulanito and Fortuna la Súper F.

Alza la Mano

The single was built on the choruses of El General, the Panamanian who took Spanish-language dancehall to the whole continent in the early nineties. Clearing it was the hard part: Rocko has said permission had to come from Erick Morillo, from Robi Rob of C&C Music Factory and from Edgardo Franco himself.

The effort went well beyond what a hook normally requires. They were not sampling for texture; they were claiming a lineage, and they wanted the people who made it to sign off.

Between the merengue and the machine

Dale Pa’ Tras is the one that travelled. It reached listeners of merengue and of electronic music at the same time, which is a hard trick and the reason Sony noticed them.

They have described the problem themselves: audiences expect a tropical merengue from them, or a romantic urban reggaetón, and the records sit between those expectations rather than inside either. Chuiqui Chuiqui, Hay Que Vivir la Vida, No Me Aguanto, Ella Es Mía and a Christmas song, Pa’ Gozar Navidad, are the rest of it.