El Clasicom —Rouel Camilo Pier Jerez— is a Dominican salsa singer and songwriter from the Las Frutas section of Los Mina, Santo Domingo, known for a harder, street-facing style he calls salsa urbana and for an earlier career as a taekwondo athlete.

From taekwondo to salsa

Before he sang he fought. Over twelve years as a taekwondo athlete he won the Central American and Caribbean Championship in 2000, was runner-up at the Central American and Caribbean Games in 2002, and took several medals at Pan American championships. At the 2003 Pan American Games, held in Santo Domingo, he won silver, losing the gold-medal bout to the Mexican Víctor Estrada; he retired from the sport soon after. He then expanded the nickname his fellow athletes had given him, El Clásico, into El Clasicom, and has said his father is a musician and his uncle, Tony Sugar, sang with the group Los Diplomáticos de Haití.

Salsa urbana

He built a repertoire — «La Tipa le Dio Pa’», «Una Mala», «Nunca Tanto», «Tiempo pa’ Cuero», «La Calle Soy Yo», «Siguió Embalao» and «Activo» among the songs — around what he calls salsa urbana, describing himself as a plain portraitist of everyday life in the barrio. He has said he aimed his music at listeners he felt other salsa singers had left behind while courting a more romantic audience, and has named Michel el Buenón, Víctor Waill and the singer Rey Reyes as the salseros who opened the way for his generation, with Sexappeal as a direct inspiration. His backing band in the early 2010s was drawn from the ranks of Chiquito Team Band.

Touring Europe

By mid-2013 «Una Mala» had spent 22 weeks on a Billboard chart, and that October he closed a tour of more than 20 dates across Austria, Barcelona, Zurich, Bern, Milan, Palma, Madrid, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands and the Canary Islands, performing alongside DJ Alfa Drum for audiences that mixed Dominicans with Ecuadorians, Salvadorans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Peruvians and Moroccans.

Legacy

A 2022 newspaper column recalling his athletic career noted that when Clasicom was honored as a performer at an athletes’ gala in Santiago in the early 2010s, some of the fellow athletes in the audience did not realize until that night that the salsa singer and the taekwondo medalist were the same man.